Roles: Systems developer (as a staff member of the Humanities Computing Development Team, Oxford University Computing Services)

The brief: The Theology Faculty required a web-based system to manage various kinds of information relating to taught courses (undergraduate and postgraduate). A particular requirement was a convenient means for staff to maintain their own profiles with some basic formatting options.

Solution: An existing system, OxArch, written in PHP/MySQL, with ODBC connection to MS Access database, was identified as a suitable starting point as it was used for managing teaching in the School of Archaeology. It was repurposed and expanded for Theology. A novel JavaScript solution, NetWedit, was implemented for rich text editing.

URL: http://resources.theology.ox.ac.uk/ (via archive.org)

Here are a few highlights. For details, pleased browse the portfolio.

March 2000

Open Source Wisdom

I delivered a paper, Open Sources: A Higher Consciousness in Software Development, at To Catch the Bird of Heaven: A conference on ‘wisdom’, which took place 27-29 March 2000, at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.   I’ve kept a brief programme summary.

4 November 2001

Public Release of NetWedit

I released NetWedit with GPL license, possibly the world’s first cross-platform JavaScript-powered rich text editor, deployed in a teaching-based CMS, where Oxford’s Theology Faculty could maintain their own profiles.  Read more in Adventures in the Read/Write Web.

2002

Editing XML with XSLT

The Interactive Audio Comprehension Materials (IACM) project at Oxford University’s Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages enabled academics to generate learning paths, including audio segments, with all data stored in XML.
I devised a means of editing XML using XSLT, based on correctness preserving transformations; changes to specific nodes were targeted with XPATH. Beyond the technical achievement there are significant reflections on structure and flow.

2002-2003

CD2Go – A static web production system

I conceived and implemented an extension of a CGI/Perl website to a static web production system, preserving all the interactive multimedia content. Inherently secure, the content remains online, though browsers no long support most interactive functions. The same system was used for a Japanese site.

09/2004 – 04/2005

RAMBLE project

As Principle Investigator of this ostensibly technical project at Oxford, showcasing service-oriented architecture (SOA) between personal learning spaces and institutional LMS, I uncovered insights into the conditions that foster deeper learning, as intimated in an article for Ariadne.

December 2010

New Architecture for Social Networking Online

I gave my first paper on a multi-dimensional relationship model based on the Buddha’s teachings, the foundations for the Sigala project. This was in the social sciences track at the 3rd World Conference on Buddhism and Science at Mahidol University, Thailand.

2019-2021

A Vision for the History of Science Museum

On a different note, I have applied a holistic approach to envisioning how a museum can be a hub for a scientific ecosystem with proper accountability across the University. The blog post illustrates the ongoing process of refinement to my ideas.

2021

Offline Search for WordPress

Twenty years after starting work on CD2Go, I returned to the problem of searching static snapshots of CMS, now updated to WordPress. After some radical changes to an existing plugin, I now have a solution (which you can try out by downloading the Sigala research site.)