Introducing… David Beavan

What’s your name?
David Beavan (you can call me Dave)

What’s your background?
I’m a Digital Humanaut, software scribe and research wrangler. After initially working for two years in the real world, I’ve been in and around academia. I’ve developed infrastructure and code for nationally important language resources, taught new generations of digital scholars, managed the research portfolio of a Digital Humanities Centre and Faculty, and represented the professional membership of international Digital Humanities organisations. But for me, it’s always been about collaboration and the desire to ask new questions, not answering old ones.

In one sentence, what is your role on the project?
I’m a Research Software Engineer, I engineer research software, at the same time I engineer software and research. I have the pleasure of being a Co-investigator and the lead of Sources Lab.

What excites you about the project?
What we are doing breaks new ground, in terms of complexity and scale, but also in terms of getting the most out of interdisciplinary research. Tech isn’t subservient to research questions, it will deliver new ways of seeing and inspire different ways of thinking.

What challenges do you see ahead?
With great power comes great responsibility. We are part of many different communities and have a great number of stakeholders and interested parties. We must listen to them, adapt and give back. If we do that right we may change scholarship for ever and for the better.

What’s the last (non work) book you read, exhibition or performance you saw?
Does doing some urbex of an abandoned hotel overlooking the most amazing views of a caldera in the Azores count?

Finally, where can people find out more about you and your work?
Track me down on Twitter, LinkedIn and check out the Turing’s Data Science for Digital Humanities special interest group