Virginia Knight

I formerly worked at IT Services, University of Bristol, but was made redundant along with a number of colleagues. After some jobseeking which has left me with a mistrust of competence-based interviews (speak to me in person for details and some horror stories!) I am now working in a sector where such interviews are not used. I'm using my skills in writing and designing for the Web, research and JavaScript. I have a long-standing interest in Digital Humanities, dating back to my time doing research in Classics, and am an occasional contributor to the Humanist email list for discussion of DH-related matters. I am an editor of the Digital Classicist Wiki and am responsible for promoting several local non-profit organisations using social media. photo of Virginia Knight

For my activities outside work, see my personal Web page.

I did an undergraduate degree in Classics at Merton College,Oxford, then a Ph.D at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge about the epic poet Apollonius of Rhodes, which I subsequently published (ISBN 9004103864). After working for a couple of years at the Cambridge Group for the History of Population, working with historical Census data from 1891-1921, I moved to Manchester for four years, holding the post of Census Information Officer at Manchester Computing, within what became MIMAS and is now Jisc's Digital Resources division. I wrote and delivered a half-day course on the Census datasets at some 40 universities, and provided front-line support for Census users throughout UK higher education at every level from undergraduates to senior academics, as well as interacting with funding bodies and the Census Office (now National Statistics). I also produced documentation for the data and associated software.

After a short spell at what is now Eduserv, (at that time NISS, based at the University of Bath), I worked at IT Services, University of Bristol at ILRT (Institute for Learning and Research Technology) for fifteen years. During this time I worked on many projects, initially with a special interest in metadata standards and digital libraries. I was a founde7r member of data.bris, Bristol University's research data management service, and helped to write its data management planning guides and glossary. I set up, and was Bristol's project manager for, the Hidden Lives Revealed website, one of a portfolio of sites presenting digitised historical documents, and winner of the Institute of Archivists' Phillimore Prize. I created interactive tutorials using QuickForm on behalf of Bristol's Social Medicine department. I have customised a number of repository, content management and blogging packages, and VLEs, including DSpace, Omeka, Wordpress, Drupal and Moodle. The principal technologies I have used have been PHP, SQL, HTML5/CSS, JavaScript, XML (including TEI) and Perl. I had a reputation for writing correct English and was called upon to edit documents both within ILRT and for other parts of IT Services. I love working with non-standard scripts and am a whizz with Unicode.

Other projects I worked on while at ILRT included the following:


Selected publications


virginiaknight at gmail dot com

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