Catherine Smith

SSI fellow

University of Birmingham

I am interested in other people’s research questions and how software might help to answer them. I specialise in the Humanities particularly in areas relating to language analysis.  I am also interested in the history of humanities computing.

I work at the Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing (ITSEE) in the department of Theology at the University of Birmingham. I have a PhD in Theology and Greek Linguistics and an MSc in Computer Science which makes my current job a perfect fit.

In my RSE-like role I support the online workflow used by our collaborators around the world to transcribe manuscripts, compare the different texts and organise that data for publication. I am the primary developer of the collation editor which provides an interactive GUI wrapper for collateX and is one of the key pieces of software for making our editions. As well as being used in ITSEE’s Workspace for Collaborative Editing the collation editor is currently used by two other online editing platforms.

ITSEE specialises in making editions of the Greek and Latin New Testament and is currently working on three projects:

• CATENA which is investigating early commentaries on the New Testament;
• GALaCSy which is a preparing editions of Galatians and Ephesians in multiple languages;
• 1Cor which is preparing an edition of 1 Corinthians in multiple languages.

We also support editorial work in other areas. I recently worked with a team in modern languages at Birmingham editing the Estoria de Espanna and with colleagues at SOAS supporting their editorial work on the Avestan YASNA, a sacred ritual text of the Zoroastrian religion.

Online Presence

My institutional website

My ORCiD

My GitHub page

Check out contributions by and mentions of Catherine Smith on www.software.ac.uk