Articles by Robert O'Toole

Formal IT training seems to have become unfashionable. We either expect software to be so well designed we can just use it, or we learn just-in-time from Youtube. But the IT trainer’s perspective is still valuable, with its focus on knowing how people make sense of and habitiuate often complex and hard to remember systems.

Working in raw code and data is no fun. We need interfaces! Views that help us to access just what we need when we need it, and then do clever stuff with data. The UX Designer’s job is to make these interfaces so that they work well for us.

In this article we explore the world of the programmer, what they care about, how they think. Whenever we structure data, or create processes to apply to it, we are programming. If we use the programmer perspective we can do this better.

In this article we explore what researchers want, how they work, and how they think, so as to understand how they can work well with the other 6 roles in the Digital Humanities team.