Sebastian Patrick Quintus Rahtz (13 February 1955 – 15 March 2016) (SPQR) was a British digital humanities information professional.

Life

Born in 1955 to

Somerset ( en, All The People of Somerset) , locator_map = , coordinates = , region = South West England , established_date = Ancient , established_by = , preceded_by = , origin = , lord_lieutenant_office =Lord Lieutenant of Somerset , lord_ ...

-focused archaeologist

Philip Rahtz Philip Arthur Rahtz (11 March 1921 – 2 June 2011) was a British archaeologist. Rahtz was born in Bristol. After leaving Bristol Grammar School, he became an accountant before serving with the Royal Air Force during the Second World War. D ...

, Sebastian trained in archaeology, before delving into the computing realm via ''Lexicon of Greek Personal Names'' (''LGPN'') in 1982. He was a long-term contributor to several communities in the broader digital humanities, including ''LGPN'',

TeX Tex may refer to: People and fictional characters * Tex (nickname), a list of people and fictional characters with the nickname * Joe Tex (1933–1982), stage name of American soul singer Joseph Arrington Jr. Entertainment * ''Tex'', the Italian ...

, computer methods in archaeology, and the

Text Encoding Initiative The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is a text-centric community of practice in the academic field of digital humanities, operating continuously since the 1980s. The community currently runs a mailing list, meetings and conference series, and main ...

(TEI). Sebastian's legacy also includes the vital contributions which he made to building and maintaining much of the TEI's technical Infrastructure and related software such as their

XSLT XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations) is a language originally designed for transforming XML documents into other XML documents, or other formats such as HTML for web pages, plain text or XSL Formatting Objects, which may subseque ...

stylesheets and web-based document conversion engine OxGarage, CLAROS, the

Oxford Text Archive Oxford Text Archive (OTA) is an archive of electronic texts and other literary and language resources which have been created, collected and distributed for the purpose of research into literary and linguistic topics at the University of Oxford, En ...

Text Creation Partnership The Text Creation Partnership (TCP) is a not-for-profit organization based in the library of the University of Michigan . Its purpose is to produce large-scale full-text electronic resources (especially in the humanities) on behalf of both member i ...

and

OSS Watch OSS Watch is the United Kingdom's advisory service for issues relating to free software and open source software, based at the University of Oxford. OSS Watch started as a pilot project funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (Jisc) i ...

. From 1999 to 2015 he worked at

Oxford University Computing Services Oxford University Computing Services (OUCS) until 2012 provided the central Information Technology services for the University of Oxford. The service was based at 7-19 Banbury Road in central north Oxford, England, near the junction with Keble Ro ...

(OUCS) which in August 2012 merged with two other departments to become IT Services. He joined the department in 1999 from

Elsevier Elsevier () is a Dutch academic publishing company specializing in scientific, technical, and medical content. Its products include journals such as ''The Lancet'', ''Cell'', the ScienceDirect collection of electronic journals, '' Trends'', th ...

, having previously been a lecturer in Humanities Computing at the

University of Southampton , mottoeng = The Heights Yield to Endeavour , type = Public research university , established = 1862 – Hartley Institution1902 – Hartley University College1913 – Southampton University Coll ...

. He became Head of the Information and Support Group in OUCS, and then joint Director (for Research) of the Academic IT Group in 2010, and a member of the senior management team. In 2014 he was appointed Chief Data Architect. He took medical retirement from IT Services in the late summer of 2015. He died in 2016, from

brain cancer A brain tumor occurs when abnormal cells form within the brain. There are two main types of tumors: malignant tumors and benign (non-cancerous) tumors. These can be further classified as primary tumors, which start within the brain, and secondar ...

Selected works

* ''Kicking and screaming: Challenges and advantages of bringing TCP texts into line with Text Encoding Initiative''. J. Cummings and S. Rahtz, in Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, ''"Revolutionizing Early Modern Studies"? The Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership'', (2012). Retrieved from http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:f9667884-220b-4ec9-bb2f-c79044302399 * ''The LaTeX Web Companion: Integrating TeX, HTML, and XML''. M. Goossens, S. P. Q. Rahtz, and S. Rahtz.

Addison-Wesley Addison-Wesley is an American publisher of textbooks and computer literature. It is an imprint of Pearson PLC, a global publishing and education company. In addition to publishing books, Addison-Wesley also distributes its technical titles through ...

* ''Guide to LaTeX''. H. Kopka, P. W. Daly, and S. P. Q. Rahtz. Addison-Wesley * ''The LaTeX companion''. F. Mittelbach, M. Goossens, J. Braams, D. Carlisle, and C. Rowley. Addison-Wesley * ''LaTeX: Einführung''. H. Kopka and S. Rahtz. Addison-Wesley * ''The LaTeX Graphics Companion: Illustrating Documents with TeX and Postscript (Tools and Techniques for Computer Typesetting)''. M. Goossens, F. Mittelbach, S. Rahtz. D. Roegel, and H. Voss. Addison-Wesley * ''A style option for rotated objects in LaTeX'' (1992), 156-180. S. Rahtz and L. Barroca. * ''Archaeology and the Information Age: A global perspecti''ve (1992)'','' P. Reilly and S. Rahtz (eds.), One World Archaeology. Routledge.

Impact

In September 2016, Oxford University ran a whole-day event celebrating his life, with speakers talking about his projects. Many of the talks are available as podcasts.

References

External links

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Rahtz, Sebastian Patrick Quintus 1955 births 2016 deaths Scientists from Bristol Academics of the University of Southampton People associated with the University of Oxford Alumni of the University of London Text Encoding Initiative Alumni of the University of Oxford Deaths from brain tumor People in digital humanities

Life

Selected works

Impact

Further reading

References

External links