Seamus Ross

Seamus Ross (born November 12, 1957) is a digital humanities and digital curation academic and researcher based in Canada.

He is the son of James Francis Ross, a philosopher, and Kathleen Fallon Ross, a nurse. After graduating from the William Penn Charter School, he earned his A.B. (1979) from Vassar College (United States), his M.A. (1982) from the University of Pennsylvania (USA), and his D.Phil. (1992) from the University of Oxford (UK).

Seamus Ross is professor at the iSchool at the University of Toronto, also known as the Faculty of Information and from 2009 through 2015 he served as the school's dean. During 2016, he was visiting professor at the School of Information Sciences and Technology, Athens University of Economics and Business (Athens, GR), and interim director of the McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto. Before joining Toronto, he was professor of humanities informatics and digital curation and founding director of HATII (Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute) (1997–2009) at the University of Glasgow. He was one of the founders of and served as associate director of the Digital Curation Centre (2004–9) in the UK, and was principal director of ERPANET and Digital Preservation Europe (DPE) and a co-principal investigator such projects as the DELOS Digital Libraries Network of Excellence, Planets and the Digicult Forum. From the beginning of 1990 through 1996, Ross was assistant secretary (information technology) at the British Academy in London.

Ross's scholarly research has focused on digital humanities, digital preservation, digital curation, digitisation, digital repositories, emulation, digital archaeology, semantic extraction and genre classification, and cultural heritage informatics. See for instance his study of digital archaeology, his examination of digital preservation and archival science, and his introduction to digital preservation, Changing Trains at Wigan. He promotes a diversity in ways of making scholarship available to broader audiences and was instrumental in the creation of the Digiman Series through Digital Preservation Europe, Digital Preservation and Nuclear Disaster: An Animation,

Honours In March 2016, Ross was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Scotland's national academy of science and letters.