Susan Hockey

Susan Hockey is an Emeritus Professor of Library and Information Studies at University College London. She has written about the history of digital humanities, the development of text analysis applications, electronic textual mark-up, teaching computing in the humanities, and the role of libraries in managing digital resources. In 2014, the University College of London created a Digital Humanities lecture series in her honour.

Hockey was born Susan Petty in 1946 in Halifax, West Yorkshire, and educated at Princess Mary High School, Halifax and Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. In 1969 she joined the Atlas Computer Laboratory at Chilton She became a founding member of the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing (ALLC) in 1973 and in 1975 she joined Oxford University Computing Services. At Atlas she developed software for the display of non-Western characters. At Oxford she was instrumental in developing the Oxford Concordance Program from COCOA, an early piece of software used in humanities computing. These tools have become central to the practice of the digital humanities in the United States and UK.

In 2004, Hockey was awarded the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations's Roberto Busa Prize in recognition of "outstanding lifetime achievements in the application of information and communications technologies to humanities research".

She is a founding member of several major digital humanities-related associations such as Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing (ALLC), 1973, and the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH), 1978, and an editor of the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing (ALLC) Bulletin, 1979–83, chair of the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing (ALLC), 1984–97 and member of the steering committee of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), 1987–99.