Interview with Mark Anderson

Abstract

Mark Anderson has worked in the creation and support of information systems for over 40 years. In 2013 he returned to formal study, completing an MSc and PhD in Web Science at Southampton University, looking at sustaining organisations' knowledge held in hypertext. He is now a visiting fellow in the WAIS Group at the University of Southampton. He has previously worked in a range of careers: firstly as a signals officer in the Royal Navy, then co-founding an online start-up in the mid-90s, and latterly as a specialist metadata and Tinderbox consultant. During his PhD studies, he worked on saving old hypertext systems of note (most notably, Southampton's Microcosm system). His current research continues to look at organisational knowledge systems that include humans in the loop rather than place complete reliance on computer "AI". He is also involved in a number of public projects to improve the durability of knowledge (including Visual-Meta, which was first trialled at Hypertext'21), as well as continuing to contribute to the recovery of other early hypertext systems---while they can still be found. In other research, he has created an in-conference citation dataset for the Hypertext Conference (1987--2020) and then worked with others to generate visualisations based upon it. Since 2004 he has been the volunteer support leader for the community of users of the Tinderbox and Storyspace hypertextual tools including writing and maintained Tinderbox's "aTbRef" open documentation. He has also worked on digitisation of Ted Nelson's books to make them more accessible to the post-print generations. Most recently, as part of the Future of Text initiative he is also researching the implications for work in VR. Mark has a particular interest in issues of spatial hypertext and the employment of multiple views on hypertext data. Mark's formal research work may be found at https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=jn8crEAAAAAJ or https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7396-0721; he can be contacted at mwra1r19@soton.ac.uk or via Twitter @mwra.