Sebastian Rahtz
Sebastian Patrick Quintus Rahtz was a British digital humanities information professional.
Education and early life
Born in 1955 to archaeologist Philip Rahtz, Sebastian also trained in archaeology, and was awarded a PhD in 1974 from University College London.Career
Rahtz developed an interest in computing from working on the Lexicon of Greek Personal Names in 1982.Rahtz was a long-term contributor to several communities in the broader digital humanities, including LGPN, TeX, computer methods in archaeology, and the Text Encoding Initiative. Rahtz' 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 stylesheets and web-based document conversion engine OxGarage, CLAROS, the Oxford Text Archive, Text Creation Partnership and OSS Watch.
From 1999 to 2015 he worked at Oxford University Computing Services which in August 2012 merged with two other departments to become IT Services. He joined the department in 1999 from Elsevier, having previously served as a lecturer in Humanities Computing at the University of Southampton. He became Head of the Information and Support Group in OUCS, and then joint Director 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.