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Continue reading →: Glorious
In the last few weeks Mark Bernstein, a leading light in digital culture, and an established figure in the hypertext and web community has posted a sequence of articles (Infamous, Careless, Thoughtless, Reckless and most recently Caring) on #Gamergate and that movement’s use of Wikipedia. Particularly the proposal by the Arbitration Committee to ban key editors who were…
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Continue reading →: Chuck Vs The BoxsetsI just watched Chuck. All 91 episodes of it. There is something about this five season spy spoof that really worked for me. Without a doubt it’s my favorite TV show since I watched Buffy some fifteen years ago. You can like a TV show for all sorts of reasons,…
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Continue reading →: You Kippers
Imagine if you will a super-national organisation dedicated to peace. It’s population is over half a billion, and it has the largest GDP on Earth (some 16.6 trillion US dollars). It is a fiercely progressive place, with universal suffrage, laws to foster equality for women, protection for children, rights for…
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Continue reading →: Brutal Engineering
Over the last few months I have been co-organising a workshop for this year’s Web Science Conference on interdisciplinary; the aim is to collect together interdisciplinary experiences (from Coups and Calamities) and reflect on some of the disciplinary differences that make Web Science research so interesting. It has caused me…
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Continue reading →: A Positive No: Why Britain Needs Systems Engineering
It has been said that for Scotland, being in a union with England is like being in bed with an elephant. The numbers speak for themselves. Scotland has a population of just over 5 million, England over 53 million. That makes Scotland around the same size (in population) as Yorkshire,…
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Continue reading →: How to Fail
It’s that time of year, a time of renewal, of promises… of revision. Yes, spare some thoughts for the poor students, still nursing their New Year hangovers as they consider the exams awaiting them this January. For some of them it will be the first time they have been assessed…
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Continue reading →: Reflections on the Web Science MOOCWeek Two of the Web Science MOOC has ended, and the MOOCsters move on from my material to Craig Webber’s week on crime and security online. So do I feel like Frodo and Sam in Return of the King, collapsing in relief as the sweeping gaze of Sauron moves of…
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Continue reading →: Building the Web Science MOOCThis week at the University of Southampton we launched the Web Science MOOC with FutureLearn, the course is a dizzying whirlwind of interdisciplinary coolness that acts as a primer for Web Science and includes a wide variety of topics from cybercrime to digital democracy. My week is on Networks, and…
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Continue reading →: Pacific Rim: Suspension of Disbelief Suspended
I am getting old, and I am worried about my suspension of disbelief. When I was younger my suspension of disbelief was in fine form – I remember watching the original Star Wars as a boy and barely wondering why massive super-tech star ships bothered with dogfighting (later Iain M.…
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Continue reading →: Canyons, Deltas and Plains
I’m not a hard-nosed computer scientist. I’m more interested in people than algorithms, and that’s why my research has taken me in the direction of hypertext, UX and narrative. That’s also why earlier this month I was so sad to hear about the death of Douglas Engelbart, the American Scientist…
Welcome,
I’m David
I am Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton, UK within the Data, Intelligence, and Society group in ECS. I am also Head of the Education Group within ECS with the goal of improving education across the whole of Electronics and Computer Science in a meaningful, healthy, and sustainable way.
My research roots are in Hypertext, but my current interests are in Interactive Digital Narratives, Mixed Reality Games, and AI Knowledge Interfaces.
David Millard 