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Holly Wright
ADS Research Projects Manager

Biography

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3403-4159

Originally from California, Holly had her first brush with archaeology as a kid at the USC Idyllwild Arts summer programme in the San Bernardino mountains.

Digging with her mother (and looking very serious).

This experience lay dormant for quite some time, and she went on to attend the University of California at Santa Cruz (go Slugs!), obtaining a BFA in Art (drawing and painting) and a BA in Art History (architectural history). After moving to Minnesota, she worked in the non-profit arts sector in a variety of creative and administrative roles for 12 years, including eight years at the innovative community arts centre Intermedia Arts; eventually drawing on her undergrad education in visual art, alongside a growing interest in computing, as the graphic design and IT manager.

While at Intermedia, she attended a conference about the art, architecture and archaeology of Albania, was exposed to archaeology once again, and caught the 'bug'. Having no formal training in archaeology, she did the equivalent of an undergrad degree in anthropology at the University of Minnesota, and gained as much fieldwork experience as possible, while continuing to work.

She went on to be operations manager at the Minnesota Alliance for Arts in Education for a further four years, and was then ready to combine her interests in the arts, archaeology and computing, coming to the University of York to pursue an MSc in Archaeological Information Systems in 2002. Graduating with distinction in 2003, her dissertation, titled Scalable Vector Graphics: An Exploration of Potential Archaeological Applications, was centred on archaeology and the use of SVG, which is the W3C recommendation for vector graphics. A distillation of this research can be found in Archaeological Vector Graphics and SVG: A case study from Cricklade in Internet Archaeology.

Returning to Minnesota, she worked for the Cultural Resource Management firm The 106 Group, as an archaeologist and graphics specialist. In 2005 she was awarded a EU Marie Curie CHIRON fellowship and returned to York to pursue a PhD, centred on archaeology and the Semantic Web, supervised by Professor Julian Richards. Upon completion of her Marie Curie fellowship, she was hired as Research Manager for the Department of Archaeology, where she used her non-profit administration experience to support external research funding efforts, in particular the European funding portfolio.

She completed her PhD in 2011, titled Seeing Triple: Archaeology, Field Drawing and the Semantic Web, and is delighted to be working as International Projects Manager for the Archaeology Data Service, allowing her to combine all her research and administrative interests and skills, and continue living and working in the beautiful and historic City of York.

Holly Wright working at the Cleveland Circle site in downtown St. Paul, Minnesota.

Contact details

Dr Holly Wright
Archaeology Data Service
Department of Archaeology
University of York
The King's Manor
York
YO1 7EP

http://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/