Ross Scaife


Allen Ross Scaife was a Professor of Classics at the University of Kentucky.

Life

Ross Scaife was born to William and Sylvia Scaife in Fredericksburg, Virginia in 1960, one of four children. He was married to Cathy Jane Edwards Scaife and they had three sons, Lincoln, Adrian, and Russell. He died at home after a year-long fight against cancer.

Education and scholarship

He graduated in 1978 from the Tilton School in New Hampshire and he read Classics and Philosophy at the College of William and Mary. In 1985 he was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship for a year of study at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Greece and in 1988 he participated in the summer program at the American Academy in Rome. He earned his PhD in 1990 from the University of Texas at Austin for his thesis on The Kypria and its early reception.
He worked from 1991 to the time of his death at the of the University of Kentucky. His primary research and teaching interests were ancient art and material culture, women and gender in Antiquity, as well as Aristophanes and the Greek historians.
Scaife was best known for his pioneering work in the use of computer technology in humanities scholarship. He was the founding editor of the in 1997, which serves as an umbrella project for many projects in the Classics, such as EpiDoc, the , and the . Ross Scaife was a co-creator of the latter three.
A digital humanist, he was instrumental in setting up and driving the Digital Classicist, a partner project hosted at King's College London.
Scaife was dedicated to the principle of open access and he believed in the potential of technology to bring the highest levels of scholarship to the widest possible audience. He also believed in the power of collaborative work, and he was instrumental in building the framework behind projects, such as the , of which he was a founding editor.
Since 2005, he was the director of the at the University of Kentucky. His recent work included forging the collaboration that resulted in the high resolution digital imaging of the Venetus A, a 10th-century manuscript of the Iliad located at the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice, and also the NSF-funded for non-invasive, volumetric scanning technologies for virtually unwrapping and visualizing ancient papyrus scrolls.
His work continues to be influential among scholars working in the field of open access and collaborative editing in Classics, with major projects citing his example and involvement in their inception and design.

Selected publications