Costis Dallas

Biography

Costis Dallas is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto, serving as the faculty’s Director of Collaborative Programs since 2015. He has been Research Fellow of the Digital Curation Unit of the “Athena” Research Centre since its foundation, and has been affiliated with the Digital Curation Institute at the iSchool since 2015. Professor Dallas has been actively involved in consultancy work and project management in the field of digital communication, notably as Vice-President and Head of Innovation at PRC Group, the Management House SA, a consulting group specialising in intangible assets management, and previously as President of Critical Publics SA, a consultancy firm he co-founded in 2000. He has experience in professional positions in the field of cultural heritage policy and management and in cultural heritage informatics. Professor Dallas was Special Advisor to the Greek Foreign Minister on cultural diplomacy and information issues, where his responsibilities included the dossier for the restitution of the Parthenon marbles, coordination of initiatives to support modern Greek studies abroad, and the creation of an international centre for the promotion of Olympic Truce. He served as Special Secretary for Libraries, Historical Archives, Educational Television and Instructional Media in the Greek Ministry of Education, as well as the first General Director of the Foundation of the Hellenic World, a position he took after having founded and led the Documentation and Systems Department of the Benaki Museum in Athens, Greece. Professor Dallas holds both Master of Philosophy and Doctor of Philosophy degrees in Classical Archaeology from the University of Oxford. His DPhil thesis, “The Significance of Costume in Classical Attic Grave Stelai: A Statistical Analysis,” was an attempt to synthesize a semiotic approach to social archaeology with an information systems-based, numerical method of analysis. He holds a Bachelor degree in History from the University of Ioannina, his native town in northwestern Greece.Costis Dallas is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto, serving as the faculty’s Director of Collaborative Programs since 2015. He has been Research Fellow of the Digital Curation Unit of the “Athena” Research Centre since its foundation, and has been affiliated with the Digital Curation Institute at the iSchool since 2015. Professor Dallas has been actively involved in consultancy work and project management in the field of digital communication, notably as Vice-President and Head of Innovation at PRC Group, the Management House SA, a consulting group specialising in intangible assets management, and previously as President of Critical Publics SA, a consultancy firm he co-founded in 2000. He has experience in professional positions in the field of cultural heritage policy and management and in cultural heritage informatics. Professor Dallas was Special Advisor to the Greek Foreign Minister on cultural diplomacy and information issues, where his responsibilities included the dossier for the restitution of the Parthenon marbles, coordination of initiatives to support modern Greek studies abroad, and the creation of an international centre for the promotion of Olympic Truce. He served as Special Secretary for Libraries, Historical Archives, Educational Television and Instructional Media in the Greek Ministry of Education, as well as the first General Director of the Foundation of the Hellenic World, a position he took after having founded and led the Documentation and Systems Department of the Benaki Museum in Athens, Greece. Professor Dallas holds both Master of Philosophy and Doctor of Philosophy degrees in Classical Archaeology from the University of Oxford. His DPhil thesis, “The Significance of Costume in Classical Attic Grave Stelai: A Statistical Analysis,” was an attempt to synthesize a semiotic approach to social archaeology with an information systems-based, numerical method of analysis. He holds a Bachelor degree in History from the University of Ioannina, his native town in northwestern Greece.

Research Interest

Professor Dallas’s overarching research objective is to develop an epistemic framework for the digital curation of archaeological, museum and cultural heritage ‘things,’ as shaped by increasingly distributed, pervasive digital infrastructures and participatory information practices ‘in the wild.’ He is currently pursuing a grant to study pervasive digital curation activities, objects, and infrastructures in archaeological research and community meaning-making in the digital continuum through a combination of conceptual modeling, multiple-case studies and requirements elicitation for good practice. Professor Dallas has been working on conceptualizing and investigating aspects of digital curation under an approach informed by cultural-historical activity theory. Through his affiliation with the Digital Curation Unit at the Athena Research Centre he was involved in conceptualizing and developing the Scholarly Research Activity Model (SRAM) and the NeDiMAH Methods Ontology (NEMO). In the same period, he conducted research on the information practices and needs of humanities researchers and on digital infrastructure requirements for the Digital Advanced Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (DARIAH), the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI) and the Europeana Research initiative. As chair of the DARIAH Digital Methods and Practices Observatory WG (DiMPO), he developed a longitudinal trans-European empirical research program on the information practices and needs of arts and humanities researchers based on a combination of conceptual modeling, case studies and questionnaire surveys. Professor Dallas is currently completing the co-authored publication of an extensive survey of over 2,200 respondents conducted in 2015 in a dozen European countries. His ongoing theoretical research on the digital curation of ‘thing’ cultures touches on ontological and epistemological questions underlying the theory of cultural objects, the relationship between things and information and the knowledge practices they mediate in scholarly work and “in the wild”. Since 2003 Professor Dallas has been the author of the Greek national report for the Council of Europe’s Compendium on Cultural Policies and Trends. In 2012 he co-authored “A Proposal for a New Cultural Policy” as a White Paper for the Greek Minister of Culture, and he maintains an active research interest in the lifeworlds of Greek performing artists in a time of crisis.