Tony Hirst is an academic in the Department of Communication and Systems at the Open University

Open University

The Open University is a distance learning and research university founded by Royal Charter in the United Kingdom...

, but better known for the OUseful Blog on practical applications of Open Data

Open Data

Open data is the idea that certain data should be freely available to everyone to use and republish as they wish, without restrictions from copyright, patents or other mechanisms of control. The goals of the open data movement are similar to those of other "Open" movements such as open source, open...

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Notable Achievements

In February 2009, Hirst and colleague Joss Winn, established WriteToReply, to re-publish the UK Government's Digital Britain Interim Report in a way that allowed readers to comment on each paragraph. This was among a number of experiments to promote greater online public participation in government consultations.

In March 2009, Hirst created a technique for extracting and presenting subtitles generated from Twitter status updates

Twitter subtitling

Twitter subtitling is the process of using live or recorded tweets from the backchannel to create subtitles for video content. The use of 'twitter subtitling' has mainly been used to enhance the video archive of live events Twitter subtitling is the process of using live or recorded tweets from the...

 in SubRip (*.srt) format

Hirst won the 2011 "Open Up" contest for his ideas about the use of UCAS

UCAS

The Universities and Colleges Admissions Service is the British admission service for students applying to university and college. UCAS is primarily funded by students who pay a fee when they apply and a capitation fee from universities for each student they accept..-Location:UCAS is based near...

 data. The Open Up contest was run by TSO

The Stationery Office

The Stationery Office is a British publishing company that was created in 1996 when the publishing arm of Her Majesty's Stationery Office was privatised. TSO is the official publisher and the distributor for legislation, command and house papers, select committee reports, Hansard, and the London,...

 (formerly "The Stationery Office", a publishing company that supplies the UK Government) and came with a £50,000 development fund to enable the idea

Hirst was described as "brilliant" by The Guardian

The Guardian

The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...

data blog for his work analysing the use of twitter by journalists.

Media work

Hirst has been an academic adviser and expert contributor to the BBC World Service programme Click, formerly Digital Planet.
He was co-founder of the Open University Robotics Outreach Group, which led to the Blue Peter

Blue Peter

Blue Peter is the world's longest-running children's television show, having first aired in 1958. It is shown on CBBC, both in its BBC One programming block and on the CBBC channel. During its history there have been many presenters, often consisting of two women and two men at a time...

/RoboFesta Competition in 2001. This competition - which required children to "Design a Really Useful Robot" - had 32,000 entries.