Our people - Jill Slay
As an accidental pioneer, I chose to study engineering because it was being promoted among girls as the best way to apply mathematical ability. I was utterly shocked to find myself the only female in my year but, although it was a bit unnerving learning to weld and solder, I found the study straight forward.
I hated working in a factory and leaned towards a research career from the outset. I have too many personal stories of the ways female engineers were discriminated against, particularly before anti-discrimination legislation was put into place.
I 'discovered' computers in the era of paper tape and punched card. Computers saved me from the noise and hassle of a machine shop and allowed me to simulate physical processes in peace and solitude. As much as I enjoy my research in IT security and computer forensics, my personal passion is culture, particularly Chinese culture.
I have spent about one quarter of my life in Hong Kong and China. I learned Cantonese by copying people I worked with and later I studied Mandarin in a formal way. My PhD was a study of the way Chinese culture affects the way students use, understand or learn about science and technology.
This definition of culture by anthropologist Clifford Geertz sums up how I understand culture: Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself [sic] has spun. I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it is not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretative one in search of meaning.
I love looking at the webs we have all spun on our life journeys and analysing how we each derive and apply the meaning we gain from them.
Jill Slay is a senior lecturer in the School of Computer and Information Science and Director of the Enterprise Security Management Laboratory.