Dr Ian Johnson is an Honorary Associate of the Faculty of Arts, University of Sydney. Trained as a palaeolithic archaeologist, he was Director of the Archaeological Computing Laboratory, later Arts eResearch, at the University of Sydney from 1992 to 2015, where he taught digital methods in archaeology, developed tools for archaeology and for the digital humanities, with a particular emphasis on collaborative databases, GIS, mapping and the temporal dimension, and participated in a wide variety of projects.

Prior to joining the University in 1990, he worked for the Arkansas Archaeological Survey (1984 - 1987) and the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service (1987 - 1990), and was a post-doc at the University of Queensland (1982 – 1984) and ANU (1981 – 1982) where he worked on the Kakadu Project. He did his PhD The Getting of Data at the Australian National University (1976 - 1979) looking at methods of field recording and their influence on interpretation of technological changes around 5000 BP. From 1973 – 1976 he did a Diplôme d’Etudes Supérieures thesis at the University of Bordeaux developing a new method of spatial analysis applied to the site of Pincevent. BA 1969-1972 University of Cambridge.

His main technical development projects include Minark (1980 - 1987; a microcomputer database management system for archaeology used by several state site registers, excavations and personal projects); TimeMap (1997 - 2003; time-enabled distributed-data web mapping, developed in collaboration with the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative, Berkeley); and Heurist (2005 onwards; web-based research information management and web publishing).

Heurist is used by a broad range of research projects in Australia, Europe and N and S America, from archaeology through history to contemporary social science. It is Open Source software and runs two free services open to all researchers on the Australian NECTAR research cloud and the French Huma-Num research support service for the Humanities, as well as on a number of institutional servers with more restricted access in Australia, France, Belgium, Germany and Greece (to our knowledge).