Dorothea Salo

Distinguished Faculty Associate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison

Dorothea was there when XML, a language for formatting documents, came out and into the mainstream. However, she wasn’t working as a computer scientist or programmer; she was typesetting for university presses and journal publishers. A unique career has led her to teaching Computer and Information Science classes at the University of Wisconsin as a distinguished faculty associate, all stemming from a beginning that had its roots in librarianship.

 

She grew up in North Carolina and began her undergraduate studies with a mixture of comparative literature, Spanish and linguistics. She had a strong sense that these subjects would suit her brain for patterns and wanted to explore a range of subjects she was interested in. It was difficult to know at the time where she wanted to take her career after college, she felt at the time that she may end up moving towards journalism as she progressed.

 

Finding a role that suited her right after the completion of her degree wasn’t easy. She began graduate school with an interest in Spanish, however decided it wasn’t right for her. She left quickly and took on various different positions until she was given a role that would light the spark of her curiosity for computer science: typesetting. She began working with large amounts of documents for a small publishing company in the area of academia. She quickly came across regular expressions, a language or set of rules that allow one to quickly search through text. For her this was a driving force of her curiosity for all things computational. Driven by this interest, she quickly became proficient and realised entry-level programming skills would be a huge help in her work. 

 

“You can be a really bad programmer and still have it save you a ton of time over having to do things yourself.”

 

This point she went on to emphasise greatly. There’s room for everybody in CS, she said, and the tools of computing are there for people of all varieties of careers to take full advantage of.

 

Dorothea often reflected on her interest in the patterns of human writing and how she has explored this throughout her career. What really allowed her to pursue this interest further and for it to flourish was the introduction of computing into her life, allowing her to work more quickly and efficiently. It was clear that she placed great value on her experience prior to her introduction to computing. The skills and knowledge she acquired from exploring her own interests are today invaluable in her Computer Science classes. She loves to see other people coming from completely different areas and finding their own interest in computer science through unique and non-traditional avenues. 

 

Dorothea also pushes for more diversity in CS, welcoming any pushback against the stereotype of the “white male hacker” or “math genius”. She teaches an introductory programming class which she’s especially proud of entitled “Code and Power”. Generally she sees a diverse group of students attend, typically women or people of colour. She emphasises how rewarding it is to see them enjoy learning more about the prevalence of stereotypes in Computer Science while simultaneously gaining introductory programming skills. She wants to ensure they know that they’re valued in this field.

 

“It turns out that for a lot of students, when they get their hands a little bit dirty with SQL, they realise they really love it. Others get really into HTML. They’re thrilled because they’ve never had that power in their hands before.”

 

Librarianship has an earned reputation for being for career changers, and she places significant importance on the fact that Computer Science can be too. She knows there are many stories out there such as hers, with a beginning in a job that had very little to do with computing. They may only need only a slight push to end up developing a massive interest, and Dorothea loves to see where this takes them when they reach that point.