Rate My Professor David Hood

David Hood serves as Adviser in IT Training and Development within the Learning and Development team at the University of Otago's Human Resources Division. In this capacity, he delivers training sessions to staff and students on various software applications, including creating timelines in Excel, restructuring data in SPSS, and generating reports in Filemaker Pro 14. His instructional videos and classes emphasize practical data manipulation skills and strategies for maintaining safety in digital environments. For his outstanding contributions, Hood received the 2021 Staff Award for Exceptional Performance by Professional Staff, shared with colleagues from Learning and Development and Anatomy.

Earlier, Hood held the position of Junior Research Fellow with the Caversham Project in the Department of History at the University of Otago, where he advanced quantitative historical research methods. He developed the Caverphone phonetic matching algorithm in 2002, revised in 2004, specifically tailored for de-duplicating names in New Zealand historical datasets. This innovation, documented in technical papers such as 'Caverphone Revisited' (CTP150804, 2004) and contributions to best practices in quantitative historical research, has influenced phonetic encoding tools used in software libraries like NLTK and broader demographic studies. In recent work, Hood authored the 2024 publication 'Cumulative excess deaths in New Zealand in the COVID-19 era: biases from ignoring changes in population growth rates: comment' in New Zealand Economic Papers, advocating age-standardised mortality rates over crude regression models for accurate excess death assessments during the pandemic. He has presented on data wrangling and digital insecurity at the Digital Humanities Hub (2019), analyzing public data on social issues, and summarized COVID trends at the 2023 COVID & Work conference, with ongoing public resources available.