Sue Asscher

Sue Asscher is an associate editor with Darwin Online and volunteer for Project Gutenberg and Project Gutenberg of Australia. She has been creating machine-readable etexts for ten years, mostly of naturalists and explorers. Those include, among others, works by or about Agassiz, Belt, Bligh, Burke and Wills, Cook, Collingridge, Dampier, Charles Darwin, Fabre, Flinders, the Forrests, Franklin, Giles, A. and F. Gregory, Grey, Hooker, Humboldt, Huxley, P.P. King, Landor, Landsborough, Langstroth, Lee, Lyell, MacGillivray, McKinlay, Marsden, Mitchell, Muller, Haeckel, Stokes, Stuart and Tasman.

Sue was the first volunteer to join John van Wyhe with the creation of Darwin Online in 2002, and enjoys creating, proofreading and marking-up those etexts in a collaboration that has been pure delight. She is happy to have the opportunity to work on the Darwin material.

Sue's principal aim in making etexts is to make them accessible for people who find the physical process of reading paper texts difficult. All the etexts can be listened to with freely available software.

Sue lives in Queensland, Australia, a few hours' drive from James Cook's landing in May 1770, and just along the street from the spot from where Matthew Flinders viewed Hervey Bay and the biggest sand island in the world and reported "nothing interesting" to observe. The same coucal pheasant that drove those mariners nuts wakes her up on summer mornings.