TEI Members Meeting 2001: Elections

TEI Council

TEI Board

Candidates' Statements

Stephen Bird writes: I am associate director of the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC), a not-for-profit consortium of several hundred universities, companies and government research labs, hosted at the University of Pennsylvania. Since its founding in 1992, the LDC has published 200 annotated linguistic databases for use in the development of new human language technologies. My research at Penn focusses on formal and computational models for linguistic information to support the description of the world's 6,800+ languages, including many languages that are endangered or unknown to science. Before coming to Penn I worked in Scotland, Cameroon, and Australia. My vision for the TEI is that its approach to speech transcription should be modified to use a widely accepted model known as ‘standoff markup’, in which annotations are anchored to linguistic artefacts by referencing them, rather than by being embedded in them. This shift leads to many desirable properties with respect to creation, maintenance and query.

David J. Birnbaum is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh. His research interests in electronic text theory and practice include character set standardization (see, for example, his “Standardizing Characters, Glyphs, and SGML Entities for Encoding early Cyrillic Writing,.” Computer Standards & Interfaces: 18 [1996], 201-52) and philosophy of markup (see, for example, his “The Relationship Between General and Specific DTDs: Criticizing TEI Critical Editions,.” presented at Extreme Markup 2000 and accepted for publication in Markup Languages: Theory and Practice: ). See also http://clover.slavic.pitt.edu/~djb/etext.html for information about some of his other research projects in electronic text technology. He is a member of ACH and ALLC, and also of the editorial board of Markup Languages: Theory and Practice.

Matthew Driscoll writes: I am a lecturer in nordic philology at the Arnamagnæan Institute, a teaching and research institute within the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. I hold degrees from the University of Stirling, Scotland (BA (Hons.) 1979), the University of Iceland (Cand.mag. 1988) and Oxford University (D.Phil. 1994). My research interests include manuscript and textual studies, particularly in the area of Old Norse and Early-Modern Icelandic; major publications include editions and translations of a number of early Icelandic works as well as the monograph, The unwashed children of Eve: The production, dissemination and reception of popular literature in post-Reformation Iceland (London, 1997). I am also involved in a number of projects to do with the digitisation and text-encoding of medieval and post-medieval manuscripts, among them MASTER (01.01.1999-31.06.2001), an EU-funded project whose goal has been to define and implement a general purpose standard for the description of manuscript materials using TEI- conformant XML.

Regarding the future direction of the TEI, I should like to see the development of more sophisticated mechanisms for encoding physical features of texts, in particular as they relate to the texts' meaning(s), in keeping with recent historical-bibliographical or cultural-materialist approaches to philology. I have no doubt that the TEI is uniquely suited to provide modern philologists with the tools for which they have been searching.

David Durand writes: As a candidate for the TEI council I reflect a more technical side of the TEI. I am a computer scientist, who's worked on hypertext, collaborative editing of documents (my dissertation research) and markup theory. I worked for the TEI on TEI P1-P3, as a member of the committees on Metalanguage and Syntax and Hypertext. Steve DeRose and I wrote Making Hypermedia Work: A User's Guide to HyTime. I would like to see the issue of customization (re-)addressed, as part of moving TEI to XML. The pizza chef represents one approach, automating the control of customization features that proved hard for users to manage themselves. I would like to see if the use of architectural form ideas or one of the new schema languages for XML can simplify this process so that a specialized tool will not be necessary.

Tomaž Erjavec writes: I work at the Dept. of Intelligent Systems at the research Institute "Jozef Stefan" in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Since 1995 I've worked mostly on EU and national projects involving annotating and using Slovene / multilingual language resources for language engineering purposes: tagging, lemmatisation, alignment; lexical databases. The majority of the produced resources are TEI encoded and have been made widely available; we have been using them mostly for experiments on machine learning. In the future, I think TEI should put its effort into maintaining the tei-l mailing list, into offering services (Pizza Chef, XSL styles; seminars) and in tracking recent related initiatives (e.g. RDF, OLAC).

LeeEllen Friedland has been developing digital library initiatives at the Library of Congress (LC) since 1991. She was a co-developer of the TEI-based American Memory DTD and implemented the Library's first electronic full-text encoding program. She has been a leader of or advisor to LC electronic text initiatives through the last decade, including the development and/or implementation of the Encoded Archival Description (EAD) DTD, SGML-based document management system for the Congressional Research Service and the US Congress, TEI in Libraries Guidelines (based on TEILite) use to address preservation and interoperability issues, and the new LC bibliography DTD (based on TEILite). She developed and co-chaired the Digital Library Federation conference on TEI and XML in Libraries, held at the Library of Congress in 1998, and is co-editor of the resulting TEI in Libraries Guidelines which establish recommendations for best practice for five levels of encoding with TEILite for large-scale institution-based electronic text applications. She has been a leading voice bridging the gap(s) between different communities working with electronic text, such as the humanities computing and library communities. She is a frequent speaker and writer on digital library topics. She would bring to the TEI Consortium Board extensive knowledge of library-based electronic text and digital library programs and policies, as well as a veteran practitioner's perspective on the need for and design of tools, documentation, implementation and best practice guidelines, training, and support. If the TEI Consortium is to succeed in the future, its governance must include proportionate representation of the TEI's user communities, including libraries, which have, arguably, been underrepresented in the past.

Fotis Jannidis writes: I have studied German and English literature. At the moment I am teaching German literature at the university of Munich.

My main interest is literary studies, especially humanities computing. I am coeditor of the electronic edition The young Goethe: , an electronic edition using TEI as encoding format. At the moment we are working on a framework to put TEIlite encoded texts on the net. I am also coeditor of the Jahrbuch fuer Computerphilologie , a German website and yearbook on humanities computing (mainly literary studies). As head of the commission for editorial applications in the working group for German editions (Ekage) I am working on promoting TEI as a standard format for literary editions.

TEI should become easier and more complex. At the moment the learning curve to implement the TEI guidelines is still rather steep for the ‘normal’ editor who wants to create an electronic edition. The TEI could build on the impressive offerings, which are shown on the TEI website, and offer a package of open source tools with extensive description how to use them in order to create and validate TEI encoded texts and make them accessible via the internet. At the end, it would be nice to have a server package, which allows an editor just to drop her edition into it to publish it.

On the other side work on the guidelines has to go on to enable the encoding of more information in a standard way. Coming from an editorial background I am especially interested in ways to encode the material aspects of a source (p.e. size of the manuscript, position of text on the manuscript, linking between image position and text etc.). Some critical points need to be decided: Should the TEI develop the SGML only and the XML version of the guidelines parallel or only the XML version? Is a conversion of the TEI DTDs to XML Schema useful? Should TEI P5 be fully compatible to earlier versions? Another important point to work on is the relation of concepts in the TEI guidelines to new standards like RDF, topic maps, or XPointer/XLink.

William A. Kretzschmar, Jr. (PhD, English, University of Chicago, 1980) is Professor of English and Linguistics at the University of Georgia. His major publications include Oxford Concise Dictionary of Pronunciation: (with Clive Upton and Rafal Konopka, Oxford U Press, 2001); Introduction to Quantitative Analysis of Linguistic Survey Data: (with Edgar Schneider, Sage Publications, 1996); Handbook of the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States: (with Virginia McDavid, Theodore Lerud, and Ellen Johnson; U Chicago Press, 1993). The primary outlet for his Linguistic Atlas research is the Linguistic Atlas web site. Current work on the Atlas focuses on creation of a text-encoding and presentation format for Atlas interviews which will allow for linked text, sound, maps, and analytical information for a wide range of users. He served as editor of Journal of English Linguistics: for 15 years. He now serves as editor-in-chief for two Linguistic Atlas projects (LAMSAS, LANCS) and a board member for several others; as an executive board member for the American Dialect Society and the Association for Computers and the Humanities; and as an advisory board member or consultant for several professional journals and dictionaries, including the Oxford English Dictionary. He is the local host for the 2003 ACH/ALLC annual meeting.

Tony McEnery writes: If elected to the board I will represent the views of those interested in the use of the TEI to encode and exploit corpora. I have wide experience of using the TEI in a range of corpus building activities, including the development of spoken corpora, written corpora and multimodal corpora. While I have constructed English language corpora I also have extensive experience of non-English language corpora, having been involved in the construction of corpora for languages such as Bengali, Chinese, French, Gujarati, Hindi, Panjabi, Polish, Spanish and Urdu. In addition I am a member of the board of a major corpus provider, ELRA. If elected, I would like to act as a bridge between the TEI and this organization which represents a large number of corpus builders and users throughout the world.

Martin Mueller writes: I am a Professor of English and Classics at Northwestern University. My primary research field has been the uses of ancient epic and tragedy by European writers since the Renaissance. I have also written on Homer and Shakespeare. More recently I have become interested in the uses of information technology for traditional philological inquiries. Together with Ahuvia Kahane, Craig Berry, and Bill Parod I am the editor of The Chicago Homer, a bilingual Web-accessible database of early Greek epic, published by the University of Chicago Press this fall.

As for the TEI, I have been a great admirer of the subtle and complex thinking that has gone into its design. At the same time, I doubt whether it can get a foothold beyond a small circle of editors and hackers unless it can become an authoring tool that graduate students or faculty with low technology pain thresholds may find advantageous to use for various projects. My hope is that an appropriately modified version of the TEI-Lite could serve that function and would provide a way of ‘ramping up’ to more complex uses. I see the construction of such a ‘ramp’ as the most promising way of anchoring familiarity with the TEI in the broader community of humanities scholars on whose interest and support the success of the TEI will depend in the long run.

Merrilee Proffitt writes: I graduated from UC Berkeley degrees in English and American History. I worked for over twelve years at The Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley. During my time at Berkeley, I managed digital library publishing and imaging projects, and worked with both TEI and EAD. I now work for RLG, collaborating with our member institutions on standards and projects that help define or resolve community issues. My professional interests are metadata, the future of special collections/archives, and tools development. I am involved in the development of METS (Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard)

Peter Robinson writes: I have been associated with the TEI for over ten years. I was chair of the Textual Criticism workgroup and a member of the primary source transcription source group; I was primarily responsible for the chapters dealing with these in the Guidelines; and I gave both these sections the most thorough testing in the work of the Canterbury Tales project over this last decade Latterly, I have led the EU-funded MASTER project in devising and implementing a standard for descriptions of manuscript descriptions. Because I have found it difficult to publish the XML we have made as we would wish, in my spare time I created an advanced XML publication system and a publishing company to publish it and the goods we have made. The software has now been released, as Anastasia; the publishing company is Scholarly Digital Editions. As a member of the TEI board, my concerns would reflect my use of TEI as a practitioner and sometime theorist: to keep the TEI both elegant and useful.

Laurent Romary is Directeur de Recherche at INRIA Laboratoire Loria. He writes: being a researcher in Computational Linguistics, I have been involved since 1994 in TEI related projects which have provided me with the opportunity to experiment with various aspects of the Guidelines (linking mechanisms, prose, drama, distionaries etc.). In particular, I have had some occasions to see the need for a framework where subsets of the Guidelines could be defined in specific contexts (e.g. precise control of the TEI header for on-line delivery of texts). For the last two years, I have been project leader at ISO TC37/SC3 for the future ISO 16642 standard which is a direct follow-up of the Terminology chapter and which proposes a possible technical background for ensuring modularity and flexibility in the definition of XML based formats. Moreover, the creation of a new sub-committe (SC4) within ISO TC37, dedicated to linguistic resources, should provide opportunities for some collaboration between the work done in TEI groups and at ISO.

Harold Short is Director of the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King's College London. He is also Chair of the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing and Co-Director of the Office for Humanities Communication. He has been involved since their inception in the annual Digital Resources for the Humanities Conferences and is a member of the DRH Standing Committee. He has extensive experience of the application of computing in humanities research, and is technical director of a number of major research projects. He played a leading role in the establishment of the UK's national Arts and Humanities Data Service. He also has wide experience of teaching at undergraduate and postgraduate level, and is programme director of the BA Minor programme Humanities with Applied Computing at King's.

I am very pleased to be a candidate for election to the TEI Board. The TEI has been an area of major interest and concern to me since its beginnings, and the work of the TEI informs many of the projects in which I am involved and the courses that we teach. As Chair of ALLC, one of the TEI's three sponsoring associations, I have been active over the past few years in the efforts to find a way for the TEI to continue, and was directly involved in formulating the agreements and in setting up the transitional arrangements that led to the establishment of the TEI Consortium. In part I agreed to be a candidate from my personal engagement and in part as a public commitment from the ALLC to the continued success of the TEI. The Consortium faces many challenges, not least in relation to establishing a secure basis of funding, but also has many opportunities. If elected I will seek to play as constructive, positive and supportive a role as I can in furthering the Consortium's aims.

C. Perry Willett writes: I am the Assistant Director of the Digital Library Program at Indiana University, and general editor of the Victorian Women Writers Project (VWWP), a collection of TEI-encoded electronic texts. Since its inception in 1995, the VWWP texts have received over 1 million uses. In addition, I serve as the chair of the Digital Library Federation's working group on TEI encoding in libraries, which has drafted guidelines for the use of the TEI in library etext projects. These guidelines are undergoing significant revision, which should be ready by the end of 2001. I also serve as chair of a task force to draft recommendations for transcription and encoding of texts in the Early English Books Online project using the TEI and am the coordinator of the Wright American Fiction project, a collection of almost 3,000 19th century American novels. This collection will have its first release later this year, but when completed, the Wright collection will be one of the largest TEI encoded etext collections freely available on the web.

Simply stated, I believe that the Text Encoding Initiative is the best hope for librarians and scholars in their efforts to encode electronic text, and am keenly interested in its maintenance and development.

Christian Wittern writes: Having worked both in Taiwan and Japan and being comfortable with both Chinese and Japanese, my main interest lies in trying to to raise the profile of TEI in East Asia. For this to be successful, some areas in the TEI Guidelines need to be developed further, especially, but not limited to the represenation and encoding of characters. As a TEI officer, I would like to act as a liason to text encoding endeavors that have so far not been well connected with the TEI, for example the Electronic Buddhist Text Initiative (EBTI) as well as other projects in Japan. I would also try to make the TEI Guidelines more accessible to new audiences, specifically by working towards greater availability of examples of TEI encoded texts ("TEI Best Practice") and tutorials.