TEI Host Activities Report: 2001

Traveling for the TEI Consortium

Establishing Management Routines

A lot of work has been done to build the management needed for an organisation as the TEI Consortium. The international aspect of the consortium has been a challenge, with the head office in Norway and the Consortium corporate in Virginia. We have had good help from the Chair of the Board of Directors, John Unsworth, as well as others. Our management and staff here at the HIT Centre have also be of great help.

Membership recruitment

The basic income for the TEI Consortium is the membership fee. In order to have a budget the membership recruitment has been the most important activity in 2001. All the hosts and the members of the board has take part in this effort. TMB have cordinated this effort. She has kept the recruitment database updated, which at the moment has 60 entries. TMB has also sent out approximately 45 letters to institutions and persons that has express some kind of interest in becoming members, she has also sent an unknown number of emails with information about the TEI Consortium to various institutions.

Management

The management has been time consuming in this first year. The online membership and subscriber application forms and the database for membership, subscription and recruiting have been developed and been essential to handle this work. Keeping the records updated is however time consuming. TR has been of great help doing the accounting and the invoicing for the TEI Consortium.

TEI-related Activities

The other major project TMB is involved in is the project Henrik Ibsen's Writings, where she is their main encoding consultants on TEI encoding.

TMB has also been working on a upcoming EU application of a project called ESTATE where TEI is a main subject. This is done in close connection with Peter Robinson, De Montfort University, and others.

The HIT Centre has been consulting for the National Archives in Stockholm, Sweden, concerning use of TEI for the encoding of an edition of Axel Oxenstierna's correspondence.

Similiarily, HIT staff was involved in consulting for the establishment of a TEI-based encoding standard for edition of nordic medieval manuscripts at the Norwegian Academy in Oslo.

Resources and staffing

The HIT Centre assigns approximately 50% of TMB's time, and 5% (2/3 of a month) of TR's time, to TEI activities. Kristine Breivik held the Executive Director position the first two months of the year before Tone Merete Bruvik was able to start in her new position in March. KB has also assisted in the establish of the various routines later during the year.

Promotional activities

Produced the TEI leaflet in May, ready for the ACH/ALLC Conference in New York in June 2001.

Revision of the Guidelines

In October, Syd Bauman took over the role of North American editor during Steve DeRose's temporary leave of absence, and helped Lou Burnard complete substantial portions of this revision.

TEI Survey

Following the first TEI board meeting, Julia Flanders designed a survey aimed at querying the TEI community about its current uses of TEI and its needs for the future. This survey was initially distributed at the ACH/ALLC conference in New York in June 2001, and subsequently has been available online at the TEI web site. The data-gathering will be concluded shortly and results will be made available at the TEI site.

Other work

During this year Syd Bauman also acted as moderator for TEI-L, the TEI's electronic discussion list. Julia Flanders worked on the design of the TEI membership benefits early in the year and spent much of the spring recruiting members.

Editorial activities

To support multiple authors we are now using the version control system within Oxford University Computing Services (Perforce), which controls access to all TEI documents, including the website.

Conversion of P3 ODD files to XML was done more or less automatically between January and May, enabling the preparation of a preliminary version of the P4 XML DTDs in time for the ACH-ALLC meeting in July.

The production process for DTDs, and both HTML and print versions of the Guidelines, from the TEI ODD files was completely replaced in May and June, and has been gradually improved over the rest of the year. It is now entirely implemented as an integrated suite of XSLT style sheets.

Steve De Rose worked on identifying a large number of areas of potential XML/SGML conflict in the text of the Guidelines during his visit to Oxford in July and also participated in our Summer School.

During August and September, in response to the call for volunteer proofreaders, we dealt with some 30 different sets of comments on particular chapters of the Guidelines. Unfortunately, Steve De Rose was unable to contribute any further effort to the process at this time, which meant that some of the more demanding editorial tasks have had to be delayed.

In October, Syd Bauman was named acting North American editor. With his invaluable assistance, a very large number of systematic errors were fixed, and a huge amount of additional checking carried out.

In addition, both SR and LB have dealt with large numbers of enquiries on TEI-L and elsewhere.

Resources and staffing

Oxford assigns approximately 40% of LB's time, and 5% of SR's time, to TEI activities. In addition, some 40% of SR's time is devoted to maintaining and developing the Oxford University Computing Services (OUCS) web ( http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ ), which is a TEI application.

During August, we attempted to recruit an additional member of staff to work full time on developing and maintaining the TEI website. Unfortunately no suitable candidates presented themselves at that time. In November, however, we were able to offer the position to Stuart Brown, who will begin work shortly after the Pisa meeting

Although the immediate problems of producing P4 have been overcome, there will be a growing need for sustained high quality intellectual editorial input if we are to respond appropriately to the challenge of new work groups.

Software Development

The XSLT stylesheets used for the TEI Guidelines are built on those written by SR for the OUCS web site and for other local documentation; this has meant that most of the development work has been provided by OUCS. Enhancements specific to the ODD format have, however, required considerable work; this is mainly due to the extensive literate-programming paradigm used by the TEI, which makes extracting the end-user DTDs non-trivial. The result is a set of portable XSLT specifications which entirely replace all of the Spitbol programs formerly used to generate DTD fragments, P3X, and HTML. Another set of XSLT stylesheets generates PDF, by transforming the TEI XML to XSL Formatting Objects XML markup, which is then processed using TeX, via a complex set of macros for parsing XML developed by David Carlisle, and implemented for FO by SR.

SR has also been experimenting with automatic generation of an XML schema (expressed in Relax NG) from the existing ODD files, with so far very promising results. We expect to do a lot more on this next year.

During February and March, the SARA indexing software used for the BNC was adapted to enable it to operate with any TEI conformant corpus.

Website activity

The structure of the website has stabilised over the year, more or less, though there is still considerable room for improvement and expansion. All non-archival pages are now written in TEI XML, which is transformed to static HTML for delivery. The web site is maintained in Oxford, and automatically synchronized with the TEIC web server in Virginia.

We hope to move to dynamic delivery of the XML files from the TEI website soon, converting them to HTML on demand. This will allow us to deliver the web pages in different styles according to user preference.

The TEI funded Humbul ( http://www.humbul.ac.uk ) to search for and produce up to 100 records of projects using the TEI, or tutorials about it, the majority of which found their way into the appropriate section of the TEI website. New projects continue to appear, sometimes from unexpected quarters, and it is evident that some kind of database is needed to organize the information more effectively than at present.

Promotional activities

The MASTER project came to an end in July, with an extensive series of workshops across Europe promoting this TEI-based standard for manuscript description. LB taught Master workshops at Milan (24-26 Jan), Vilnius (7-11 March), Paris (16-17 March), Sofia (8-12 June), London (21-22 June), and Sydney (24 Sept). LB/SR taught an intensive course on XML publishing with the TEI at OUCS (February/March, and again in July); LB also taught week long courses on TEI and corpus linguistics in Forli (1-6 May) and Prague (14-22 July); LB gave invited lectures on TEI at ENS (Lyon, 15 March), ITC (Mumbai, 23 April), Digital Cultural Heritage III (Maastricht, July). SR organized the first international conference on XSLT at Oxford in July; TEI materials were included in the CD distributed to the 200+ attendees.

Organizational Work

As Chair of the Board of the TEI Consortium, John Unsworth has recruited and supervised the lawyers and accountants who have helped to incorporate the TEI-C as a non-profit membership organization and who have provided the necessary forms and paperwork to the State of Virginia and the United States Internal Revenue Service, and he has spent time answering questions and providing information to these lawyers and accountants, and to the state and federal agencies with which they correspond. He has also administered the meeting of the Board of Directors in Norway, in May of 2001, and overseen the arrangements and the development of a program and announcements for the members' meeting in Pisa, in November of 2001. In addition, he has spent time arranging for the NEH grant to the TEI to be accepted by the University of Virginia, since the TEI is not yet certified as a non-profit corporation by the IRS. He has also undertaken a mailing campaign to contact former members of past TEI working groups, to invite their renewed or continued participation in TEI.

Joy Shifflette has done the administrative work to enable payment of lawyers and accountants, to arrange TEI-related travel by UVa host representatives, and to ensure payment of UVa's TEI membership fee.

Recruitment

John Unsworth and David Seaman have represented the TEI at a number of conferences in the United States, Canada, and elsewhere, either through formal presentations, public sessions, or the distribution of printed promotional materials. Unsworth has personally recruited a number of significant new members, including the Modern Language Association, the Library of Congress, the Association of American University Presses, and some major universities. David Seaman has done a mailing to potential members or sponsors in the library world, and he has personally recruited both libraries and publishers. Unsworth has supervised and paid a student worker at UVa who developed online membership application and membership database administration tools.

Publication

Unsworth has supervised the technical details of mirroring the TEI web site from Oxford, where content is developed, to Virginia, where it is publicly distributed.

Kirk Hastings has worked with personnel at Oxford to implement the mirroring of TEI web content from Oxford's development site to the public site at Virginia.