TEI Elections 2003

TEI Board

TEI Council

Candidates' Statements

Hilde Bøeis Assistant Editor of Henrik Ibsen's Writings at the University of Oslo, Norway. The project, which aims at the publication of all of Ibsen's writings in print as well as in electronic form, is based on TEI. Bøe has worked with DTD development and documentation for the project for the last five years.

Bøe's work has made her focus her interest on diplomatic transcription and the encoding of authorial changes in modern manuscript sources. Her work has led her to believe that there is still much to be done in developing the TEI Guidelines and TEI DTDs in the fields of transcription and critical apparatus. She is also concerned about the relationship between scholarly editing and text encoding; a very important issue to explore is how these two fields influence each other.

If elected to the Council, Bøe would like to use her position to promote the use of TEI in the nordic countries. She would also very much like to contribute to the work on the TEI Guidelines, especially the sections concerning transcription of primary sources and encoding of scholarly work for electronic critical editions.

Matthew James Driscoll (b. 1954) writes: I am a lecturer in Old Norse philology at the Arnamagnæn 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 MENOTA and CHLT.

Patrick Durusau is the Director of Research and Development for the Society of Biblical Literature. He is currently a member of the TEI Character Set working group, leading a task force on the need for revision of networks, graphs and trees (in P4), co-editor of ISO 13250, Topic Maps -- Reference Model; chair, V1 - Text Processing: Office and Publishing Systems Interface, the US TAG to ISO/IEC JTC1 / SC34; chair, OASIS Published Subjects for Geography and Languages TC, technical advisor to the XSTAR Project (XML based archaeological database project at the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago) and technical lead for the Open Scriptural Information Standard (a joint effort of the Society of Biblical Literature and the American Bible Society to create an easy to use schema for biblical stuides).

My markup interests are centered around the encoding and analysis of texts from the Ancient Near East and the representation of complex textual traditions and analysis of those texts. As such, overlapping hierarchies, character set issues, meaningful access to such texts and analysis, and fundamental markup issues that affect the foregoing are my primary concerns. I have been participating in the TEI effort for some time, first only be email in the 1990's but later as a representative of the SBL in the TEI Consortium and as an active participant in proofing and in working groups. I see a great deal of value in the TEI Consortium more effectively communicating the technical excellence represented in the Guidelines and in actively recruiting members as well as collaborations with other groups with similar issues. The more open the TEI Consortium becomes, the greater the benefit to the humanities community of its past, present and future labors.

Tomaz Erjavec writes: I am a scientific associate at the Dept. of Intelligent Systems at the research institute Jozef Stefan in Ljubljana, Slovenia. My research focuses on machine learning of language structure and the development of annotated mono- and multi-lingual textual corpora and other language resources. I have worked extensivelly with TEI since the middle of '90, mostly using it to annotate corpora and lexical resources in a number of EU and Slovene projects and have given courses on encoding at several European summer schools. Recently, I have also started working, in cooperation with the Slovene Academy, on the encoding of manuscripts and text-critical editions. I have served one term on the TEI Council and am a member of the TEI SGML to XML migration WG.

By profession and majority of my work I am a computational linguist (I've served two terms on the board of the European chapter of the ACL), and it is in this field that TEI seems quite underutilised - while it has been used for annotating corpora, it is almost non-existent in the markup of other CL/HLT resources, such as lexical databases, grammatical formalisms, feature-structures, ontologies, termbanks, etc. Even if TEI does not establish WGs to address these areas, it must define linkage mechanisms to the standards most used in the field, e.g. MARTIF, OLIF, OWL, etc. In short, one of the reasons I would like to be in the Council is to represent the computational linguistic community.

On a more geo-political note, I also see myself as a representative of the ex-socialist countries that are now in the process of joining the EU; here TEI can be promoted via outreach activities, such as courses, but also via localisation of the Guidelines.

Having served one term on the Council, I am also familiar with the charges of the working groups and task forces, and would of course continue to advise them on their work.

Peter Flynn writes: I have been using TEI since the early 1990s when we selected it as the file format for the (now) CELT project (then CURIA), a corpus of Irish text. Since then I have used it extensively both for this and other projects in the Humanities, in my own institution and elsewhere, and I used it as an example of DTD customization in my book on SGML and XML Tools.

I currently run the Electronic Publishing Unit in University College Cork, where we provide support and training for Humanities and other academic users in creating and maintaining documents for single-source publishing. We also run the college Web site and a number of document collections (in TEI and other DTDs) which reside on it.

Both I and my institution have benefited from use of the TEI, and I would like to be in a position to be able to give something back to the Humanities markup community. I'm also concerned that without a considerable increase in the availability of tools for handling TEI text, it risks falling below the horizon of perception. There is a strongly-talented and dedicated band of people working on the TEI, but I am aware that all too often the lacuna in such projects is in the governance rather than the technical achievement, and I would be sorry if this were to happen with the TEI.

David L. Gants (Ph.D, English, University of Virginia, 1997) is the Canada Research Chair in Humanities Computing at the University of New Brunswick. His interest in text encoding began at the University of Virginia where he helped establish the library's Electronic Text Center, eventually serving as its assistant coordinator. He has published numerous articles and reviews as well as spoken widely on humanities computing, bibliography and textual criticism. He is currently the Electronic Editor for the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson: , the director of the Early English Booktrade Database project, and a member of the advisory board for the Oxford Works of Edmund Spenser.

With projects such as the CEWBJ: and EEBD he seeks to explore the potential of text markup, and especially the guidelines developed by the TEI, to translate information embodied within printed books into digital forms that can be investigated in new and innovative ways. Such information includes not only linguistic data but more importantly what D.F. McKenzie calls the "expressive nature of materials forms." Key to this enterprise is the continued improvement of SGML/XML structures and their associated XSL, XLL and Schema strategies. As more scholars, many with little background in computer technologies, begin working on electronic scholarly editions and archives it is essential that the TEI continue its mission to develop community-based standards for text encoding and exchange.

Kurt Gartner writes: My interest in humanities computing goes back to 1972 when I was working with Roy Wisbey at King's College London on processing medieval German texts, using the computer as a tool for concordance and index making and the creation of critical editions. Using modern technology for dictionary making and for creating electronic texts has been at the centre of my interest ever since. At the University of Trier, where I have been teaching history of German since 1979, I initiated a considerable number of humanities computing projects. As project director I have published together with a group of younger scholars, philologists and computer specialists, an online and offline version of a compound of all the major dictionaries to Middle High German with all single dictionaries interlinked to each other, and also an electronic version of the great dictionary to the German language, the Deutsche Wrbuch (33 vols.) by the brothers Grimm which is the German equivalent to the OED. In collaboration with the Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia I am directing a project to create an XML-based Middle High German Text Archive. This text archive should once become a part of a national text archive for German. For all these projects we have used TEI extensively from the beginning.

Out of my interest in international collaboration on the basis of standards I would use my connections with various projects of German universities, the Academies of Sciences and Humanities, and research libraries to recruit members, subscribers and sponsors. In particular, the major research projects using TEI should be convinced to join the TEI and secure a sound financial planning for its future. In my view, there are still too many projects und institutions around using proprietary software and incompatible technical standards. To advance the TEI standard in Germany in order to create sustainable and sharable archives and tools within the academic community is at present my particular concern.

Fotis Jannidis writes: I have studied German and English literature and worked in the computer department of our faculty. At the moment I am teaching German literature at the university of Munich.

My main interests are literary theory, narratology and humanities computing, especially the creation and the use of electronic editions. I am co-editor of the Jahrbuch fuer Computerphilologie : , a German website and yearbook on humanities computing. I am also co-editor of the electronic edition The young Goethe, which is encoded in TEI. At the moment we are working on a framework to put TEIlite encoded texts on the net. Another line of interest is the encoding of manuscripts for diplomatic transcriptions (I am working on a proposal for a grant for a working group). As head of the commission for editorial applications in the working group for German editions (this name was not my idea) I am working on promoting TEI as a standard format for literary editions in Germany by giving lectures and providing training seminars.

Stephen Ramsay is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Georgia specializing in humanities computing. He has worked with TEI since about 1995, first in association with UVA's Electronic Text Center (Assistant Director, 1998-1999), and later as Senior Programmer for the Virginia Center for Digital History and the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (1999-2003). He has been variously involved with the creation of encoded documents, SGML-XML migration, computational analysis of encoded texts, and large-scale storage and dissemination of literary and historical documents using TEI in the context of digital libraries. He is also the Associate Editor for the journal TEXT Technology in charge of online resources.

He writes: It gives me great pleasure to be nominated to the TEI Council, particularly since nearly all of my current research is involved, in one way or another, with the TEI. As a faculty member specifically hired to teach computing in the humanities, I worked to develop undergraduate and graduate curricula which includes substantial training in both TEI and in the theoretical issues which surround it. As the editor of an online journal, I am now overseeing the migration of all our journal articles to a subset of TEI (and have been asked to develop a more generalized TEI-compliant DTD for such articles by the current chair of the TEI Board). More pertinent to my candidacy, however, is my extensive involvement in the development of tools specifically designed to manipulate encoded documents within distributed environments. I am at work on a program called SceneGraphwhich uses TEI to generate directed graphs of the stage traffic in dramatic works, and I am also heavily involved in the construction of TAPor (Text Analysis Portal) -- a framework for the computerized analysis of encoded documents currently being developed under the auspices of the Canada Foundation for Innovation. I founded the Digital Humanities Developers' Consortium in order to promote the creation of interoperable digital tools for manipulating encoded documents, and have worked as a consultant to several organizations seeking to create TEI-based digital archives in the humanities and social sciences. I believe I bring the experiences of a young scholar and a seasoned software engineer to the table, and would welcome the opportunity to play a role in the future of the TEI.

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). In 2000-2002, I was the editor of ISO 16642 standard (TMF Terminological Markup Framework), 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.

Since 2002, I have been the chairman of ISO committee TC 37/SC 4 on language resource management, and have acted to establish strong collaboration between the TEI and this committee. This has lead in particular to the setting of a joint working group on Feature Structure Representation that is being established to bring chapter 16 to an ISO standard.

Christine Ruotolo writes: I am a former Associate Director of the Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia Library, which produces and maintains a substantial public collection of online texts. During that time I managed two large TEI-based digitization projects (Early American Fiction and the Japanese Text Initiative) and developed applications for delivering TEI content, both to the web and to various ebook platforms. In my current job in Digital Services Integration, I'm working on converting our text collections and processing environment from SGML to XML and developing tools for searching and displaying our TEI-encoded content alongside other types of digital objects. For the past year, I have served as chair of the TEI taskforce on SGML to XML migration, which will deliver its final recommendations this fall. I'm also a Ph.D. candidate in English, working on a dissertation about electronic scholarly editing.

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.

Natasha (Natalia) Smith holds an MA in Linguistics from Moscow University and an MLS from the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Prior to coming to U.S., Natasha worked as senior editor in a publishing house in Moscow. Upon graduation from UNC, in 1995, she served as the first UNC-CH Digitization Librarian. She writes:

I started working on creating my first TEI-encoded text back in 1994, after having attended CETH summer seminar in Princeton. Since then, I managed production of the library's digital publishing endeavor Documenting the American South , a collection of the TEI encoded texts freely available on the web.

I was a member of the original working group that back in 1999 was charged with developing a set of recommendations for libraries using the TEI Guidelines in electronic text encoding. The Guidelines were endorsed by the Digital Library Federation, published on the Digital Library Standards and Practices site and used by many digital libraries as a model and referred to as best practices for encoding (Note - Guidelines are currently undergoing significant revision.) I was also on the DTD Design Group to draft recommendations for transcription and encoding of texts in the Early English Books Online (EEBO) project using TEI. Finally, I am currently a member of the TEI/NEH Task Force on SGML to XML migration.

The significance of TEI for library-based digital publishing projects cannot be overestimated. As a member of the TEI-C Council, I would work on further promoting TEI in the library community, which has the most promising ground for its implementation - the importance of maintenance and development of standards is understood and supported in the libraries. However, the relationship between the TEI-C and libraries should be reciprocal, with both sides perceiving and developing the mutual benefits. Having said that, I strongly believe that the librarians' presence and role in the TEI-C development and governance is not only necessary, but vital for the Consortium's future.

John Unsworth writes: From 1993 to 2003, I have been Director of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia, a research and development unit that has sponsored the creation of a number of TEI-based scholarly editing projects, as well as some others that have created their own DTDs. In August of 2003, I begin my term as Dean of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, a school with a number of faculty interested in humanities computing and informatics more generally. My engagement with TEI over the last several years has been significant, and has been focused mostly on organizational issues: I organized the original proposal to turn the TEI into a membership organization, and I chaired the transition group that incorporated the TEI Consortium. During the last three years, I have acted as a host representative (from Virginia), as Chair of the TEI Consortium's Board, and as Chair of the TEI Consortium. Now that I am relocating to Illinois, I would like to continue to contribute to the Consortium as an elected member of the Board.

Edward Vanhoutte is co-ordinator of the Centrum voor Teksteditie en Bronnenstudie - CTB (Centre for Scholarly Editing and Document Studies), a research institute of the Royal Academy of Dutch Language and Literature (Ghent, Belgium). He is an SGML/XML consultant in different TEI based academic projects in Belgium and The Netherlands, and publishes widely on textual and genetic criticism and electronic scholarly editing. He has given many workshops on the use of TEI in Belgium, Europe and several continents (Africa), and teaches graduate courses on genetic editing and humanities computing at the University of Antwerp (UIA). He serves as Reviews Editor of Literary & Linguistic Computing.

His research interests include text-encoding and markup of modern manuscript material (prose and epistolary material), electronic scholarly editing, genetic editing, and the history of electronic editing. He is the co-editor of the DALF guidelines for the description and encoding of modern manuscript material which is documented as an extension to the TEI and is used for the construction of a growing textbase of modern (19th & 20th century) correspondence material. His work on the TEI Council would concentrate on the need to cater for the (genetic and documentary) transcription and edition of modern manuscript material, and the development of didactic modules for the instruction of TEI to different communities on different continents.

Next to writing a book on the history of electronic scholarly editing, he is currently co-editing two special issues of Literary and Linguistic Computing: devoted to young scholars in IT and the Humanities, and one issue on Scandinavian approaches towards electronic editing. He is preparing a collection of essays on the edition of correspondence material (Epistolaria: ) and has previously edited several collections of essays like De ene leeuw is de andere niet. Zeven maal De Leeuw van Vlaenderen herlezen: (Antwerp, 2003), Talig Erfgoed. De Zuidelijke Nederlanden in de 14de eeuw: (Gent, 2002), and Paralipomena: (Antwerp 2001), a collection of essays on genetic studies which he edited with Dirk Van Hulle. Amongst his most recent publications are the text-critical reading edition of De Leeuw van Vlaenderen: (The Lion of Flanders) by Hendrik Conscience (Lannoo, 2002), the text-critical reading edition in bookform (Manteau, 1999) and the electronic-critical edition on CD-Rom of Stijn Streuvels' De teleurgang van den Waterhoek (Amsterdam University Press/KANTL, 2000) which he prepared together with Marcel De Smedt. Edward Vanhoutte is also a food writer and mainly reviews cookery books.

John Walsh writes: I am currently Manager of Electronic Text Technologies with Indiana University's e-text center (LETRS) and Digital Library Program. As such, I am involved in a wide range of e-text and digital library projects. I have eight years experience working with SGML, XML, and the TEI in a library setting. I also hold a Ph.D. in English literature and have a strong interest in the use of markup languages and the TEI as scholarly editorial and critical tools. I am the editor of the Swinburne Project, an on-line, TEI-encoded collection of the works of Victorian poet and critic Algernon Charles Swinburne. From a technical standpoint, I am an enthusiastic supporter of the now successful effort to bring the TEI into the XML world, and I am interested in using the full range of XML technologies to exploit the possibilities of TEI-encoded texts. I am currently a member of the TEI Workgroup on SGML/XML Conversion. Given the opportunity to serve on the council, I am committed to working hard to keep momentum going on DTD development, education and training development, working group activities, and other efforts of the TEI consortium.

Perry Willett is the Associate Director of the Digital Library Program at Indiana University. Formerly, he served as the bibliographer for English and American Literature at IU. He has a BA in English and German literature, and an MA in Comparative Literature. He is the general editor for the Victorian Women Writers Project: and the Wright American Fiction 1851-1875: online collections. He chaired the task force that drafted transcription and DTD guidelines for Early English Books Online, and also chaired the Digital Library Federation task force that drafted the TEI in Libraries Guidelines. He currently chairs a task force working on revising those guidelines, and has published articles on the use of TEI in digital libraries.

Christian Wittern (PhD Chinese Studies, Goettingen University) is Associate Professor at the Documentation and Information Center for Chinese Studies (DICCS) of the Institute for Research In Humanities, Kyoto University (JAPAN). Recent professional projects include digitization and markup of Chinese Buddhist Texts (now online at www.cbeta.org) and the development of a KnowledgeBase for Buddhist Studies.

Within the TEI, he has served on the TEI Council for two years since 2001, as a chair of the Character Encoding workgroup, which was chartered in July 2001 and as a member of the TEI META workgroup since March 2003. He writes:

My interest has been to develop the TEI Guidelines further and to broaden its usage in East-Asian countries, especially Taiwan and Japan. Some of these efforts are starting to show results now with academic institutions from East Asia joining the TEI Consortium and the formation of a special interest group in Taiwan for Chinese texts in the TEI. The TEI is now in a crucial phase of re-adjusting the whole framework to the XML world and other recent developments and I would very much like to continue to contribute to this work as a member of the TEI technical council. I would also like to continue to work as an evangelist for the TEI in East-Asia, for which it helps a lot to be a member of the council.