TEI Host Activities Report 2003
Contents
The following reports summarize activities during the year 2003 at each of the four host institutions: Bergen, Brown, Oxford, and Virginia.
The University of Bergen
Staffing and institutional matters
- Claus Huitfeldt (CH), the University of Bergen's representative on the TEI-C Board and Honorary Treasurer of the TEI-C
- Alois Pichler (AP), Acting Executive Director of the TEI-C; 50% of a FTP 1.1.-30.9.2003; this includes assistance by Anne Lindebjerg (AL) and Kristine Breivik (KB), administration)
- Tone Merete Bruvik (TMB), Executive Director of the TEI-C; 50% of a FTP (on maternity leave 1.1 - 30.9.2003)
- Torill Revheim (TR), Administration and accounting; 5% of a FTP (2/3 of a month).
- General management
- Grant applications
- Promotional activities
General management
- Preparations for the third members meeting in Nancy
- Membership and subscription management: Invoicing of annual fees, registration, correspondence
- Reimbursement, budgeting and accounting for the TEI-C
- IRS reporting
- Preparing papers for the board meetings: Preparation of agenda, financial reports, host reports, budgets etc.
- Membership and subscription recruitment.
Grant applications
AP continued efforts with EU grant proposals, concentrating on integrating TEI-C FP6 participation with proposals coordinated by other institutions. This was successful, as on April 24th, 2003, three proposals were delivered to the EU for the IST priority, where TEI-C participation was included. The three proposals responded to objective IST-2002-2.3.1.12 Technology-enhanced learning and access to cultural heritage: Access to Cultural Heritage, focusing however on different aspects (learning/access) of it or using different instruments (1 Network of Excellence proposal, 2 Integrated Project proposals). AP reported to the Board on EU funding possibilities on April 3 and April 28, 2003. The EU has signalised that none of the two Integrated Project proposals will be selected for funding, while there have not yet been received signals on the Network of Excellence proposal.
Promotional activities
- CH presented TEI as part of undergraduate courses in humanities informatics
- CH presented TEI in talks held in Munich in March and at the Nordic Research Course at Gotland in August.
Membership recruiting
- DOK, Unit for Digital Documentation at the Faculty of Arts, University of Oslo
- CREAC, University of Hertfordshire
- MoDyCo, Universite Paris X Nanterre, France.
Other activities
CH served in the TEI-C 2003 nomination committee.
Brown University
Staffing and institutional matters
- Julia Flanders (JF), Brown's host representative to the TEI board, approximately 10% time (contributed by Brown)
- Syd Bauman (SB), North American Editor of the TEI Guidelines, 50% time (paid by the TEI)
- TEI editorial activities
- Management and organizational activities
- Training and promotional activities
TEI editorial activities
- SB attended the manuscript description workgroup meeting in Iceland, September 2003;
- SB attended the NEH-funded SGML/XML migration workgroup meeting in Alicante, Spain, June 2003, and wrote a case study for the migration workgroup;
- SB worked on EDW79, and on attributes that need changing for P5;
- SB participated in ongoing work on EDW77 (errors reported and corrected in the Guidelines);
- SB did continuing updates of website in support of workgroups, in particular the standoff markup and migration workgroups;
- SB participated in conference calls for TEI Council, TEI Board, and TEI workgroups.
Management and organizational activities
JF served as Chair of the TEI Board starting in November 2003.
SB participated as a member of the program committee for the 2003 Members Meeting in France.
SB continued to moderate the TEI-L listserv (approximately 2.5 hours per month, contributed by Brown University). In mid-October 2003, the listserv was converted to an unmoderated forum, so SB's moderation activities concluded at that point.
Training and promotional activities
- SB presented a poster session on the TEI at ACH/ALLC 2003 in Athens, Georgia
- JF and SB organized a two-day training event to be held before the ACH/ALLC 2003 conference, but unfortunately this event had to be cancelled due to underenrollment (conference attendance was also low, possibly as a result of current political and economic troubles).
- JF and SB presented a two-day training workshop at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in October 2003.
- at the Electronic Literature Organization/Digital Cultures e(X)literature Conference, she presented a paper on the possible applicability of TEI to problems of archiving and studying electronic literature
- at the Renaissance Society of America conference in Toronto, she presented a paper on text encoding using the TEI, and prior to the conference she gave a recruiting talk on TEI at the University of Toronto Library
- at an invited lecture at Siena College, she presented a paper on the Women Writers Project and its use of the TEI
JF continued to represent the TEI on the ADHOC committee investigating possibilities for closer collaboration between the ACH and ALLC; discussions on how to proceed, and how the TEI might be involved, continued via email and at the ACH/ALLC 2003 conference. JF agreed to continue working on elaborating and specifying the protocol for conferences under the new organization.
Oxford University
- Lou Burnard (LB), European editor for the TEI
- Sebastian Rahtz (SR), Oxford representative on the TEI Board
- Judy McAuliffe, administrator
- Participation in TEI Workgroups
- Maintenance and development of TEI website
- Development of infrastructure for TEI P5
- TEI-related software development
- TEI consultancy and training activities
Resources and staffing
Oxford assigns approximately 40% of LB's time, and 15% 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; he also works on a JISC-funded Open Source Software project to which TEI-related tools and methods are of considerable relevance.
Administrative support is provided by Judy McAuliffe, and charged at 5%.
Editorial activities
A major amount of time has been spent in the establishment and conduct of TEI workgroups and task forces this year, in particular the work of the NEH Task force on SGML Migration, and the workgroups on Character Encoding, Feature Structures, and Manuscript Description. LB has attended meetings of most work groups and drafted discussion documents for several of them.
Maintenance and development of the TEI web site continues to take up time, particularly as workgroups become more active. In September, the perforce change control system which manages the two web sites was moved to a new server at Oxford, which has enabled us to simplify and make more reliable the process of synchronizing and updating the two websites.
In May, Oxford hosted a face to face meeting of the TEI Council.
LB is providing consultancy to ELRA (the European Language Resources Association) on validation of language corpora: this has involved defining a procedure for establishing the degree of conformance of language resources to standards such as TEI.
P5 development
- The first stage of redesign of the ODD language is complete
- The sources have been converted to use RelaxNG notation for element contents
- Tools have been written to generate Schemas and DTDs, with TEI elements in their own namespace
- Attributes have been assigned W3C datatypes where possible
- The P5 Guidelines are valid against a RelaxNG schema
- Work has started on documenting the P5 schema in proper TEI style, to make it a normal module
Software Development
The XSLT stylesheet families maintained by SR for converting TEI documents to HTML and XSL FO have been under constant revision, and are in use at a number of sites around the world, with contributions from several other developers. They have been joined by stylesheets for converting TEI to LaTeX.
Under the aegis of the BNC project, LB has continued work on Xara, a generic TEI-XML text searching engine, designed for language corpora in any language. The program is now being beta tested for full release.
Work on converting OpenOffice to TEI reported in 2002 was re-used in 2003 by developing import and export filters for OpenOffice 1.1 to allow it to transparently open and save simple TEI XML documents. This work is available from http://www.tei-c.org/Software/teioo .
The customization of GNU Emacs for use with TEI DTDs and Schemas has been updated to include the new nxml mode developed by James Clark, which uses RelaxNG schemas for continuous validation. The distribution is accompanied by experimental TEI Relax schemas. For the 2003 members meeting, Oxford prepared a TEI customization of the Knoppix CD (a version of Linux running from CD) to demonstrate the Emacs and Open Office setups.
Teaching and promotional activities
- Courses taught at Oxford Universiy
- Courses taught at other institutions
- Public presentations which promoted the TEI
SR and LB taught four half day sessions about Text Encoding and XML as part of Oxford University Computing Services regular learning programme in February 2003.
LB participated in a seminar on text critical editing organized in Munich in March, and another in Leicester in July.
LB was invited again to teach a four day workshop on corpus encoding with the TEI at the Scuola Superiore di Lingue per Interpreti e Traduttore in Forli in April.
SR presented a paper about TEI and Relax NG schema at XML Europe in London, May 2003.
LB has provided consultancy to a number of TEI-related projects in the UK and elsewhere. These include the BASE (British Academic English Spoken English) corpus at Reading and Warwick; the EETS demonstrator project in electronic textual editing at Southampton; the Endangered Languages Archive at SOAS; the Jain Manuscript cataloguing project at the Wellcome Institute.
University of Virginia
Host Institution Staff
Hosting duties at the University of Virginia are shared by the Library and the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH).
- Christine Ruotolo
- Matthew Gibson
- John Unsworth
- Daniel Pitti
- Joy Shifflette
- Regina Carlson
- Sarah Wells
- Cindy Girard
- Robert Bingler
John Unsworth left IATH at the end of June 2003, and is now Dean of the School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. From January through June of 2003, Unsworth chaired the Council and the Board. In July 2003, Pitti became the Virginia representative to the Board.
Major Activities
- Chairing of TEI Board and Council (Unsworth) [through June 2003]
- TEI XML migration workgroup (Ruotolo and Wells)
- Grant administration and submission (Carlson, Shifflette, Pitti)
- Systems and technical assistance (Bingler, Girard, Unsworth, Pitti, Gibson)
- Representing TEI in the year-long discussions of the ACH, ALLC, TEI, etc. (Unsworth)
- TEI library task force representative (Gibson)
- Technical and editorial maintenance of web-accessible version of the P4 Guidelines (Gibson)
Chairing TEI Board and Council
John Unsworth served as Chair of the TEI Board and Council through June of 2003. Among other activities, organized and chaired four conference calls for the TEI Council and chaired one face-to-face meeting of the Council (Oxford, May 2003). Participated in Board conference call in June.
Pitti assumed host representative duties for Virginia in July 2003.
TEI XML Migration Workgroup
Chris Ruotolo has managed the large NEH-funded workgroup devoted to documenting methods for migrating TEI repositories from SGML to XML. As Chair, she has organized several international meetings, moderated discussion on a project email list, and generally supervised the work of the group. Sarah Wells has been the technical writer for the migration working group, drafting the main reports and case studies. The working group report will be made available soon for review and comment.
Grant administration and submission
IATH's administrative services specialist, Joy Shifflette, has administered the budget of the NEH grant for TEI's XML migration workgroup during the period May 2002-May 2003. This has included processing reimbursements, paying invoices from host sites for grant-related activities, and providing periodic financial reports on the grant. With the departure of Unworth, Pitti has become the PI on the migration grant. Given the nature of this grant, the PI's responsibility is primarily adminstrative oversight. Pitti, with assistance from Wells and Carlson, submitted an Interim Performance Report to NEH, and is now working with the editor and Board to plan the activities that will bring the grant to completion in April 2004. IATH's development officer, Regina Carlson, helped John Unsworth to prepare and submit one (unsuccessful) grant proposal to the Ford Foundation in February, and an additional proposal to the Carnegie Corporation that was, after deliberating its prospects, not submitted.
Systems and technical assistance
Girard administered (with assistance from Unsworth through June 2003) the Sun server on which the TEI web site resides; content is mirrored from the Oxford Consortium site, thus IATH involvement is restricted to maintaining the UVa server and mirroring software, and occasionally editing content (mostly php pages related to accessing the membership database). Bingler administered the membership database (PostgreSQL). During this reporting period, Bingler migrated the database from an R&D server to IATH's principal and more reliable server (jefferson.village.virginia.edu), the same server hosting www.tei-c.org. Unsworth (through June 2003) and Pitti (July 2003-) monitored and administered the council and board lists. IATH also hosted the TEI library task force list, but this list was migrated to Indiana University in June 2003. Gibson provided ongoing technical and editorial maintenance of the web-accessible publication of the TEI Guidelines (P4) (http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/teip4/).
Representing TEI in the year-long discussions of the ACH, ALLC, TEI, etc. (Unsworth)
Unsworth was one of two representatives designated by the TEI Board in May of 2002 to represent the TEI in a joint committee of the TEI, the ACH, and the ALLC, charged with recommending mechanisms to promote more efficient administration of, and more productive collaborations among, these organizations. Unsworth also represented the ACH in these discussions.
TEI library task force representative
Gibson is a member of the TEI library task force, chaired by Perry Willett (Indiana University) and is participating in its ongoing discussions and meetings.