TEI Host Activity Reports, Jan-Sept 2004.
Contents
The following reports summarize activities during the period from January to September 2004 at each of the four host institutions: Bergen, Brown, Oxford, and Virginia.
The University of Bergen
Staffing and institutional matters
- Daniel Apollon (DA), the University of Bergen's representative on the TEI-C Board and Honorary Treasurer of the TEI-C, from March 2004
- Claus Huitfeldt (CH), the University of Bergen's representative on the TEI-C Board and Honorary Treasurer of the TEI-C, January - February 2004
- Tone Merete Bruvik (TMB), Executive Director of the TEI-C; 40% of a FTP
- Alois Pichler (AP), Project Director of the Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen
- Torill Revheim (TR), Administration and accounting; 5% of a FTP
- Anne Lindebjerg (AL), Membership management; 5% of a FTP.
In August AKSIS - UoB decided that we would not apply for a second period as a TEI Host Insitution when the current four year period ends in December 2004. TMB will as a consequence from 2005 no longer be Executive Director of the TEI-C.
- General management
- Grant applications
- Training and Promotional activities
General management
- Membership and subscription management: Invoicing of annual fees, registration, correspondence
- Reimbursement, budgeting and accounting for the TEI-C
- IRS (Internal Revenue Services) reporting
- Membership and subscription recruitment
- Preparations for the members' meeting in Baltimore
- Preparing papers for the board meetings: Preparation of agenda, financial reports, host reports, budgets etc.
- Preparing the document "Grant proposal deadlines" at http://www.tei-c.org/Board/GrantDeadlines.html
- Preparing the document "TEI Consortium procedures, customs and practices" at http://www.tei-c.org/Board/procedures.html
Grant applications
- AP continued efforts with the EU Integrated Project HyperLearning proposal (coordinator Paolo D'Iorio) which includes and promotes TEI-C participation. Although the proposal was given good responses, it was not selected with the first deadline. Work is done to resubmit the proposal for the next deadline.
- A large scale project (InterLigo) allowing interlinking av Topic Maps and TEI-based text archives and corpora have been submitted to the Norwegian Research Council. The project has been given priority at UoB.
Training and promotional activities
- TMB has been teaching TEI as part of undergraduate courses in humanities informatics. One Master project will include TEI issues. We have also been asked to house a German postgraduate student having just completed a TEI-centered project on the Italian Newpapers' Mafia Corpus (Duisburg Germany)
- The Wittgenstein Archives published the electronic resource "Using XML to generate research tools for Wittgenstein scholars by collaborative groupwork" (http://helmer.hit.uib.no/wab/sept1914/) which is based on TEI Guidelines
- AP has on several international occasions given presentations and papers, promoting the TEI Guidelines, including Paris, Sandbjerg, and Bologna, (see http://helmer.aksis.uib.no/wab/alois/alois-pap.htm)
- DA promotion TEI in the EU Commission, presentation of of TEI and TEI-C for representative of Directorate General Multimedia and Education together with AP
- Promotion by DA of TEI and in-depth discussion with French research units dealing with XIXth century text studies
- Promotion of a TEI-based Norwegian Centre for Digitalization of of Research Material (DIGIFOR). The TEI standard was mentioned in a preliminary hearing sent by the Ministry of Education and Research, and universities were asked to make suggestions. AKSIS and the faculty of Arts at UoB supported the plan. However UoB's top management had reservation on the financial implications of the government's plan. A possible new round may take plan in 2005. The whole plan needs approval from the Parliament.
- Further contacts in Norway between TEI compliant projects (e.g., Ibsen's Complete Edition, MENOTA etc.). A substantial TEI expertise is accumulated through this cross-project contact. Also, preliminary contacts have been made with various academic departments and individual experts to promote TEI-based new initiatiative (Knut Hamsun, Ludvig Holberg)
- TEI issues have been presented by DA to guest researchers as part of the EU-financed Advanced Research Infrastructure (2002-2004).
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
- assisted in the creation of the working group on physical bibliography
- made updates to P4, including repairs of problems remaining from the SGML-to-XML conversion and fixes to errors reported by users, and published a new corrected release of P4
- worked with the Migration Task Force to complete SGML-XML migration documents
- oversaw activities of Character Encoding workgroup concerning the decision to use xml:lang in P5
- oversaw activities of Stand-Off Markup workgroup, and began transition to XPointer, to bring TEI pointing mechanisms into harmony with W3C specification
- created and participated in the working group on <choice>
- attended the Metalanguage workgroup meeting in Paris
- participated in conference calls for TEI Council, TEI Board, and TEI workgroups.
Management and organizational activities
JF served as Chair of the TEI Board and a member of TEI Council from January through October 2004.
JF and SB revised and expanded the TEI's operating procedure document
JF assisted with writing the final report for the TEI's SGML/XML migration work.
Training and promotional activities
- JF and SB participated in a three-day TEI training workshop at Wheaton College, June 2004, including a lecture on TEI, hands-on training and consultation, and some intensive recruiting activities.
- JF taught a one-week introductory TEI course at the Humanities Summer Institute at the University of Victoria, June 2004.
- JF and SB presented a paper on the TEI ODD system at the Extreme Markup Languages conference in Montreal, August 2004.
- JF presented a paper on the WWP's TEI documentation project at ALLC/ACH 2004, Göteborg, Sweden
- SB presented a paper on the TEI's proposed use of xml:lang at ALLC/ACH 2004, Göteborg, Sweden
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 2004 conference.
Oxford University
- Lou Burnard (LB), European editor for the TEI
- Sebastian Rahtz (SR), Oxford representative on the TEI Board
- Judy McAuliffe, administrator
- Staff of the Oxford Text Archive (manager: Martin Wynne)
- Visiting researchers and students: we were lucky to have an extended visit by Alejandro Bia, a useful work placement by Arno Mittelbach, and a brief visit from Laurent Romary.
- Maintenance and development of TEI website
- Participation in TEI Workgroups
- Editing the TEI Guidelines
- Development of the infrastructure for TEI P5
- TEI-related software development
Resources and staffing
Oxford assigns approximately 40% of LB's time, and 15% of SR's time, to TEI activities. Most of LB's work is funded by the Consortium as TEI Editor, while SR's time is Oxford's main extra contribution as a host. In addition, SR's main role at Oxford University Computing Services (OUCS) as Information Manager involves maintaining their web site ( http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ ) as a TEI application; he also manages the JISC-funded OSS Watch Open Source Software advisory service, which also uses TEI markup, and works with the TEI on tools and methods.
Administrative support is provided by Judy McAuliffe, and charged at 5%.
Editorial activities
The Feature Structures and META work groups have produced most work this year, with increased involvement by LB in the ISO meetings associated with FS. LB has attended meetings of most work groups and drafted discussion documents for several of them. SR has undertaken the majority of work implementing the results of the META work group.
After the May 2004 Council meeting, a project was set up on Sourceforge ( http://tei.sf.net/ ) to maintain TEI-related software, and manage feature requests and bug tracking. The work for this has fallen on LB and SR, with Syd Bauman.
Maintenance and development of the main TEI web site has not been a major activity this year, with more effort being expended on the Sourceforge project. LB has spent an increasing amount of time monitoring and commenting on suggestions appearing on the SF tracker for P5 feature requests. SR has been involved with other members of the Board in discussions about the needs of the web site, and in particular logos.
P5 development
The META working group ( http://www.tei-c.org/cms/Activities/Workgroups/META/ ) has taken up a great deal of time for SR and LB over the course of 2004, with an important face to face meeting in Paris in the spring of 2004. The outcomes of this, the subsequent discussion at the Council meeting, and later testing by Laurent Romary during his visit to Oxford, produced many changes to the ODD language, which was only deemed stable by mid September 2004. The tools (largely XSLT stylesheets) to manage the source of the P5 Guidelines have been rewritten substantially (several times over!), and the emphasis is now on testing and consolidation.
Software Development
A complete rewrite of the experimental Roma system to generate customized TEI DTDs and schemas was undertaken in May 2004. This done by Arno Mittelbach, who completed the coding in PHP and XQuery to a high standard. The result is available at http://tei.oucs.ox.ac.uk/Roma/ . A side product of this was an eXist XML database version of the TEI Guidelines source, now used by software implementing the ODD system.
In conjunction with the OSS Watch service, a remastering of the Knoppix Linux distribution on CD has been maintained with TEI-useful software on board. An important step was completed in September 2004 by making all the TEI-related material (schemas, stylesheets, etc) into Debian packages. After checking and testing, these packages should be available as part of the main Debian distribution in October or November 2004. This work has the very important side-effect of working out a directory structure (following the Debian XML guidelines) which can be used to accomodate all the TEI deliverables.
The Emacs customization for TEI use has been maintained, and a complete new version was released in September 2004.
Internationalization work for the TEI Guidelines, translating element and attribute names, and attribute values, were advanced by Alejandro Bia, who was a visiting researcher at OUCS in July/August 2004. This work is implemented in Roma.
The XSLT stylesheet families maintained by SR for converting TEI documents to HTML, LaTeX and XSL FO have been under constant revision. Most of the work has concentrated on processing the ODD source of the TEI Guidelines.
Under the aegis of the BNC project, LB has continued work on Xaira, a TEI-XML text searching engine, designed for language corpora in any language. A very welcome grant from the Mellon Foundation in June 2004 is allowing for the program to be extended to Linux and Macintosh platforms, and be released as open source in 2005.
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 2004.
In June, LB taught a four day workshop on corpus encoding with the TEI at the Scuola Superiore di Lingue per Interpreti é Traduttore in Forlí, and also gave an invited lecture at a seminar on critical editing organized by the Institution for Slovenian Literature in Ljubljana. Along with other Workgroup members he presented the work of the TEI ISO FSR workgroup at the LREC conference, which was also notable for the range of NLP TEI applications being reported on.
SR presented a third paper about TEI and Relax NG schema at XML Europe in Amsterdam (April 2004), and at a UK XML meeting in June 2004. LB presented a paper on the ODD syste, at the Extreme Markup conference in August 2004.
LB and SR have provided TEI consultancy to a number of projects and services in the UK and elsewhere. These include the Qualidata Archive at Essex University; the BASE project at Reading and Warwick Universities, which is developing a language corpus of Spoken Academic English; the Endangered Languages Archive project at SOAS, London; the Clay Sanskrit Library, which is developing a major online library of Sanskrit classics in translation and original languages. Stuart Brown and LB are developing a TEI editing environment for this project, and held a preliminary training session on its use in Oxford in September.
A TEI workshop is also planned for early October at Wuerzburg, which will be taught by LB and Laurent Romary.
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).
- Michael Furlough
- Christine Ruotolo
- Matthew Gibson
- Daniel Pitti
- Joy Shifflette
- Regina Carlson
- Sarah Wells
- Cindy Girard
- Shayne Brandon
- Robert Bingler
Pitti has represented Virginia on the Board in 2004. In February, IATH hired a full time systems administrator, Shayne Brandon. Brandon assumed Girard's administrative duties. Virginia hired Bernard Frischer from UCLAas the new director of IATH. He officially started in August.
Major Activities
- TEI XML migration workgroup (Ruotolo and Wells)
- Grant administration (Carlson, Shifflette, Pitti, Wells)
- Systems and technical assistance (Bingler, Girard, Brandon, Pitti, Gibson)
- TEI library task force representative (Gibson)
- Technical and editorial maintenance of web-accessible version of the P4 Guidelines (Gibson)
TEI XML Migration Workgroup
Chris Ruotolo managed the large NEH-funded workgroup devoted to documenting methods for migrating TEI repositories from SGML to XML. In 2004, Ruotolo finalized and submitted the working group report. Sarah Wells was the technical writer for the migration working group, drafting the main reports and case studies. Wells assisted in finalizing the report. The working group report is available on the Consortium site.
Grant administration
IATH's administrative services specialist, Joy Shifflette, administered the budget of the NEH grant for TEI's XML migration project from January 2004 to April 2004, when the grant ended. Over the course of the grant, Shifflette processed reimbursements, paid invoices from host sites for grant-related activities, and provided periodic financial reports on the grant. In closing out the grant, Shifflette ensured that all funds were appropriately disbursed. Pitti and Wells, with input from the other hosts, wrote the final Performance Report to NEH. Carlson prepared the final Budget Report, including documentation of cost share, and monitored both reports to ensure that they were submitted by the July 2004 deadline. The TEI XML migration project was a great success, with all major project met or exceeded!
Systems and technical assistance
Girard (January-February) and Brandon (February-October) administered 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 Brandon oversaw the migration of the mirror site and membership database to a new server. Pitti monitored and administered the council and board lists. Furlough, on behalf of the Library, also monitored the board list. Brandon with assistance from Pitti also migrated the listservs from Majordomo to Mailman. Gibson provided ongoing technical and editorial maintenance of the web-accessible publication of the TEI Guidelines (P4) (http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/teip4/).
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.