TEI Elections 2004

TEI Board

TEI Council

Candidates' Statements

Alejandro G. Bia currently works as Head of Research and Development at the Miguel de Cervantes Digital Library of the University of Alicante (Spain), where the results of his ongoing research are being put to practice. He also works as a lecturer at the department of Programming Languages and Information Systems of the same university.

In the past he has been the Special-Projects Manager at NetGate (1996) and the Documentation Editor of the GeneXus project at Advanced Research and Technology (ARTech)(1991-1994). He has lectured on Concurrent Programming (2004), Software Engineering (2003), Operating Systems, Computer Organization, Computer Networks, and English for Computer Sciences (1990-1996). His current fields of interest are: automation of digitisation processes by computer methods, digital preservation, digitisation metrics and cost estimates, text structuring and markup languages.

He writes: I am very pleased to stand for reelection for the TEI Council. I would like to keep contributing in several ways towards goals like the migration from SGML to XML, the internationalization of TEI, and specially the spread of the TEI markup scheme in Spanish speaking countries. In the last few years, I've been involved in several efforts of mutual cooperation with Hispanic scholarly groups, and the organization of courses, seminars, and other training and support activities in Spanish language. Recently, I've been cooperating with the TEI Internationalization project by translating the whole TEI tagset and part of the documentation descriptions to Spanish. The goal is to have this new Spanish tagset and documentation completed and integrated into P5. In 2003, I've also cooperated with the TEI SGML-to-XML Migration Group , and with the <teiPublisher> project. If re-elected I will continue playing an active role in reaching these objectives.

Alan Burk is Founding Director of the Electronic Text Centre (ETC) at the University of New Brunswick (Canada) and Associate Director of Libraries. He is an Honorary Research Associate through the School of Graduate Studies. His PhD is in philosophy from Brown University.

The ETC was formally launched in 1996 as a library enterprise for the production and distribution of electronic texts. Recently, the Centre was designated as a University priority and given funding over a three-year period to make the transition to a research centre or institute for advanced technologies in electronic scholarly communication. Two Canada Research Chairs are affiliated with the Centre, one a half-time appointment. The Centre today is recognized for its involvement in interdisciplinary research and development in electronic publishing, digital libraries and humanities computing and for its education initiatives, including its Summer Seminar Series. Its projects are wide-ranging, promoting the use of standards and open-source software. Sample initiatives include building a TEI database of Canadian Poetry with a version spun off for Chadwyck-Healey's Lion; being one of the primary developers of the CanCore metadata application profile for the Canadian eLearning community; and working collaboratively with the Chair in Atlantic Canada History in the design and development of the Atlantic Canada Portal.

Alan Burk is an Associate Director for the TAPoR text analysis project, funded by the Canada Foundation for Innovation. He is a member of the steering committee for the five institution publishing initiative - The Canadian Information Network for Research. He is a successful applicant for grant funding from a number of agencies, including SSHRC, NBIF, CANARIE and CFI.

David J. Birnbaum is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at University of Pittsburgh. He has been involved in the TEI since the mid 1980s, and has a particular interest in the application of electronic text technology to medieval manuscript studies. Within the TEI he has served on the TEI Council, the Character Set Work Group, and the Medieval Manuscript Task Force; he is also a former member of the ACH board and of the editorial board of the journal Markup Technologies. During the past summer he taught electronic text technology in workshops at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Alberta, and his recent ongoing electronic text projects include the Repertorium of Old Bulgarian Literature and Letters and The Annotated Afanas'ev web site of Russian Fairy Tales and related texts.

Mavis Cournane is principal consultant with Cognitran Limited in the UK. She has a PhD in Computer Science and History from the National University of Ireland. Her dissertation topic was 'The Application of SGML/TEI to multilingual text processing'. This dealt with issues surrounding the use of TEI for the encoding of complex, multilingual (Old Irish, Latin, Norman French, Norse, Greek, Hebrew) and historical texts. Much of the work done during this time was done under the auspices of the Corpus of Electronic Text (CELT) Project (http://www.ucc.ie/celt/). The entire CELT corpus is encoded in TEI and Mavis continues to act as a freelance consultant to CELT on TEI issues.

Mavis' current work with Cognitran is focussed on the application of XML and its related technologies to the area of multilingual technical information. Her particular focus is on the use of XLIFF and OTF that are XML vocabularies used in the areas of Translation Memory.

She is also active in standards work. Currently she is co-chair of the Naming and Design Rules Subcommittee for the OASIS Universal Business Language (UBL - http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=3Dubl) Technical Committee. She is also the moderator for the Atlantic side of the TC (US, Europe).

James Cummings is a Research Officer for the Oxford Text Archive at the University of Oxford, which also hosts the U.K.'s Arts and Humanities Data Service: Literature, Languages, Linguistics http://ahds.ac.uk/litlangling/ ). In our role as an AHDS subject centre we advise funding applicants on best practice in text encoding. The Oxford Text Archive has been collecting electronic texts for the last 28 years and, having been founded by Lou Burnard, has always had a close relationship with the TEI. I have been striving with others in an informal working group to create a proposal for a choice mechanism to be included in TEI P5. Its mailing-list archives are available on the TEI sourceforge site. I have also been working with the members of the TEI Presentation Tools SIG to help to develop collections of TEI texts for testing various presentation tools. My own interest is in using these collections with Apache's Cocoon and the XML database eXist to develop tools for analysis of TEI texts. I am also part of the TEI Manuscript SIG and TEI Authoring SIG. In my role at the Oxford Text Archive I have been involved with TEI training and advice for humanities text encoding projects within the UK.

Before working for the Oxford Text Archive, I was a Research Associate for the CURSUS project at the University of East Anglia, whose goal is to make medieval liturgical documents more accessible by transcribing and marking them up in TEI XML. My educational background is in Medieval Studies, and my PhD thesis Contextual studies of the dramatic records in the area around The Wash, c. 1350-1550 AD: (University of Leeds) was an archival-based thesis that transcribed and investigated those records left in surviving financial accounts for early entertainment in a localised area. Prior to this I completed an MA in Medieval Studies (University of Leeds) and a BA as a Medieval Studies Specialist with Latin minor (University of Toronto). My interests in early drama records have led me to proselytize the Records of Early English Drama project to the use of TEI for their planned retro-digitisation efforts. I am currently working on a TEI XML edition of the The Conversion of St Paul a medieval play from Bodleian MS Digby 133. More recently I have joined the executive of the Digital Medievalist Project ( http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/ ) which is attempting to foster a community of best practice amongst those medievalists who are creating electronic resources. I think it is beneficial to have medieval manuscript scholars involved with the TEI as the close attention to detailed textual phenomena is something which they both share. I have followed the developments leading towards TEI P5 and hope to keep contributing to them as I think this major revision to the TEI guidelines will encourage the use of the TEI by an even broader range of digitisation projects.

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

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 extensively 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 was/am a member of the TEI Task Force on SGML to XML Migration and the ISO/TEI Workgroup on Feature Structures.

John Lavagnino studied physics at Harvard (AB, 1981) and English at Brandeis (MA, 1989; PhD, 1998). He is a lecturer in the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King's College London, where (among other things) he teaches courses in XML and electronic publishing. He was a member of the work group on drama and performance texts that wrote the drama chapter of P3, and has been involved in three large TEI-based electronic-publishing projects: the Women Writers Project, an edition of Thomas Middleton's works, and Charlotte Rouché's edition of Greek inscriptions from Aphrodisias.

Jessica Perry Hekman writes: I work for Ingenta, an online publishing consulting company based in Oxford, England (I live in Massachusetts). Ingenta handles large SGML/XML projects using various DTDs. I have participated in two TEI working groups -- the SGML/XML Migration group chaired by Christine Ruotolo, and the Stand-off Markup group chaired by David Durand. Finally, I contributed some modifications to OpenSP's osx application, an SGML->XML transformer.

Andreas Nolda has been a research and teaching assistant ('wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter') at the Institute for German language and linguistics at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin since 1999. He previously worked as student assistant in a computational-linguistic research project ("Dawai") at the Humboldt-Universität. 1993-1999, following studies in German and general linguistics, French, and musicology at the Freie Universität Berlin and the Université de Paris VIII.

He writes: I first came into contact with the TEI Guidelines in 1996 when I was looking for an application-independent data model. Since then, I have been using the TEI DTD for my own texts and my bibliographic data - first in SGML, then in XML form. I have developed XSLT stylesheets for 'Microsoft Word HTML' and LaTeX output from TEI input files. The LaTeX stylesheets are available from my homepage.

I have been following discussions on TEI-L since 1996. Lately, I contributed to the <biblItem> proposal for P5 by the xml-biblio Sourceforge project. In addition, I posted several P5 feature requests on my own behalf.

Daniel Paul O'Donnell is Associate Professor of English, University of Lethbridge in Canada, an Anglo-Saxonist and editor of the Electronic Caedmon's Hymn (SEENET). He is also the founding director of the Digital Medievalist Project, a community of practice for medievalists whose research involves digital media. His non-Humanities Computing research interests include book history, textual scholarship, editorial theory and practice. His principal research interests in Humanities Computing include markup (particularly textual apparatus, variants, and "choice"-type structures), unusual database applications, and collaborative learning infrastructure. His familiarity with TEI extends back to 1997.

Susan Schreibman is Assistant Director Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) and Affiliate Assistant Professor of English. She is the General Editor of the Thomas MacGreevy Archive, a TEI-based digital archive published at IATH, and developed and maintains Irish Resources in the Humanities. She has given many TEI workshops, including those at University Of Maryland, the Humanities Computing/ Digital Humanities Summer School at Victoria (British Columbia) and University College Dublin (Ireland). She has also co-facilitated TEI workshops attached ACH/ALLC at Gøteborg, Sweden (2004) and Athens, Georgia (2003). Her TEI-related software development includes The Versioning Machine http://www.mith2.umd.edu/products/ver-mach/ , and teiPublisher http://teipublisher.sourceforge.net . She holds a Ph.D. from University College Dublin in Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama (1997). Her publications include A Blackwell Companion to Digital Humanities: , edited with Ray Siemens and John Unsworth (forthcoming November 2004), 'The Text Ported' Literary and Linguistic Computing: (April 2002), and 'Computer-mediated Discourse: Reception Theory and Versioning' Computers and the Humanities (August 2002). She is the co-moderator of two TEI SIGs, training and manuscripts.

David Sewell is Editorial and Technical Manager of the Electronic Imprint of the University of Virginia Press, whose Rotunda publications are primarily based on underlying TEI-compliant XML data: original scholarship, digital editions, and adaptations of digitized print material. As such, he would bring to the Board the perspective of a traditional scholarly publisher that is committed to moving beyond the prevalent "online PDF" model of university-press electronic publishing. Although his active engagement with TEI began in 2002, he has been involved with humanities computing since the early 1980s, when he composed his Ph.D. dissertation in American literature using the vi editor plus nroff/troff on a Unix mainframe system and found that he needed to customize a macro package to meet UC San Diego's formatting requirements. During his time as a faculty member with the Department of English at the University of Rochester (1984-92), he managed the networked student writing lab, was active in the "computers and composition" community, and developed an introductory graduate seminar on computers and the humanities that covered text analysis, hypertext theory, interactive fiction, and computer-mediated communication. Since 1992 he has pursued a non-teaching career in scholarly publishing at the University of Arizona and (1999-present) with the University of Virginia Press. His recent work with TEI-based data has required both structural/editorial analysis of markup decisions and hands-on technical work, including original programming in Perl, XSLT, and XQuery. He is particularly interested in issues of evaluation and quality control with TEI (e.g., how should we peer-review markup?), and in encouraging the development of software tools that facilitate authoring TEI documents and editing both single documents and large document collections.

John A. Walsh writes: I have over eight years experience working with SGML, XML, and TEI electronic texts in an academic environment. I was recently appointed to a faculty position as Associate Director of the Indiana University Digital Library Program. Prior to that I worked with SGML and XML texts at the Indiana University Library Electronic Text Resource Center (LETRS). In these positions I've worked to develop TEI collections as well as the Web-based frameworks required to deliver those collections to users. I 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, a TEI-encoded collection of the works of Victorian poet and critic Algernon Charles Swinburne, and I am lead developer of CBML (Comic Book Markup Language), a TEI-based markup language (using standard TEI extension mechanisms) for encoding comic books and graphic novels for scholarly use. From a technical standpoint, I am interested in using the full range of XML technologies and standards to exploit the possibilities of TEI-encoded texts. I have contributed to TEI activities in the past through the organization of a special interest group on graphics and text and through participation in the TEI/NEH task force on SGML to XML migration. Given the opportunity to serve on the Board, I will work hard to contribute to the efforts of further TEI development, education and training, working group activities, and other endeavors of the TEI Consortium.

Matthew Zimmerman has worked as a Humanities Computing Specialist at New York University since 2000 where he has consulted on encoding projects such as The Public Writings of Margaret Sanger, The Clerk's Tale,: and James Fenimore Cooper's The Bravo. He has been NYU's representative to the TEI-C since 2002 and has attended the annual members meetings in Chicago and Nancy.

At the 2003 meeting in Nancy, Matthew convened the first meeting of the Presentation Tools Special Interest Group and has continued to maintain the SIG's website and listserv. If elected, Matthew would advocate more education and dialogue about TEI processing tools as well as continuing the development of the guidelines.