TEI MM 31: Elections 2005

TEI Board

TEI Council

Candidates' Statements

David Birnbaum is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh (US). He is a TEI subscriber and has been a member of TEI Council, the TEI WorkGroup on Character Sets, and the TEI Task Force on Manuscript Description. His principal research interests include the computer-assisted analysis of medieval manuscripts; for a publication illustrating both theoretical and practical aspects of his TEI-related scholarship, please see the following article, which was delivered as a report at the Extreme Markup 2000 conference and then published in Markup Languages: Theory and Practice. Vol. 3, No. 1. 17-53:

Linda Cantara is Head of Digital Library Initiatives and Metadata Librarian at Kelvin Smith Library, Case Western Reserve University. She has been working with TEI since 1998, encoding everything from image-based electronic editions of damaged Old English manuscripts and Old English glossaries to an archive of Tibetan oral history interviews. As a scholar-librarian, she has had hands-on experience with both complex encoding projects as well as TEI-Lite encoding of texts for digital libraries. She is currently integrating TEI-encoded texts with the Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS), transforming MARC records to TEI-Headers, and using TEI with Encoded Archival Description (EAD) finding aids. Her research interests include designing tools to create and capture digital preservation metadata, library digital publishing production management, and development of ontologies for searching and browsing digital libraries. She is a member of the TEI in Libraries SIG and the Ontologies SIG. For more information, see http://library.case.edu/ksl/techserv/metadata/index.html.

Patti Cossard. I am willing to commit time to discussion, decision-making, and TEI activities. I have an M.A. in medieval Studies from the University of Toronto, and an M.L.S. in library science from Rutgers University. For the past four years I have served as the chair of the Medieval Academy of America's Committee on Electronic Resources. I have been a bibliographic cataloger, contributed to the US National Authority File, and headed a cataloging department, at which time I was a project leader to implement an integrated library system. I have also served as a systems librarian, as well as the curator for Manuscripts at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in which I played a role in creating Places in Time http://www.brynmawr.edu/iconog/. In the 1980s I first became involved with humanities computing as a contributing indexer to the dicta probatoria project, an early humanities computing project to create a database of manuscripts. I have since worked on a number of digital projects in the 1990s in both technical and outreach roles. As the Chair of the Committee on Electronic Resources (see above) I have worked to effect policy to value digital projects. I am currently the founding editor of the Medieval Academy's Electronic Editions Series. I am also currently editing a volume on medieval computing for the Annual New Technology series published by ITER. In May, I served as an IMLS panelist for their digitization grants. I am currently a fellow at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, developing a multi-lingual thesaurus for medieval studies utilizing the TEI recommended TBX standard, through which I have been invited to serve as become official members of the US TAG for ISO Tech Comm. 37 (Terminology and language and content resources) I am also currently serving as the Principal Investigator on the Digital World's Fair project collaborating with Susan Schreibman, Assistant Dean and Head of Digital Collections and Research (UML).

Matthew Driscoll. 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 an independent consultant advising a range of clients on markup and information technology issues. He is currently a member of the TEI Character Set working group, 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 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). From 2000-2005, he was the Director of Research and Development for the Society of Biblical Literature.

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. The TEI has taken a number of steps over the last several years to broaden its outreach and to make the process of developing the Guidelines more open. I think the next step in that process is to publicize the practical benefits of TEI membership and that arise from using the TEI in encoding projects.

Amit Kumar. I am a software developer for the Library and Information Science School, University of Urbana Champaign. I have been involved with TEI-based projects since 2002, when I was the programmer for Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities. My first TEI application development was The Versioning Machine http://mith2.umd.edu/products/ver-mach/index.html, an application which displays and compares multiple versions of encoded texts. I have been the lead programmer for several TEI repository projects, including Early American Digital Archive http://www.mith2.umd.edu/eada and The Thomas Macgreevy Archive http://www.macgreevy.org. I have co-facilitated several XML/XSL workshops in Canada, the United States, and Sweden.

I am the lead developer of the open source project teiPublisher http://teipublisher.sourceforge.net/ an application to generate TEI- based repositories.

Jindrich Marek. After finishing the study of history at the Charles University in Prague I started to work in the National Library of the Czech Republic in its Manuscripts Department. My specialization is medieval homiletics and electronic-digital processing of manuscript descriptions.

If elected I would focus on manuscript description module of TEI. I would try to combine existing models (especially for medieval manuscripts) and test the usability od this module for other types of material (e.g. early printed books), eventually test combinations of different DTDs for different kinds of material. The second area of my interest are digital libraries. Here I would like to focus on linkung of elements and different libriaries' models.

Daniel O'Donnell. I am an associate professor of English at the University of Lethbridge and founding director of the Digital Medievalist Community of Practice. I have extensive experience with markup languages, going back to TEI/SGML, and was recently a contributor to the development of the P5 choice element. My first TEI-based project is being published this winter by Boydell and Brewer. I am currently a director of the Visionary Cross project.

I have been an active member of the TEI community for eight years. Having received so much support from the TEI community, I would now like to give something back. As director of the Digital Medievalist Project http://www.digitalmedievalist.org and member of various humanities computing and editorial boards, I have experience in strategic management of projects like the TEI. I would greatly appreciate the opportunity to work with such a central organisation.

Dot Porter. I first became interested in humanities computing while an MA candidate in medieval studies at Western Michigan University at the tail end of the 1990s. I was very intrigued by the various electronic projects focused on bringing usually hard-to-view manuscript materials to a broader audience – The Canterbury Tales project, Piers Plowman, and the Electronic Beowulf. This interest led me to the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where I completed an MS in Library Science with the thesis “Medievalists' Use of Electronic Resources,” based on a national user study. Since 2003 I have been Program Coordinator at the Collaboratory for Research in Computing for Humanities at the University of Kentucky.

My main work for the past two years (as co-PI on the Electronic Boethius Project, directed by Kevin Kiernan, an image-based electronic edition of a seriously damaged Old English manuscript) has been with image-based encoding, that is, investigating ways to both increase the physical description available in the TEI and create links between text encoding and digital images. Related to this is my interest in the problems of overlapping markup, and in 2003 I convened the TEI Overlapping Markup SIG in order to bring together interested individuals to discuss the problem and possible solutions. More recently my project base has expanded and I have been investigating ways to use the TEI P5 to encode dialogues, link multiple parallel texts while recording their relationships to one another on the page, and encode Latin dictionaries with the later aim of merging them into one project. I am currently working with an art historian on the description of an extensively illustrated manuscript, through which I am investigating approaches for using the manuscript description element, new in P5, to build a complete model of a single manuscript. Together we contributed an invited review of the P5 Chapter on Manuscript Description. I work with individual scholars, many of whom are not familiar with XML or the TEI, so it is important to me that the Guidelines be clearly written and descriptive, and include relevant, detailed examples. For more information about me, please see my CV at http://www.rch.uky.edu/dporter/CV.doc. Please feel free to contact me at dporter@uky.edu.

My pet projects include researching ways to use the TEI for paleographical description and approaches for encoding medieval music notation.

I am pleased to offer my time and effort to the continuing development of the TEI.

Laurent Romary is the Director of Scientific Information at CNRS. He was previously senior researcher at INRIA where he conducted researches in the field of Computational Linguistics. He has been involved since 1994 in TEI related projects which have provided him with the opportunity to experiment with various aspects of the Guidelines (linking mechanisms, prose, drama, distionaries etc.). In particular, he has had some opportunities 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, he 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, he has been the chairman of ISO committee TC 37/SC 4 on language resource management, and has 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 which is bringing chapter 16 to an ISO standard. As a member of the TEI council he has actively participated in the definition of the new ODD platform for P5, revised the Print Dictionary chapters and started to produced a new chapter on terminology representation. He initiated the bid from Nancy as a host and has held several TEI related meetings and tutorials.

Paul Schaffner. The greatest asset that I would bring to the position is ten years' practical experience in applying TEI-based markup to a very large quantity of very heterogeneous material. I run the etext production shop at the University of Michigan's digital library production service, where I began ten years ago as a library-school student tagger applying first full TEI (P3) and then TEI-lite to 19th-century American verse. I spent two subsequent years managing the conversion of the Middle English Dictionary and associated databases to electronic form (using several customized DTDs, some of them TEI-based); another year converting and marking up primary texts in Middle English, yet more American verse, and assorted minor projects (e.g., Knight's American Mechanical Dictionary); and have spent the past five years managing the three Text Creation Partnership (TCP) projects (Early English Books Online, Evans early American imprints, and Eighteenth-Century Collections Online), which have together already produced a huge corpus of about 12,000 TEI-encoded books --among which appears nearly every oddity of language, genre and format that early modern authors and printers could devise. In this latter capacity, I supervise directly a staff of about 18 markup reviewers in four countries, indirectly a host of taggers and keyers employed by the four data conversion firms who do the initial markup, and try to keep all of them more or less consistent. Most of my experience is in SGML, since I have only recently introduced XML, (initially as an export format), and in TEI P3/4 and derivatives. I am accustomed to soliciting advice and building a consensus when possible, but am also woefully accustomed to the need to make daily policy decisions on markup questions, even when no consensus or advice is available. The constraints of the projects I manage have reinforced my native inclination toward simplicity, flexibility, practicality, (and thoroughness of documentation). I am only a techie so far as I need to be--certainly no programmer--, saving my real affection for the material and the information that can be captured from and about it. My academic training was mostly textual, linguistic, and historical, devoted to medieval and early modern languages, literatures, manuscripts and books. My cv is online at http://www.umich.edu/~pfs/cv.html and links to most of the internal documentation of the projects cited above can be found at http://www.umich.edu/~pfs/codetext.html

Ray Siemens. I'm very pleased to be considered for the TEI Consortium Board. I've made a strong professional commitment to TEI, both in my research and in my teaching, and I would like to broaden this, further, via duties associated with the TEI Consortium. Areas in which I might be some use include activities associated with awareness, outreach, and the expansion of TEI Consortium membership. In the past, I've suggested things like a series of 'Best Practice' awards for research projects of particular note using TEI, and various forms of subtle TEI branding methods (e.g. small, tasteful images, indicating TEI compliance) to raise awareness across the communities served by TEI. These are small things, to be sure, in comparison to other necessary focal points for the Consortium; but I'd urge that outreach and awareness are key to ensure the strong future that TEI will enjoy.

Ray Siemens is Canada Research Chair in Humanities Computing and Associate Professor of English at the University of Victoria, is Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King's College London, and serves as President [English] of the Society for Digital Humanities / Société pour l'étude des médias interactifs (SDH/SEMI; formerly COCH/COSH). Director of the Digital Humanities / Humanities Computing Summer Institute, founding editor of the electronic scholarly journal Early Modern Literary Studies, and co-editor (general) of the Topics in the Digital Humanities book series (U Illinois P; with Susan Schreibman), he is also author of many articles chiefly focusing on areas where literary studies and computational methods intersect, is editor of several Renaissance texts, and is co-editor of several book collections on humanities computing topics, among them the Blackwell Companion to Digital Humanities (with Susan Schreibman and John Unsworth) and the forthcoming Blackwell Companion to Digital Literary Studies (with Susan Schreibman).

Dr. Siemens' current work involves prototyping a computing environment for the electronic scholarly edition that integrates activities central to professional involvement in humanities disciplines. Details of his work are available via his website, at http://web.uvic.ca/~siemens/

Conal Tuohy is the senior developer at the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre. He joined the centre in 2003 and was responsible for setting up the NZETC's website at www.nzetc.org. His interests in TEI include: using XML Topic Maps to link TEI documents together, and to other digital resources, to provide highly navigable user interfaces; and the use of TEI for authoring "born-digital" materials.

John Unsworth. I'm interested in continuing to serve on the Board of the TEI Consortium, and I think there are several key tasks that the Board needs to accomplish in the near future. One of those is to complete the specification of "TEI-Tight," a more tightly constrained version of TEI Lite, for use in libraries: the importance of this initiative is that it would provide us with the basis for a tangible benefit of membership, namely discounts with data conversion companies, for small jobs and small institutions. Another important project underway but not completed is the translation of TEI tagsets into other languages: some work on this has been done, but the Board can help secure grant funding to advance this project further. Finally, in the next term of Board membership, there may be important opportunities to assert the importance of funding standards research and development in connection with the EU 7th Framework and with the evolving US and international conversations on cyberinfrastructure.

In 2003, John Unsworth was named Dean of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, with appointments as Professor in GSLIS, in the department of English, and on the Library faculty. During the previous ten years, from 1993-2003, he served as the first Director of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, and a faculty member in the English Department, at the University of Virginia. For his work at IATH, he received the 2005 Richard W. Lyman Award from the National Humanities Center. His first faculty appointment was in English, at North Carolina State University, from 1989 to 1993. He attended Princeton University and Amherst College as an undergraduate, graduating from Amherst in 1981. He received a Master's degree in English from Boston University in 1982 and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Virginia in 1988. In 1990, at NCSU, he co-founded the first peer-reviewed electronic journal in the humanities, Postmodern Culture (now published by Johns Hopkins University Press, as part of Project Muse). He also organized, incorporated, and chaired the Consortium that now oversees the Text Encoding Initiative, co-chaired the Modern Language Association's Committee on Scholarly Editions, and served as President of the Association for Computers and the Humanities. Further information is at: http://www3.isrl.uiuc.edu/~unsworth/.

Ron Van den Branden. At the Centre for Scholarly Editing and Document Studies of the Royal Academy of Dutch Language and Literature, my main involvement is in the DALF project, which aims at the develoment of a Digital Archive of Letters written in Flanders. I co-edited the DALF guidelines for the description and encoding of modern correspondence material, documenting modifications and extensions to the TEI model that are proposed for the electronic scholarly editing of correspondence materials. I am technically assisting the electronic correspondence edition projects at the Royal Academy using the DALF model, as well as the development of other electronic editions, and a project developing a linguistic corpus of 14th-century Dutch texts. Since they all take TEI encoding as a granted starting point, they offer me a great chance to experience and understand the fascinating interrelation between (re)presentational standards, tools and techniques and emerging technologies in many facets. I would be very happy to actively participate in the further development of TEI.

Edward Vanhoutte is currently coordinator of the Centrum voor Teksteditie en Bronnenstudie - CTB (Centre for Scholarly Editing and Document Studies), a research institute of the Koninklijke Academie voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde - KANTL (Royal Academy of Dutch Language and Literature - Ghent, Belgium). He is an independent SGML/XML consultant in different academic projects in Belgium and The Netherlands, and publishes widely on textual and genetic criticism and electronic scholarly editing. He teaches graduate courses on genetic editing and humanities computing at the University of Antwerp, and is Associate Editor of Literary & Linguistic Computing. He runs the occasional series Seminars in Electronic Editing. He serves as a member of several boards and councils such as the TEI Council (2004-2005), the ALLC executive Council, the Digital Humanities Conference program committee, the ADHO Publications Committee, the scientific committee of the Huygens Institute, the Board of Advisors of the Woordenboek der Nederlandse Taal (WNT), the Technological Council of the dbnl: Digitale Bibliotheek der Nederlandse Letteren, and the board of directors of the Vereniging voor Geschiedenis en Informatica (VGI - Association for History and Information Science). His research interests include text-encoding and markup of modern manuscript material, electronic scholarly editing, genetic editing, and the history of electronic editing and humanities computing. He is currently working on a doctorate in that field.

He is the editor and author of 7 scholarly editions, 7 collections of essays, a couple of monographs and reports, 55 articles and 60 conference papers, presentations, public lectures, guest lectures and talks on topics of scholarly editing and digital humanities.

Edward Vanhoutte is a passionate food writer, runs his own party catering service, and mainly reviews cookery books. He can be booked as a demonstration chef.

Full CV

Christian Wittern. With P5 firmly on its way, there are still some details that needs to be worked out, and I would like to continue to contribute to it as a member of the Council. P5 brings the TEI encoding scheme the ability to express any character in any document, no matter whether it had been previously encoded in Unicode or not. This removes a crucial stumbling block, that had hindered recognition and adoption of the encoding scheme in East-Asia. This should, together with ongoing efforts to translate core parts of the documentation to non-European languages, should provide new momentum to the long-term effort of rooting the methodology of the TEI in these parts of the world. With a renewed endorsement from the TEI members, I would like to continue my efforts in this direction.