TEI MM 35: Elections 2006

TEI Board

TEI Council

Candidates' Statements

Hilde Bøe: Hilde Bøe is Assistant Editor of Henrik Ibsen's Writings ( http://www.ibsen.uio.no/his/hjemmeside/english.html ) at the University of Oslo, Norway. The project Henrik Ibsen's Writings uses the TEI Guidelines and DTDs in their work to publish both in print and electronically all of Ibsen's writings.

Bøe has been working with the project since 1998. She has been developing the dtd and the text encoding, as well as working with the documentation of the encoding. She is currently editing Ibsen's works and developing the dtd and the text encoding for this.

Hilde Bøe's work has made her focus her interest on the encoding of diplomatic transcriptions as well as the encoding of Ibsen's changes to his manuscripts. 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. As Assistant Editor 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 and DTDs, especially the sections concerning transcription of primary sources and encoding of scholarly work for electronic critical editions.

Donald Broady: Ever since my first encounter more than fifteen years ago with the new promises opened by the SGML standard and the TEI endeavour I have been interested in the development of tools and methods for the description and creation of digital resources in the humanities and the social sciences. At Uppsala University, Sweden, where I since 1997 hold a chair, I am the director of the research programme Digital Literature, a member of the TEI Consortium. I have also since 1990 held a part-time position as research fellow at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm. Starting in the early 1990's I have at KTH and later on at Uppsala University been directing various SGML (later on XML) applications, both software development and encoding projects such as digital editions of literary works and of historical sources and witnesses, i.a. digital editions of works by the Swedish author August Strindberg, mediaeval and 16th century land registries, and 17th century court protocols. To all these projects the collaboration within the TEI community has been indispensable. Besides the directly TEI-related projects my other main areas of research are sociology of education and sociology of culture. I am in different capacities engaged in both research and education, for example as a member of the Swedish Research Council's Committee on Educational Science, and as the director of the Swedish National History of Education Graduate School. One of my obsessions is that digital resources in the humanities and the social sciences should be encoded and managed in such a way that they lend themselves to multipurpose uses and meet the needs of both scholars and specialists on the one hand and teachers and students on the other. See http://www.skeptron.uu.se/broady/dl/

Tone Merete Bruvik: Tone Merete Bruvik is a specialist consultant at the research group for text technology at Aksis ( http://www.aksis.uib.no ), which is associated to the University of Bergen, Norway. My main work for the last 6 years has been on research projects in philology and history, where the encoding of text in TEI has played a major part. Among these project are Henrik Ibsens writings and the Menota project. From 2000-2004 I was the director of the TEI Consortium.

My main interest in the TEI has been to use and customize the guidelines for various material, and I have seen that it is important that the TEI is further developed to fit the needs of very different user communities. An area I think need more work is to make TEI accessible and understandable for newcomers and for those whose passion lays not in the technical details, but in the content of the material they work with. Home page at http://teksttek.aksis.uib.no/people/tone .

Linda Cantara: I am the Head of Digital Library Initiatives and Metadata Librarian at Kelvin Smith Library, Case Western Reserve University. I have eight years of SGML/XML markup experience, having worked on a diverse range of projects including image-based electronic editions of damaged Old English manuscripts and Old English glossaries, and an archive of Tibetan oral history interviews. In my current position, I am 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. My research interests include designing tools to integrate digital preservation metadata into TEI-encoded electronic editions, library digital publishing production management, and development of domain ontologies for searching and browsing digital libraries. I am a member of the TEI in Libraries SIG and the Ontologies SIG.

I have extensive experience training students and other librarians how to use TEI, have written tutorials and users' guides, and have designed customized versions of the TEI-DTD. With the release of P5, I anticipate the Council may need to develop comprehensive guidelines for using the new schemas, and I welcome the opportunity to contribute to such efforts. For more information about me and my work, please see http://library.case.edu/ksl/techserv/metadata/index.html .

Arianna Ciula: I am delighted to be considered for the TEI Council. My involvement and participation in the TEI community is relatively recent but intense, since it affects the projects I work at, my research and the teaching. I would promote TEI activities both in the research environment and in the teaching framework. The best way of contextualising the guidelines is showing them in actions. Projects which use TEI should make it explicit in their outcomes, producing accessible documentation. The Consortium could facilitate this and keep on acting as a community network. I would like to see the perspective and expertise of TEI disseminated within undergraduate and postgraduate programmes including the European framework.

Arianna Ciula is Research Associate at Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London. She has worked in the XML team of the department for two years. Involved in around twenty projects which use TEI more or less extensivel, She teaches a postgraduate course on Material Culture (Medieval manuscripts) in the MA of Digital Humanities and, in general, has been lecturing within undergraduates and postgraduate programmes on humanities computing and primary sources at the University of Siena-Arezzo. She is a member of various international digital communities e.g. ALLC and ACH associations, Digital Medievalist, Digital Classicist and manages the current website of ALLC. She is involved in the Italian national project DIGIMED (Filologia Digitale di Testi Mediolatini) and was member of the scientific committee of its first international seminar "Digital Philology and Medieval Texts" (2005), of which she is now co-editing the conference papers. She was member of the local committee of CLiP 2006 hosted by King's College London last June.

She graduated with BA (Hons) in Communication sciences (University of Siena, Italy) in 2001. She received an MA in Applied Computing in the Humanities from King's College London in 2004 and received a Ph.D. in Manuscript and Book Studies from the University of Siena in 2005.

Dr. Ciula's research interests focus, in general, on the debate and creation of digital resources related to primary sources. More specifically, as her papers and publications reveal, she is interested in the integration of medieval palaeography and humanities computing. Having worked on digitisation projects in the past and having experience onimage-processing, she is interested in the connection between image-based research and textual technologies.

James Cummings: James Cummings is the Research Officer of the Oxford Text Archive at the University of Oxford, which also hosts the U.K.'s Arts and Humanities Data Service: Literature, Languages, Linguistics. The Oxford Text Archive has been collecting electronic texts for the last 30 years and, having been founded by Lou Burnard, has always had a close relationship with the TEI. James organised a one-day conference on text archives and humanities computing to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary. James was elected to the TEI council at Baltimore, 2004, and has worked hard to assist in the continuing development of TEI P5. He has taken part in the Personography (Prosopography) Working Group, helped with the introduction of the 'choice' element, reviewed modules to assist in the creation and rationalisation of the P5 class system, participated fully in council activities, votes, and undertaken work on behalf of the council. He has taught a number of introductory and advanced workshops on TEI and related technologies (such as XSLT and XQuery). James administrates the TEI wiki and has contributed several customisatons and stylesheets to it. In addition he administrates and is regularly found in the TEI IRC Channel. James was responsible for convincing the council that the tei-council archives should be publicly available, and as such you can see some of his contributions for 2005 and 2006 by browsing the archives by author.

In his work at AHDS:LLL James advises funding applicants on best practice in text encoding, and James has been tireless in promoting the TEI through advice given, courses taught, answering queries on TEI-L, and papers presented in the course of his job. Many of the queries concerning TEI XML that the AHDS receives are redirected to James to answer. As such his participation in TEI activities is subsidised by his job, and he has never claimed any expenses back from the TEI. His PhD is in medieval studies and involved a significant amount of archival transcription, and the relationship of medieval manuscripts to their TEI encoded digital surrogates is an area which interests him. In addition to a number of TEI SIGs, he is on the executive and editorial boards of the Digital Medievalist project, which encourages best practice in digital resources for medieval studies. Previous to working a the OTA/AHDS:LLL, he worked for the CURSUS project, which transcribed medieval benedictine liturgical service-books into TEI XML. James was responsible for transcription of these Latin manuscripts, markup in TEI as well as the creation of a web publication framework for the results. James would like to continue to serve on the TEI council to help complete the work of bringing TEI P5 to a stable 1.0 release.

Milena Dobreva: I am the Head of the Department of Digitization of Scientific Heritage at the Institute of Mathematics and Informatics, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. I hold a PhD in Applied Mathematics and Informatics (1999). My research interests are in digital access to medieval manuscripts, text encoding, and education in information technology. In the last five years, I have contributed to the technology watch reports presenting new technologies' application in the cultural and scientific heritage sector of the DigiCULT project (www.digicult.info). I have also coordinated projects that improve the local competence in digitization of and access to cultural heritage. I received an Academic Award for young researchers for original achievements in the computer representation of medieval Slavonic texts (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, 1998); the Information Theories and Applications International Prize (2005); and a honorary medal for contribution to the Bulgarian connections with UNESCO (2006). I would be very pleased to contribute to the TEI Board, and especially to work on a more active presence of TEI in South and Eastern Europe and the New Independent States.

Kevin Hawkins: I first became involved in the TEI as an undergraduate working at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), where I helped plan TEI encoding of Emily Dickinson manuscripts and secondary sources. After finishing bachelor's degrees in Russian and linguistics, I earned an MS in library and information science at the University of Illinois, theorizing about markup with Allen Renear, Dave Dubin, and later John Unsworth and working on digital projects -- including TEI text encoding -- in the Slavic studies field with Miranda Remnek.

Since early 2003 I have worked as Electronic Publishing Librarian in the Scholarly Publishing Office (SPO) of the University of Michigan University Library, coordinating the publication of scholarly literature by converting content to a TEI-derived encoding scheme. In 2005 I did a Fulbright grant in Moscow, working on digital libraries, and recently taught a TEI workshop with Miranda Remnek in Izhevsk, Russia.

More boring information can be found at http://www.umich.edu/~kshawkin/ .

John Lavagnino: 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 a number of large TEI-based electronic-publishing projects, including the Women Writers Project, an edition of Thomas Middleton's works, and the Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts 1450-1700.

Espen S. Ore: I am a systems developer at the National Library of Norway. My former place of work was the Norwegian Computing Centre for the Humanities at the University of Bergen, Norway, and I also worked for half a year as temporary manager of the Bergen Electronic nachlass of Ludwig Wittgenstein. I have worked with TEI since the launch of P3 in 1994. I was responsible for the encoding set up by the ongoing project Henrik Ibsen's Writings (a new edition of all of Henrik Ibsen's work). I have also worked with TEI and Norse manuscripts and TEI/Epidoc on Greek papyrus texts. At the national Library I am responsible for a text archive originally developed at the University of Oslo. This material is encoded in proprietary SGML but is now being converted to TEI P5. The National Library is also starting a large scale digitication project which ideally aims at reading - and encoding - *all* of the Library's Norwegian collections.

Roberto Rosselli Del Turco: Roberto Rosselli Del Turco is an assistant professor of Germanic Philology at the Università di Torino, Italy. He is the director of the Digital Vercelli Book project ( http://islp.di.unipi.it/bifrost/vbd/index.html ) and also a founding member of the Digital Medievalist Community of Practice ( http://www.digitalmedievalist.org ). His research interests include manuscript and textual studies, with particular interest in texts belonging to the Old and Middle English tradition, and digital edition creation and presentation.

He is an active member of the TEI community since 1999 and participates in the Manuscripts SIG and in the Presentation SIG. His main markup interest is the encoding and analysis of medieval manuscripts and primary sources, but also the presentation and visualization of encoded texts to the selected audience. Having greatly benefited from the TEI Guidelines, if elected would be happy to actively contribute to the further development of TEI.

Torsten Schaßan: During the last two years I contributed to different parts of the TEI world: definition of elements, review of the Guidelines' manuscript description chapter, schema and stylesheet development, and i18n aspects. Now I would like to contribute to the further development of the Guidelines and connected technologies in general, and e.g. the PB workgroup in particular.

My educational background includes a M.A. in medieval and modern History, German literature and language and Philosophy, received at the University at Cologne, as well as teaching experience at the Computer Science for the Humanities (professorship) at the University at Cologne.

Anne Sherman: I am the Digital Projects Coordinator at the National Library of Sweden, and as such guilty of bringing TEI into our organisation. Although it is a new field for us, we are already expanding it. I was a student at the Rare Book School courses (L70 and L75) in Charlottesville in 2004, and also at the Swedish School of Library and Information Science course “Digitising the Cultural Heritage”, first as student, later as a lecturer. I would like TEI to be a substantial part of my present and future professional life and career, and I would be very happy to take part in the TEI council activities.

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/ .

Paul Spence: I am currently working at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London as Senior Analyst and Project Manager. In my role as Project Manager with responsibility for XML project development I have been involved in over 40 projects over the last two years, almost all of which use TEI in one way or another.

The markup challenges we have faced in these projects have been as broad as the materials themselves, which range from classical inscriptions or Anglo-Saxon charters to stained glass windows or musical bibliographies, but one of the aspects of TEI that interests me in particular is the potential to employ it in less conventional ways, such as or born digital materials.

In the pursuit of this interest, one of my main contributions at CCH has been the development, in collaboration with Paul Vetch, of a highly modular and extensible TEI-based publishing application called xMod that underpins most of the electronic publication of document-based data in CCH projects now.

I participated in the TEI Special Interest Group on Presentation tools, which explored common challenges facing those of us whose job it is to harvest the enormous potential of encoding texts via some kind of publishing and/or searching interface.

I have a BA in Spanish with Applied Computing from King's College London and speak six languages. I also teach in the CCH's undergraduate and postgraduate programmes, with a special focus on topics related to electronic publishing. I have spoken about TEI at various international workshops and conferences and have trained a large number of projects in its use.

I was Chair of the Computers, Literature and Philology (CLiP) conference hosted at King's College London in the summer of 2006 and am Vice-Chair of the Program Committee for Digital Humanities 2007.

If elected, I would like to contribute to making TEI a more widely used standard, and explore the potential for closer integration with other technologies.

John Walsh: John Walsh is an Assistant Professor of Library and Information Science at Indiana University where he conducts research and teaches in the areas of digital humanities and digital libraries. He has written articles and given dozens of presentations on digital humanities and TEI topics. Current TEI-based research projects include: The Swinburne Project http://www.swinburneproject.org/ , The Chymistry of Isaac Newton http://www.dlib.indiana.edu/collections/newton/ , and Comic Book Markup Language http://www.cbml.org/ .

As a member of the TEI Council John would work to further the development of TEI and for continued integration of new XML and other markup technologies into the TEI. John has particular interests in the transcription of manuscripts and other primary sources, in TEI representations of graphically rich texts (e.g., comics, graphic novels, art books, children's literature), and in the integration of metadata and semantic web technologies with the TEI. http://www.slis.indiana.edu/faculty/jawalsh/ .

Vika Zafrin: I am a PhD candidate in Humanities Computing at Brown University. In 2004-6, I was Project Director of the Virtual Humanities Lab ( http://golf.services.brown.edu/projects/VHL/ ), a two-year project co-sponsored by Brown and the National Endowment for the Humanities. While working on VHL, I supervised and later helped regularize the semantic encoding of about 900 pages of text, and assisted in converting idiosyncratic encoding (tagset created by the encoders themselves) into a TEI-compatible tagset. In 1998-2002 I also worked as encoder, proofreader and webmaster on the Decameron Web ( http://www.brown.edu/decameron/ ). My research interests include intercultural transmission, collaboration in the humanities, and the semantic encoding process as a research tool. I would be pleased to offer time and brainpower to TEI's further development.