TEI Elections 2007

TEI Board

TEI Council

Candidates' Statements

Gabriel Bodard: Gabriel Bodard has been working in Digital Humanities, and with XML and XSLT in particular, for several years. His doctorate is in Classics, and he was employed for a year at the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae in California, and has worked on several text markup projects at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King's College London, most recently the Inscriptions of Aphrodisias ( http://insaph.kcl.ac.uk/ ). He is also founder and co-editor of the Digital Classicist, and has run seminars and conferences in the field. He is also on the steering committee of the Epigraphy Society, a technical observer on the Pleiades Project, and a co-organiser of the Open Source Critical Editions seminar. He runs regular XML training workshops for classical scholars, and teaches undergraduate and postgraduate classes in electronic publication, text encoding, and digitisation.

He is one of the architects of the EpiDoc Project (TEI XML for Greek and Roman epigraphic documents; http://epidoc.sf.net/ ), a regular participant in international workshops, co-author of the EpiDoc Guidelines and a contributor to the Webapp and Crosswalker projects. He is an active participant on the TEI-L discussion list, and has been involved in TEI Guidelines discussion panels on names, persons, and places. He is very keen to help the TEI continue to be a functional and comprehensive standard for literary and liguistic encoding.

Peter Boot: The TEI has played an important role in my professional life. I look forward to working with the TEI community to extend the TEI's capabilities in capturing ancient and modern texts, for instance in the areas of annotation and web-based writing.

Short bio: Peter Boot ( http://www.xs4all.nl/~pboot , in Dutch) is a humanities computing consultant at the Huygens Institute in The Hague, The Netherlands. He has worked on among other things a manuscript digitization project and the preparation of an archive of 17th century scholarly correspondence. His main interest is in digital annotation, and he lead the EDITOR project that created an annotation tool for TEI-encoded material.

Before joining the Huygens Institute, Boot helped create the Emblem Project Utrecht ( http://emblems.let.uu.nl/ ). The Emblem Project Utrecht created digital editions (using TEI) of 25 books of Dutch love emblems. He continues to work with the project as a consultant. In the coming years this will involve working on tools that facilitate the comparison and annotation of parallel (because of translation or otherwise) texts encoded in TEI. Boot has an M.Sc. degree in mathematics and an M.A. degree in Dutch literature. He is finishing a Ph.D. thesis on digital annotation of emblem books.

Dino Buzzetti is an historian of philosophy and teaches medieval philosophy at the University of Bologna. He has published essays on medieval logic and metaphysics and the history of logic in general. He has also taught document representation and processing in the Faculty of Preservation of the Cultural Heritage in Ravenna and gives humanities computing courses to philosophy students. He has published articles on digital editions of manuscript texts and digital text representation and is among the contributors to the TEI/MLA volume on Electronic Textual Editing. He is a member of the Executive Committee of the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing.

One of the major concerns of humanities computing textual scholars in recent years has been how to make use of the considerable amount of encoded text produced according to the TEI guidelines and best practices, for there seems to be a wide gap between the production of TEI conforming encoded texts and their reuse in processing applications. And it is processing, as opposed to mere representation, that can yield relevant scholarly results. Data mining from large corpora of encoded text is an attempt to fill this gap. But the problem is far from having been solved and there seems to be a need for further research on the relationship between syntax and semantics in markup implementation. In my opinion, promoting research in this domain should become a strategic concern of the TEI consortium, to boost the attainment of important results in digital textual scholarship and to favour its full acceptance in the wider scholarly community.

Hugh Cayless heads the Research and Development Group at the Carolina Digital Library. He has a Ph.D. in Classics and an M.S. in Information Science, both from UNC Chapel Hill. Hugh has worked with TEI and other XML technologies for almost a decade and is one of the founders of EpiDoc ( http://epidoc.sourceforge.net ), a set of guidelines and tools for marking up ancient inscriptions using TEI. He has been involved in several Digital Humanities projects, including the migration of the "Documenting the American South" collections ( http://docsouth.unc.edu/ ) from TEI SGML to XML, the Stoa ( http://www.stoa.org ), the Digital Classicist ( http://digitalclassicist.org ) and others.

Before returning to UNC to assume his present position, Hugh worked in the commercial digital and print-on-demand publishing sector as a programmer and software developer. In addition to his professional and personal TEI work, he teaches the XML class for the School of Information and Library Science at UNC, which includes a large TEI component.

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 first elected to the TEI Council at Baltimore, 2004, and was re-elected at Victoria in 2006. Although he is now running for the TEI Board, he will continue to serve on the TEI Council for the remainder of his term. He has worked hard on the Council 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, wrote an initial draft of the new section on TEI Conformance, 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, 2006 and 2007 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. More recently some of his time has been seconded to a number of TEI-related projects. 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 one of his interests. In addition to a number of TEI SIGs, he is on the executive board of the Digital Medievalist project (which encourages best practice in digital resources for medieval studies) where he serves as technical director. 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 will be continuing to serve on the TEI council to help complete the work on TEI P5, but would like to donate even more time to the TEI by serving on the TEI Board where he feels his technical background and significant TEI experience will help to shape the TEI of the future.

Kevin Hawkins ( http://www.ultraslavonic.info/ ): I am Electronic Publishing Librarian at the University of Michigan, where I have worked since early 2004 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. I would like to see more cooperation and coordination of efforts between the digital library and TEI communities.

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. While completing my MS in library and information science at the University of Illinois, I theorized about markup with Allen Renear, Dave Dubin, and later John Unsworth and worked on digital projects -- including TEI text encoding -- in the Slavic studies field with Miranda Remnek. In 2005 I completed a Fulbright grant in Moscow to study digital libraries and in 2006 taught a TEI workshop with Miranda Remnek in Izhevsk, Russia.

Daniel O’Donnell: I am an Associate Professor of English at the University of Lethbridge and the current Board Chair and CEO of the TEI. I am also founding director of the Digital Medievalist Project and chair of my department. I have been using the TEI since 1996.

As TEI Board Chair, I have taken an active part in coordinating the final push towards completion of P5 and the development of our new website revision (both due for completion by the 2007 Members meeting), and have helped oversee the expansion of the Member's Meeting programme to include conference-style sessions and lectures. Should I be reelected to the Board, I would like to encourage further development of the TEI along these lines.

My ultimate hope is that the TEI will become an intellectual home for researchers in the digitisation of texts and the use of XML in research contexts in addition to its current role in the development and maintenance of a widely used standard for scholarly encoding. In my years as a board member and ultimately Board Chair, I've been extremely impressed by the energy and focus of the volunteers who devote so much time to the maintenance and development of our guidelines and community. I think this is the future of the consortium and hope to have a role in ensuring that this community continues to flourish.

Elena Pierazzo is Research Associate at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London. She works as part of the XML Team and she is involved in many different research projects such as Hofmeister XIX ( http://hofmeister.rhul.ac.uk/ ), Austen Project (transcription and digital publication of autograph manuscripts), CRSBI (Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture in Britain and Ireland, http://www.crsbi.ac.uk ), LangScape ( http://www.langscape.org.uk/ ), and many others.

Her job mostly concerns projects design, XML analysis and development (DTD, Schemas, encoding models), XSLT programming, XML to print technologies, pre-processing, teaching (Digital Publication, both at BA and MA level) and training activities.

Elena graduated 1996 at the University of Venice and completed her PhD at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa in Italian Philology in 2001. In 2002 she was awarded by Harvard University (USA) with a one year fellowship at Villa I Tatti (Florence – Italy), the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. In 2000 she started working for the Italian Department at the University of Pisa. Here her teaching activities included Italian Linguistics and Text Encoding, while her research interests were focussed on scholarly digital and printed editions and digital humanities in general. She coordinated many research projects like Opere Lemmatizzate di Dante ( http://dante.di.unipi.it ), Epistolario di Giacomo Puccini ( http://www.epistolariopuccini.it ), BaDaLi (Banca Dati Lingua Giovanile http://dblg.humnet.unipi.it) and Opera Liber ( http://www.unibg.it/operaliber ). Since then she has been involved in TEI Special Interest Groups (Manuscripts) which she has recently started to chair.

Paul Schaffner: The greatest asset that I would bring to the Council is twelve years' practical experience in applying TEI-based markup to a mountain of very heterogeneous material. I run the e-text production shop at the University of Michigan's Digital Library Production Service. where I managed the "American Verse" project; the conversion of the Middle English Dictionary and its associated bibliography and corpus of Middle English primary sources; and many smaller projects ranging from Knight's American Mechanical Dictionary to a recent effort to extract bibliographical citations from UM faculty curricula vitae. I have spent most of the past seven 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 produced a significant corpus of (so far) more than 18,000 TEI-encoded books. Among them appears nearly every oddity of language, genre and format that early modern authors and printers could devise.

"Managing" TCP means daily engagement with issues of capture and markup (I am responsible for most of our dtds, their customization, and their documentation); with workflow and metadata management; and with training. I supervise directly a staff of about 16 markup reviewers distributed amongst four centers in four countries, and indirectly thousands of taggers and keyers employed by the four data conversion firms who do the initial markup, trying hopefully to keep them all more or less consistent. Most of my experience is with TEI P3/4 and radically reduced derivatives, in both SGML and XML. I am accustomed to soliciting advice and building a consensus when possible, but am also unhappily 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, transparency, flexibility, and pragmatism. 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 the internal documentation of the TCP projects at http://www.lib.umich.edu/tcp/docs/ .

Susan Schreibman: I am grateful for the opportunity to be considered for the Board of the TEI Consortium. I have been a user of the TEI Guidelines since 1996 (P3 SGML!) in The Thomas MacGreevy Archive. In 1999 I began to offer workshops in TEI, and have since offered some 20 workshops in Canada, Ireland, Sweden, and the United States. I have previously served on the TEI Council 2002-06), and am local host for the 2007 Members Meeting. I have been active in the Special Interest Groups and currently coordinate TEI Education.

I believe I could further serve the TEI community as a member of the Board through my professional interests in both the digital humanities and digital libraries communities. As the local host in the Washington DC area, I have created or strengthened existing links between major US funding agencies and not-for-profit institutions (Library of Congress, Council on Library Resources, etc) and the TEIL linkages that I would hope to develop and expand as a member of the Board. I would also be interested in exploring further opportunities for TEI Education both within and outside the TEI community.

Susan Schreibman is Assistant Dean and Head of Digital Collections and Research at the University of Maryland Libraries. Previously she was Assistant Director of Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities. She is co-editor of The Companion to Digital Humanities (with Ray Siemens and John Unsworth; Blackwell, 2004); is co-editing A Companion to Digital Literary Studies (with Ray Siemens; Blackwell forthcoming 2007); and is book series co-editor of Topics in the Digital Humanities (U Illinois P; with Ray Siemens). Her research interests include digital humanities, digital libraries, textual editing, and Irish poetic modernism.

David Sewell is Editorial and Technical Manager of the Electronic Imprint of the University of Virginia Press, whose Rotunda publications ( http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu ) are based on underlying TEI-compliant XML data: born-digital scholarship, digital editions, and adaptations of digitized print material. As such, he would bring to the Board the perspective of a traditional university press whose use of the TEI Guidelines is driven by practical concerns as well as commitment to digital best practices.

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 programming in Perl, XSLT, and XQuery; development of schemas using Relax NG; and customization of TEI via the ODD mechanism. 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.

Manfred Thaller, born 1950. PhD (Modern History) 1975, University of Graz, Austria. PostDoc Sociology, Institute for Advanced Studies, Vienna, 1978. 1978 - 1997 research fellow / senior research fellow at the Max-Planck-Institut for History, Göttingen. Research on a general methodology of historical computer science. Since 1995 also professor of «Historical computer Science» at the University of Bergen, Norway. Visiting prof. Jerusalem (1987), London (1993), Firenze (1993). 1997 - 2000 founding director of the «Humanities Information Technology Research Programme» and the attached research centre of the University of Bergen, Norway. 2000 onwards Prof. of «Historisch Kulturwissenschaftliche Informationsverarbeitung» (Humanities Computer Science) at the University at Cologne, Germany.

During the last ten years my research interest has mainly focused upon the creation of massive digital repositories. (Among them: Archives: "Duderstadt". Digitization of archival documents (1996 - 1999); Libraries: Medieval Codices: CEEC ( http://www.ceec.uni-koeln.de ), CESG ( http://www.cesg.unifr.ch ); Incunabula: vdIb ( http://inkunabeln.ub.uni-koeln.de/ ); Modern prints: MPER ( http://www.mpier.uni-frankfurt.de/dlib/ ); Art History: Prometheus ( http://www.prometheus-bildarchiv.de/ ; Long term preservation: http://www.planets-project.eu/ ). More recently my research is also focusing on the definition of re-usabel 3D content. I should point out that while both of the last two interests – long term preservation / reusable 3D content – may seem very un-TEI, they actually involve the design of markup languages.

More abstractly my relevant research interest is in the relationship between surface (“markup”) data structures and underlying data structures within abstract models.

My contribution to the TEI should consist in efforts to clarify the abstract data model underlying it.

Katherine L. Walter, Chair of Digital Initiatives & Special Collections in the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) Libraries, co-directs the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at UNL with Kenneth Price ( http://cdrh.unl.edu ). A joint initiative of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries and the UNL College of Arts & Sciences, the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities is advancing collaborative, interdisciplinary research, creating unique digital content, developing text analysis and visualization tools, and encouraging the use and refinement of international standards for metadata. Walter has received over $4 million in grant funding for many projects in the humanities and for research and demonstration projects relating to metadata. She is currently co-principal investigator of the IMLS-funded Interoperability of Metadata for Thematic Research Collections: A Model Based on the Walt Whitman Archive, and earlier co-directed an IMLS project to develop a unified guide to Whitman manuscripts physically dispersed at around thirty different institutions in the U.S. and Europe.