TEI Host Activity Reports, Jan-Dec 2007

Contents

The following reports summarize activities during the period from January to October 2007 at each of the four host institutions: Brown, Nancy, Oxford, and Virginia.

Brown University

Staffing and institutional matters

The TEI effort at Brown University, based in the Scholarly Technology Group, the Women Writers Project, and the Center for Digital Initiatives, comprises:
  • Julia Flanders (JF), Brown's host representative to the TEI board, approximately 5% time (contributed by Brown)
  • Syd Bauman (SB), North American Editor of the TEI Guidelines, 50% time (of which slightly more than half is contributed by Brown)
  • Patrick Yott, Director of the Center for Digital Initiatives, support and consultation as needed (contributed by Brown).
Major activities in this period have been:
  • Technical and editorial activities
  • Management and organizational activities
  • Training and promotional activities
These activities are described in more detail below.

Technical and editorial activities

During this period SB's effort was chiefly directed towards the revision of the TEI Guidelines in preparation for the release of P5. He reworked chapters, solicited chapter reviews and implemented chapter revisions, designed and implemented new elements, and did global checks for consistency and clarity. He also presented a TEI-related poster session at the DH2007 conference in Illinois.

Management and organizational activities

JF served as Vice-Chair of the TEI Board from January through October 2007. During this period JF worked on membership recruiting and continued to lead the TEI's grant assistance program, providing advice on three funding applications.

Training and promotional activities

SB and JF have continued to represent and promote the TEI in various public forums. In 2007-2008 the Women Writers Project has funding for a series of 12 TEI seminars for humanities scholars, and the first four of these took place during the period covered by this report. They also presented a number of TEI training workshops supported in part by the WWP but not part of this series.

Workshops in the WWP's NEH-funded series

  • March 15, 2007: Stanford Humanities Center, Stanford University
  • May 14-15, 2007: University of California, Los Angeles
  • September 19-21, 2007: Transliteracies Project, University of California, Santa Barbara
  • October 4-5, 2007: Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska - Lincoln (held in conjunction with the Nebraska Digital Workshop)

Other workshops

  • JF and SB presented TEI training workshops at the following:
    • University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, 2 days, February 2007
    • University of Victoria Humanities Summer Institute, 5 days, June 2007
    In each case the workshop included lecture, hands-on training, consultation, and TEI recruiting activities.

2007 Financial Report

Brown's 2007 host contribution was as follows:
  • US$5,000
  • Syd Bauman's time, unreimbursed, US$21,104

Brown was reimbursed $15,000.00 for Syd Bauman's time.

Nancy (ATILF, LORIA, INIST)

Staffing and institutional matters

The TEI-C effort at Nancy mainly comprised:

  • Jean-Luc Benoit (JLB), ATILF-CNRS
  • Bertrand Gaiffe (BG), ATILF-CNRS
  • Patricia Gautier, INIST-CNRS (PG)
  • Veronika Lux, INIST-CNRS (VL)
  • Etienne Petitjean (EP), ATILF-CNRS
  • Mathieu Quignard (MQ), LORIA-INRIA

Many other persons who take part in various TEI activities in Nancy are mentioned below.

Regarding dissemination and training, our priority for 2007 was to answer requests of different projects on TEI and to provide these projects with consultancy. We have also organized a workshop on TEI during a francophone conference on Electronic Documents (CIDE 207).

Another priority was to start working on tools for TEI, especially on tools to develop customized TEI schema. Logically, our choice is to try and contribute to improve Roma.

As for administration, Nancy is responsible for various activities among which the membership management.

Major activities in this period have been :

  • General management and administration
  • Scientific work on TEI content and TEI tools
  • Scientific animation, training, promotional activities, writing grant applications

These activities are described in more detail below.

General management and administration

  • Membership and subscription management: invoicing, sending reminders, registration of new members/subscribers, correspondence with members/subscribers, etc. (VL, PG)
  • Preparations for the members' meeting in Maryland in collaboration with the local organisers : reviewing posters, registering participants, sending a call for votes, preparing the ballot, etc.(VL)
  • Participating in conference calls with the TEI board, participating in the MM (VL, BG)
  • Writing the host report and the financial report (VL)

Scientific work on TEI content and TEI tools

  • Improving the Roma with a consistency checker; writing a poster and a paper about the work for the TEI MM (VL, BG with Ioan Bernevig (student) , Sebastian Rahtz and Lou Burnard
  • Improving TEI for the encoding of spoken language corpora: a proposal is being finalised (MQ, BG)
  • Using TEI as a pivot format between two programs used for the transcription of spoken language (Transcriber and Praat) (MQ, BG)
  • Developing a tool to visualise TEI transcription synchronised with audio in SMIL(MQ)
  • Encoding the Frantext corpus in TEI (EP)

Scientific animation, training, promotional activities, writing grant applications

  • Organizing a TEI workshop on "TEI for scientific publication" at the CIDE conference in Nancy (2-4 July 2007) (VL with Lou Burnard)
  • Consultancy for the ANR project "Scientext" that plans to use TEI for encoding a corpus of scientific writings (VL)
  • Supervising an intern working on improving Roma with a consistency checker (BG, VL with Sebastian Rahtz and Lou Burnard
  • Translating TEI technical documentation (taking part in a project funded by the ALLC) and coordinating an AFNOR working work on TEI translation to French (JLB)
  • Writing a grant application to finance (part of) further internships about improving Roma (CPER) (VL)
  • Writing a grant application to finance a network of French TEI experts, workshop, etc. (TGE Adonis) (VL, BG, EP, MQ)

Oxford University

The TEI Consortium at Oxford is located within the Research Technologies Services at Oxford University Computing Services. Staff involved directly in the TEI at Oxford include:
  • Lou Burnard (LB), European editor for the TEI
  • Sebastian Rahtz (SR), Oxford representative on the TEI Board
  • Judy McAuliffe, administrator
  • James Cummings (JC), member of TEI Council
In addition, there are several projects actively using the TEI at Oxford, including the Bodleian Library, the Oxford Text Archive, the Lexicon of Greek Personal Names, and the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature.
Oxford staff were involved in 2007 in:
  • Participation in TEI Workgroups
  • Editing the TEI Guidelines
  • Development of the infrastructure for TEI P5
  • TEI-related software development
  • Maintenance of the TEI wiki
  • Teaching TEI-related courses.

Resources and staffing

Oxford assigns approximately 30% of LB's time, and 10% 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. JC's work on the TEI takes place in the context of the Oxford Text Archive and the AHDS Literature, Languages and Linguistics centre at Oxford.

Administrative support is provided by Judy McAuliffe (approx 5% FTE over the year).

During the year we had two very welcome visitors working at Oxford
  • Ioan Bernevig from the University of Nancy, working on Roma for his undergraduate dissertation (see below)
  • Carmen Arronis Llopis from the University of Alicante, undertaking post-doctoral research involving the TEI

Editorial activities and P5 development

2007 has largely been spent on working towards the release of TEI P5 in November 2007.

LB re-edited great swathes of the Guidelines during the year.

SR worked with Daniel O'Donnell and Christian Wittern to project manage the endeavour, recording work with the trac software at Oxford.

All three Oxford staff continued to work on the handling of names and dates; LB and SR took part in a meeting about places in a bitterly cold Vilnius, and LB, SR and JC took part in the final meeting in London to complete the chapter.

JC (with Dot Porter) took on the task of designing the final format for the web version of the Guidelines, and assisted SR in implementing it.

SR acted as release manager for TEI P5, and oversaw 4 releases during 2007.

Internationalization activities

SR has continue to act as leader on internationalization of the Guidelines; translations of the element descriptions in Italian and Spanish were completed, to add to the Japanese completed in 2006. French, German and Chinese are nearing completion.

Carmen Arronis Llopis magnificently worked on the Spanish translations during her stay at Oxford, and we are most grateful to her.

SR's work on the W3C's Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) as invited expert resulted in the Recommendation being released by the W3C in May 2007.

Software Development

The Roma program, and the underlying XSLT stylesheets to process ODD files, have undergone many revisions, largely fixing bugs found by the increasing number of users of Roma.

During May we welcomed Ioan Bernevig from the Universiy of Nancy to Oxford, working on an extension to Roma which checked the semantic sanity of schemas. This project was jointly supervised by LB, SR and Veronika Lux, and proved enormously beneficial in understanding the TEI class system. The resulting module was added to Roma.

SR made further progress with OpenOffice to/from TEI conversion, started a new P4toP5 converter in XSL, and worked with Syncrosoft to provide a TEI CSS stylesheet for the new release of their editor.

Teaching and promotional activities

SR, JC and LB taught a 2 day course about Text Encoding and XML as part of Oxford University Computing Services regular learning programme in February 2007. They also spoke at at a workshop organized by Laurent Romary in Berlin before the TEI Council Meeting.

SR worked with The Lexicon of Greek Personal Names at Oxford to use TEI XML for archival storage, and intoduced TEI markup at Oxford to deliver data on institutional maps.

JC taught basic and advanced workshops at the International Congress on Medieval Studies (sponsored by Medieval Academy of America), and at the TEI members meeting. He consulted on many TEI projects, including:
  • The Oxford Godwin project
  • The BNC Metaphor project (VICI)
  • Digitisation of Holinshed's Chronicles
  • A project on ‘Concept and Form: The 'Cahiers pour l'analyse' and Contemporary French Thought’
  • a corpus of C18th sermons
  • The ‘The Production and Use of English Manuscripts 1060-1220’ project
LB taught:
  • August 2007: 1 day workshop at UQAM, Montreal (part of Atelier d'ete en Analyse de Textes assistee par Ordinateur
  • October 2007: a 2 day workshop on TEI at the University of Würzburg in October 2007.
and talked at the following conferences:
  • December 2006, a talk about TEI P5 at a Dagstuhl seminar on Historical Corpora.
  • July 2007: an invited plenary on TEI P5 at the Colloque International sur le Document Numerique at INIST, Nancy
  • March 2007: an introduction to TEI (in French) at a Workshop on Critical Editing organized by Anthony McKenna at ENS-LSH, Lyon
  • October 2007: invited talk on TEI P5 at Philtag6 Meeting, Wuerzburg

LB also served on the Jury examining Sylvain Loiseau's doctoral thesis at University of Paris XIII (part of the thesis involved development of a TEI-based architecture for handling concurrent markup structures); advised the Cantigas project at Oxford; and continued to advise Clay Sanskrit Library project on development of their online database.

University of Virginia

Staffing and institutional matters

Hosting duties at the University of Virginia are shared by the Library and the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH).

The following individuals have contributed effort to the Consortium in 2006:
  • Shayne Brandon (SB), IATH
  • Greg Murray (GM), Digital Library Production Services
  • Daniel Pitti (DP), IATH
  • Perry Roland (PR), University of Virginia Library
  • Christine Ruotolo (CR), University of Virginia Library
  • Cindy Maisannes (CM), University of Virginia Library

CR served as Virginia's respresentative to the Board, and as TEI Secretary. DP served as Honorary Treasurer.

The University of Virginia Consortium budget is $17,500. Of this amount, $12,500 is reimbursed for performing the duties of the Treasurer and $5000 is in-kind contribution.

Major activities in this period have been:
  • Management of the budget
  • Technical and web support
  • Training, development, and consulting
These activities are described in more detail below.

Management of the budget

In his role as Treasurer, DP continues to manage the TEI budget. This involves processing memberships and subscription payments, processing travel reimbursements, payment of invoices for work or services performed for the Consortium, preparing accounting statements and various related for filing of U.S. federal income taxes, monitoring and balancing the Consortium bank account, reconciling account with projected in current year, preparing projected budget for coming year, and various other related activities. All such activities and current and up to date.

Technical and web support

  • The bulk of Virginia's contribution this year was in bringing the new TEI website to completion. IATH purchased a new server to host the site, and SB set up the new machine and configured the OpenCMS repository on it. CR migrated content from the current site into OpenCMS repository, updating existing files and drafting new pages where needed. All existing content was migrated to P5 in the process.
  • CR worked with members of the Council to harmonize the design of the P5 guidelines with the design of the new website.
  • CR served as the TEI web keeper, adding and revising documents on the current TEI web site.
  • SB continued to administer the website server.
  • DP continued to monitor and administer the Council and Board mailing lists.

Training, development, and consulting

  • GM consulted on the development of TEI Tight, a restricted subset of the TEI that will be offered as a benefit to members.
  • PR continued to develop the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI), a music encoding scheme based on the TEI, and gave presentations about it at Digital Humanities 2007 and the 2007 TEI Members Meeting.
  • GM completed research project looking at TEI P5, including the overhauled system for customization, and made some projections regarding the impact that moving to P5 would have on Virginia's Digital Library. This work could result in an eventual model for large library migrations.
  • CM gave a talk at the Wisconsin Editing Institute on electronic editing using TEI.
  • GM and Ethan Gruber continued to migrate legacy materials, including 2500 items in TEI Lite and 8000 items in other vendor-specific DTDs, to U.Va.'s more restrictive "TEI Tight" DTD, as part of the effort to create an integrated central repository of TEI materials.
  • CM and CR served as external reviewers on the TEI-based, NEH-funded Cabeza de Vaca project at Western Michigan University.
Last recorded change to this page: 2007-10-25  •  For corrections or updates, contact web@tei-c.org