TEI Elections 2008

Brett Barney

I am indeed interested in serving on the TEI Council, and if elected, willing to devote time and energy to the work of the Council. I have used the TEI in versions P3 through P5, beginning when I was hired in 2000 to work on an NEH-funded project to encode Walt Whitman's poetry manuscripts for the Walt Whitman Archive ( http://www.whitmanarchive.org ). Since 2001 I have worked full-time in the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities (or its predecessor, the Electronic Text Center) at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where I am currently a Research Assistant Professor. At the center I have participated in various TEI-based projects, including The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition Online ( http://lewisandclarkjournals.unl.edu/ ) and the Willa Cather Archive ( http://cather.unl.edu/ ). Most of my work, though, has been for the Whitman Archive, of which I am project manager and Senior Associate Editor. In collaboration with various others at UNL and at other institutions, I have been deeply involved in designing TEI-conformant markup (and expressing it in DTDs/schemas); writing and maintaining XSLT stylesheets; and developing encoding guidelines and documentation. I have experience writing EAD, METS, MODS, and RDF records, and I have taught TEI encoding in both formal and informal settings. Related pertinent interests include the use of TEI/XML data with other technologies and standards, specifically those for data management, geo-referencing, indexing, and the creation of digital libraries.

Syd Bauman (Council statement)

Syd came to the TEI through an interest in markup and markup languages. He became interested in SGML just prior to its publication in 1986, but he did not start engaging with a real markup language until late 1990. At that time, he began working at the Brown University Women Writers Project, where his first major task was to convert WWP legacy data to be in line with the newly published TEI P1. He still works at the WWP as a Senior Programmer/Analyst and ever since that first challenge, he's been thinking of ways to improve the TEI.

From 2001 to 2007 Syd served the TEI as the North American Editor, and is quite familiar with the workings of the Council. He believes the Council's current main thrust should be user-oriented: e.g., creating customized documentation, recommendations, and customizations for particular constituencies or user groups; improving the look-and-feel (and flexibility) of custom documentation; improving navigation within the Guidelines; creating or commissioning reference implementations; and streamlining the P5 build process.

Syd has an AB from Brown University in political science, and has worked as a systems programmer and a freelance computer typesetter. He frequently teaches TEI workshops and seminars, and consults for a variety of humanities computing projects. He has been an Emergency Medical Technician since 1983.

Syd Bauman (Board statement)

Syd has been working at the Brown University Women Writers Project since 1990. Syd's first major task at the WWP was to convert their legacy data to be in line with the newly published TEI P1, and he has been hooked on TEI ever since. From 2001 to 2007 Syd served the TEI as the North American Editor, and thus as an ex-officio member of the Board of Directors. On the board, he had significant input on TEI policies and procedures, served on committees, and helped organize and find outside financial support for many of the Members' Meetings.

One of Syd's goals is to make it easier for people to use the TEI. Since this requires resources, he would like to help increase the TEI's membership and find sponsorships and other sources of funding. He is also keen to work on the TEI's written policies, procedures, and practices to help ensure the Consortium's ‘institutional memory’.

Syd has an AB from Brown University in political science, and has worked as a systems programmer and a freelance computer typesetter. He frequently teaches TEI workshops and seminars, and consults for a variety of humanities computing projects. He has been an Emergency Medical Technician since 1983.

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 8 years has been on research projects in philology, electronic editions and history, where the encoding of text in TEI has played a major part. Among these project are Henrik Ibsens writings, Wittgenstein archive and the Menota project. From 2000-2004 I was the director of the TEI Consortium, and I have been elected to the TEI Council the last two years.

My main interest in the TEI has been to use and customize the guidelines for various material and use. 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 .

Lou Burnard

I am Assistant Director at Oxford University Computing Services, where I have worked in the application of IT to literary and linguistic research since the seventies. I have been a key player in numerous initiatives and projects, including the Oxford Text Archive, the UK's Arts and Humanities Data Service, the British National Corpus, and, of course, the Text Encoding Initiative. I was appointed European Editor of the original TEI project in 1989, was a prime mover in the establishment of the TEI Consortium in 2000, and have played a major role in the production of every edition of the Guidelines since P2. I have published widely, on "digital humanities", on database systems, and on corpus linguistics, as well as producing a range of teaching materials for numerous courses and workshops about the TEI, both introductory and advanced, in English and in French.

The TEI has evolved from being a rather esoteric research project to being a part of the everyday intellectual environment. If it is to avoid becoming stale dogma, it is of major importance that the TEI's inherent flexibility and adaptability be put to the test. In standing for the Board, therefore, I hope to promote greater openness to new ideas within the TEI community, a responsiveness to community needs and priorities, and a willingness to co-operate with other players in the digital arena. At the same time, I hope to consolidate and make more accessible the enormous amount of expertise already available within the TEI's core community of practitioners.

Hugh Cayless

Hugh Cayless is the Head of the Research and Development Group in the Carolina Digital Library and Archives at UNC Chapel Hill. He holds a Ph.D. in Classics and a Master of Science in Information Science from UNC.

I am honored to be considered for the Council of the TEI Consortium. My involvement with TEI goes back to 1999, when I worked as a student with Documenting the American South. At the moment my work focuses on integrating TEI with METS and MODS in an XML database, and processing it with XQuery and XSLT for the Colonial and State Records of North Carolina project ( http://docsouth.unc.edu/csr ). I am also a leader of the EpiDoc initiative ( http://epidoc.sourceforge.net ), which produces a set of customized guidelines for marking up ancient inscriptions using TEI. As an adjunct to my work on EpiDoc, I am a consultant for the Duke Databank of Documentary Papyri, which has been migrating its corpora from TEI SGML to EpiDoc as part of a Mellon-funded initiative. I teach XML (with a large TEI component) in the School of Information and Library Science at UNC.

I am eager to help the TEI continue to refine its technical capabilities and also to expand its reach. I am interested in ways of integrating TEI with other XML standards, particularly those related to metadata. I am also very interested in problems related to standardizing TEI documents across collections, in order to enable data mining applications. I am a participant in the Manuscripts and Text & Graphics SIGs, and I am doing research that I will present at the TEIMM on linking TEI text and manuscript images using SVG.

Arianna Ciula

After having run a term on the TEI council, I am delighted to be considered for a second term. My involvement and participation in the TEI community continues to be intense, since it affects the projects I work on, my research and teaching. I would keep promoting TEI activities in my research environment and teaching framework. I will continue to be active and attentive within the European research and teaching context, so as to make TEI more visible and more used. With this respect, I have organised TEI workshops in different European countries, introduced a course on text encoding within a recently funded Italian MA, and received funds for a joint application to organise a workshop for UK PhD students on the use of tei for editing and cataloguing medieval manuscripts.

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 four years. Involved in around twenty projects which use TEI more or less extensivel, she teaches a postgraduate course on Material Culture (of the book: Digital Models) in the MA of Digital Humanities and, in general, has been lecturing within undergraduates and postgraduate programmes on humanities computing and primary sources at other European Universities. She is a member of various international digital communities e.g. ALLC and ACH associations, Digital Medievalist (elected member of the executive board and editorial committee), Digital Classicist and manages the current website of ALLC. She is involved in the international 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). She was member of the local committee of CLiP 2006 hosted by King's College London last June and she is part of the organising committee for the next TEI Members' Meeting to be hosted by King's College London in November 2008.

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 on image-processing, she is interested in the connection between image-based research and textual technologies.

James Cummings

James Cummings is a Senior Project Officer for the Research Technologies Service (RTS) at the University of Oxford. This groups together a number of projects in the Oxford University Computing Services, such as the Oxford Text Archive (for which James has worked for the previous few years), the British National Corpus and Oxford's support for the TEI. James has been elected to the TEI Council twice previously and has worked hard to assist in the 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 a variety of 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), including a workshop on Getting to Know P5 at last year's Members' Meeting. He recently helped teach a more in-depth summer school on TEI. 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. In order to encourage more community interaction and openness, James was responsible for convincing the council that the tei-council archives should be publicly available, and as such you are able to see some of his contributions for 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008 by browsing the archives by author.

James has been tireless in promoting the TEI through advice/consultations given, courses taught, answering queries on TEI-L, and papers presented in the course of his job. He has lately started a blog of answers given to TEI questions asked of him privately. More recently some of his time has been seconded to a number of TEI-related projects including the ENRICH project which is aggregating medieval manuscript metadata across Europe for which James is writing conversion software from MASTER records to TEI P5 msDesc. In addition he is also working for the Godwin Project which is creating a deeply-encoded electronic edition of William Godwin's extensive diaries. 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 has been elected multiple times to 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 for OUCS, 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, who strongly believes people should only run for council if they are prepared to commit to a significant amount of work, wishes to continue to serve on the TEI council to assist it in creating a better infrastructure to support its increasing work of outreach and education.

Matthew Driscoll

I am a lecturer in Old Norse philology at Copenhagen University and, since 2004, curator of the Arnamagnæan manuscript collection. I hold degrees from the University of Stirling (BA (Hons.) 1979), Háskóli Íslands (Cand.mag. 1988) and Oxford University (D.Phil. 1994). My research interests include manuscript and textual studies, particularly in the area of Old and Early-Modern Icelandic. I have also taken part in a number of projects to do with the digitisation and text-encoding of medieval and early-modern manuscripts and have a long-standing involvement in the work of the TEI. I served on the TEI Council for three terms, from 2001 to 2007, during which time I chaired the Manuscript description task force, chartered in February 2003, and Personography workgroup, chartered in January 2006. The work of both of these is now completed and has been incorporated into P5. I have also conducted numerous workshops and training sessions in the transcription and description of primary sources using TEI conformant XML, principally in Central and Eastern Europe. It is my belief that as a member of the Board I will best be able to continue my involvement in and support of the work of the TEI.

Amanda Gailey

I am an assistant professor of English at the University of Georgia, where I teach literature and humanities computing. I've been using TEI for about 7 years, first on the Walt Whitman Archive, where I was senior assistant editor, then as project manager of the Spenser Archive, and now as co-editor of Race and Children's Literature of the Gilded Age. I currently serve as co-chair of the Manuscript SIG, am secretary/treasurer of Digital Americanists, and am co-chair of the Americanist editorial board of NINES. I also make TEI the foundation of my humanities computing courses. My ongoing research work, which focuses on editorial theory, makes heavy use of TEI.

I would consider it a real privilege to serve the TEI community as a member of the TEI Council. I am a TEI advocate as well as a user, and I would welcome the opportunity to help the TEI thrive.

Kevin Hawkins

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 have convened the SIG on Tools and am currently doing work for the SIG on Libraries.

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. Website: http://www.ultraslavonic.info/

Laura Mandell

I am Director of Digital Humanities at Miami of Ohio, Associate Director of NINES ( http://www.nines.org ), Associate Director of 18thConnect ( http://unixgen.muohio.edu/~poetess/NINES/18thConnect.html ), and general editor of the Poetess Archive ( http://unixgen.muohio.edu/~poetess ). For the Poetess Archive, I learned TEI P4 and XSLT. I am working with Carl Stahmer of Romantic Circles (http://www.rc.umd.edu) to TEI-encode legacy documents and create a workflow for TEI-encoding all incoming documents. In learning P4 and XSLT, I have attended an advanced TEI workshop at Berkeley and have worked extensively with the stylesheets published by Sebastian Rahz on sourceforge. Along with Robert Markley, I am currently working with ICHASS and I-cubed at Illinois to aggregate and stimulate the creation of software and OCR programs that will, we hope, return minimally TEI-encoded texts -- the first pass in encoding documents. I am also interested in using Java Processing as a visualization tool, and in thinking about how it might rely upon TEI-encoded texts.

Though relatively new to the discipline of TEI encoding, I feel that I have a lot to offer the TEI Board in several ways. First, I am running a NINES Summer Workshop this year and will help run an 18thConnect Summer Workshop at Illinois next summer. I participate in many meetings, conferences, and workshops where I can be an advocate for TEI: this month alone, I am attending THATCamp at George Mason and DH2008 in Finland; next month, I'll be attending a NINES Steering Committee meeting, a Bamboo Project workshop, and my own NINES Summer Workshop. I do perform the role of outreach to Humanities scholars in the early stages of creating archival projects, and I can help strategize about how TEI might become more user-friendly and better known. As myself newly acquainted with TEI (in the last five years or so), I may be able to better understand and represent the needs and anxieties of scholars coming to TEI for the first time. When first learning to encode in P4, I made web pages about how to create TEI documents in oXygen, and I would now like to make some introductory videos about TEI P5 and XSLT along the lines of Dan Chudnov's "learn2code" video series. Second, as a member of the MLA IT Planning Committee for the next two years, I could liaise with TEI. Third, I am using TEI-encoded documents as the fundamental feed for software applications that involve visualizations made in Java Processing. Since Processing has become usable in javascript and so executable on the web, many scholars will be interested in using it in their archives. Showing how TEI meets the needs we have for visualizing textual data better than any other kind of xml-encoded text and how it can be integrated with Processing will be one way of making the decision to code in TEI a foregone conclusion -- and I would like to be involved in that effort.

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 intrigued by the various electronic projects focused on bringing usually hard-to-view manuscript materials to a broader audience, particularly 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. Beginning in January 2003 I was the Program Coordinator at the Collaboratory for Research in Computing for Humanities at the University of Kentucky and since 2007 I also served as lead of the Computational Humanities group at the University of Kentucky's Center for Visualization and Virtual Environment. As of October 1, 2008, I am the Metadata Manager at the Digital Humanities Observatory at the Royal Irish Academy, Ireland.

My main interest is with image-based encoding, that is, ways to both increase the physical description of text-bearing objects that is available in the TEI and to create links between text encoding and digital images. In this vein while serving on the TEI Council in 2006-2007 I contributed to the Facsimile markup introduced in TEI P5. I have worked on several image-based editing projects including the Electronic Boethius (dir. Kevin Kiernan), the Electronic Aelfric (dir. Aaron Kleist) and the Pembroke 25 Project (dir. Paul Szarmach). I have also provided metadata development support for the Homer Multitext Project (dir. Casey Due and Mary Ebbott) and text encoding support for several projects directed by faculty at the University of Kentucky. I have taught workshops on TEI and image-based editing and regularly train faculty and students in text encoding practices.

I am currently a co-convenor of the TEI "Texts and Graphics" SIG and am also active in the "Manuscripts" and "Music in TEI" SIGs. I serve on the executive board of the Digital Medievalist and am also the executive secretary of the Association for Computers and the Humanities and the chair of the Medieval Academy of America's Committee on Electronic Resources.

In addition to image-based encoding I'm also interested in how to use the TEI for paleographical description and approaches for encoding medieval music notation. I believe strongly in the principles of open access and in the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration.

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

Sebastian Rahtz

Sebastian Rahtz is Information Manager for Oxford University Computing Services, where he oversees a small team of web professionals delivering web sites and services. Prior to this, he has worked as an archaeologist, a computer science lecturer, and in scientific publishing. During the 1980s and 1990s he was a major figure in the community around the TeX typesetting system.

Since the current TEI Consortium was formed, Sebastian has represented the University of Oxford on the Board of Directors, and was the Directors' nominee to the Technical Council until the end of 2007. He has taken a very large part in much of the work of the Consortium since 2000, and is part of the current TEI editorial support team at Oxford. Some of his achievements are:

• lead architect for the revised ODD system
• author of most of the ODD-processing software
• author of the biggest collection of XSL stylesheets for the TEI
• release and package manager for TEI P5 releases
• manager of the TEI internationalisation activity

He is currently working on a project for ISO to represent their standards in TEI XML.

If elected to the Council, Sebastian will continue to work on the technical architecture of the TEI, and strive to make it suitable for more and more applications. His main personal interest is in using the TEI for authoring new documents.

Sebastian is an outspoken open source advocate.

Malte Rehbein

I am Marie Curie Research Fellow at the National University of Ireland, Galway and member of TEXTE (Transfer of Expertise in Technologies of Editing, http://www.mooreinstitute.ie/projects.php?project=15 ). As such, I am actively involved in a variety of projects using TEI P5 to create scholarly editions of different types of texts. I also am a member of the Institut für Dokumentologie und Editorik ( http://www.i-d-e.de/ ).

My main interest currently is the digital edition of "kundige bok", a collection of late medieval legal texts and the dynamic linkage between the textual expression and the "external", contextual or semantic knowledge about the text. The work was recently introduced at the DH2008 in Oulu and in a forthcoming paper in the TEI special issue of L&LC.

I am a graduate in both history and mathematics from the University of Göttingen. I had my first working experience in the Digital Humanitites and the TEI as student researcher at Max-Planck-Insitute for History in Göttingen (1996-99). Beside my involvement in the Duderstadt digitization project, I was working on models and prototypes for dynamic editions using different markup strategies (SGML, TEI P3, MECS). After graduating, I worked for a while for several business companies to gain experience in software development, project management and consulting. A brief CV of mine is online: http://denkstaette.de/cv_en.html .

I am co-chairing the Manuscripts TEI Special Interest Group, organised the Galway TEI symposium ( http://mooreinstitute.ie/news.php?newsItem=8 ) in April and hosted the annual meeting of the TEI Council. In the near future, I would like to focus my TEI related work on processing and dynamic usage of TEI based editorial data, the next step beyond its static representation on the web.

John A. Walsh

I am an Assistant Professor of Library and Information Science and Adjunct Assistant Professor of English at Indiana University. Prior to joining the faculty at the School of Library and Information Science at Indiana University, I spent ten years working as a developer, manager, and librarian in the electronic text center and Digital Library Program at Indiana. My academic background is in English literature, particularly nineteenth-century British poetry. I have been involved with TEI since the 1980s and the days of SGML. I have served on the TEI Council for the past four years and participated in the final development and release of P5, contributing to sections on a new, more formalized mechanism for describing the rendition of source documents and the new <relatedItem> element in TEI bibliographic structures. My interests in TEI are wide ranging and include digital scholarly editions; description of graphics-intensive documents, such as comic books, art books, illustrated children's books and illuminated manuscripts; and the intersection of the TEI with digital library standards such as METS and MODS. With Dot Porter from the University of Kentucky, I am the co-convener of the recently revived "Text and Graphics" SIG.

While the release of P5 was a major accomplishment, much work remains to be done, including addressing community reaction to P5 itself. With my current research in digital humanities, and my teaching and professional experience in digital libraries, I believe I bring to the TEI an important perspective that seeks to address the sometimes conflicting, but more often complementary, needs of both communities. If re-elected to the Council, I will work hard to continue the great success and ongoing evolution of the TEI.

Christian Wittern

I am an Associate Professor at the Documentation and Information Center for Chinese Studies, Institute for Research in Humanities, Kyoto University. My relevant research interests are the digitization of premodern Chinese texts, mainly of Buddhist and Daoist canonical collections and methods for utilizing these texts for collaborative research. For the TEI, I sat on the Council for several years, many of them as Chair overseeing the development of P5 and organized a TEI Council meeting and outreach event "TEI Day in Kyoto 2006".

On the board, if elected, I would like to continue to work towards broadening the scope of TEI applications and users, especially in East Asia and exploring opportunities of collaboration and cooperation with research communities and special interest groups not currently using TEI.