TEI Host Activity Reports, Jan-Dec 2008
Contents
The following reports summarize activities during the period from January to October 2008 at each of the four host institutions: Brown, Nancy, Oxford, and Virginia.
Brown University
Staffing and institutional matters
- Julia Flanders (JF), Brown's host representative to the TEI board, approximately 5% time (contributed by Brown)
- Syd Bauman (SB), WWP Senior Programmer/Analyst, approximately 5% time (contributed by Brown)
- Patrick Yott, Director of the Center for Digital Initiatives, support and consultation as needed (contributed by Brown).
- Technical activities
- SB assisted the TEI in Libraries Special Interest Group in the ongoing development of the Guidelines for Best Practices for use of TEI in libraries, and during the early part of the year contributed to the TEI Council discussions. He also contributed to the TEI wiki, developing stylesheets to assist with conversion from P4 to P5.
- Management and organizational activities
- SB served on the organizational committee for the 2008 Members' Meeting, and also provided moderation of the TEI listservs, including TEI-L and the TEI SIG lists. JF served as Vice-Chair of the TEI Board from January through October 2008. During this period JF also worked on membership recruiting and wrote a successful grant proposal to fund a two-year advanced TEI seminar series.
- 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 conducted five TEI seminars in a two-year series funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities; this grant also funds TEI membership for participating institutions. They also presented a number of TEI training workshops supported in part by the WWP but not part of this series. These events are listed below. The WWP also developed a successful grant application to the NEH for an additional two-year program of advanced seminars in scholarly text encoding, which will begin in July 2009.
TEI Seminars and Workshops Sponsored by Brown University
Workshops in the WWP's NEH-funded series
- January 8-10, 2008: University of Buffalo
- April 30-May 2, 2008: University of Maryland
- June 16-17, 2008: University of Washington
- July 22-24, 2008: Miami University of Ohio
- October 10-12, 2008: Wheaton College
Other TEI workshops
- University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2 days, February 2008
- University of Victoria, Digital Humanities Summer Institute, 5 days, June 2008
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), INRIA
Many other persons who take part in various TEI activities in Nancy are mentioned below.
Regarding dissemination and training, our priority for 2008 was to improve networking of the french TEI users/experts, esp. by providing them supports to share experiments, questions, etc. We have also organized a workshop on teaching TEI in Nancy, that provided opportunity for some french TEI experts/users to meet.
Also, a particular effort has been dedicated to the translation and localisation of TEI P5.
A last priority was to continue working on tools for TEI, especially on 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
- Membership and subscription management: invoicing, sending reminders, registration of new members/subscribers, correspondence with members/subscribers, etc. (BG, PG, VL)
- Participating to conference calls with the TEI board, participating to the MM (BG,VL)
- Preparations for the members' meeting in London (VL)
- Writing the host report and the financial report (VL)
Scientific work on TEI content and TEI tools
- The Sourcencyme project is a large project, with plans for 3 years and financed by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche : the aim is a scientific and philosophical compilation of latin medieval encyclopediae. For this project, ATILF is encoding most of the 13rd century latin encyclopediae in TEI and developing annotation and editing tools for these corpora. The texts encoded in TEI will be made available with various metadata also in TEI.
- The ERC project consists in a TEI encoding of a critical edition of "La cité de Dieu" by Saint-Augustin, a medieval work of several thousands pages. Results should be both an electronic and a paper edition. TEI modules for manuscripts are used for this project (facsimile, etc.).
- Around 2 years of the newspaper "L'Est Républicain" have been encoded with TEI and made freely available on the CNRTL website.
- Speech corpora are progressively encoded in TEI P5.
- Improving Roma's consistency checker : BG supervised Ioan Bernevig during a 3 month internship to improve the coherence checker developped in 2007.
Scientific animation, training, promotional activities, writing grant applications
- With the help of Lou Burnard, organising a 3 day TEI workshop in Nancy to gather french TEI expert/users (BG, VL, PG, Catherine Morel, Claire François, William del-Mancino, Laurent Gobert). Goals were to share experience and to learn more about particular aspects of TEI P5.
- Organising work of the AFNOR group working on TEI translation (JLB). This group has monthly meetings in Paris and now works in close collaboration with Sebastian Rathz, continuing the work started in the TEI internationalization project (supported by the ALLC). The group focussed on the translation of the TEI element definition (elements gloss, desc, remarks ) and on the localisation of examples.
- 2 day tutorial on TEI to participants to the Bouvard and Pecuchet ANR project (BG in Lyon).
- Several ATILF members participated to the CATCOD 2008 workshop.
- Consultancy for the ANR project "Scientext" that plans to use TEI for encoding a corpus of scientific writings (VL)
- riting a grant application(CPER MSH) to finance an internship about improoving the coherence checker added to Roma in 2007 (BG)
Oxford University
- Lou Burnard (LB),
- Sebastian Rahtz (SR),
- James Cummings (JC), and
- Judy McAuliffe (JM)
The TEI is widely deployed at Oxford, as at other UK Universities, not least for authoring and managing aspects of the OUCS website. TEI research projects with which we have been working closely this past year include the Shakespeare Quartos project at the Bodleian Library, the Oxford Text Archive, the Lexicon of Greek Personal Names, the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature, the Clay Sanskrit Library Database, and the William Godwin Diary project. We have also provided consultancy for several other new projects, as further detailed below.
Editorial activities and P5 development
With P5 firmly established, editorial support has largely concentrated on servicing the work of the TEI Council and implementing its decisions. At its spring meeting in Ireland, the Council decided to use the Sourceforge bug and feature tracking system more systematically, and more or less all changes have been routed through there.
LB has provided the Council with regular digests of the status of feature requests and bug reports, and taken the lead in implementing decisions taken on them by the Council. Acting as release manager for TEI P5, SR oversaw three regular releases during 2008 (1.0.1 in January, 1.1.0 in June, and 1.2.0 in November).
Internationalization activities
SR has continue to act as leader on internationalization of the Guidelines. During 2008, the French translations of short descriptions were completed, and their team started on examples. The Chinese team also completed all their descriptions, and delivered the first set of examples. A new Korean translation team started work, and delivered the first tranche of work.
Software Development
The Roma program, and the XSLT stylesheets it uses to process ODD files, have undergone many revisions, as usual. The Roma web application is in increasing need of a major rewrite, as users' expectations increase, and it is difficult to meet demand. Ioan Bernevig from Nancy revised the Sanity Checker to make it faster and more helpful.
In April 2008, the Oxford team, in collaboration with a team from Brigham Young University successfully tendered for a project set up by the Central Secretariat of the International Standards Organisation (ISO). The object of the project is to define a TEI profile for authoring ISO standards, and to develop tools for conversion to and from word-processor formats. This has resulted in a conversion between TEI and the XML format used by Word 2007 which is significantly more robust and sophisticated than earlier attempts. Work is now underway to generalize this conversion, and release it to the general TEI community.
TEI-related research activities
SR worked with the Lexicon of Greek Personal Names on innovative geographic and interchange services from their TEI XML data.
- The Oxford Godwin project
- Digitisation of Holinshed's Chronicles (using EEBO-TCP texts, with conversion to TEI P5 at Oxford)
- Manuscript records in the Bodleian Library
- The ‘London Stage 1800-1900’ project
Since December 2007, Oxford has been a partner in ENRICH ( http://enrich.manuscriptorium.com/ ), an EU project funded under eContent+ programme. The main aim of the project is to create seamless access to distributed information about manuscripts and rare old printed books in Europe on the Manuscriptorium platform. LB, SR and JC have worked extensively on conversion from the older MASTER schema to TEI P5, on a tightly-controlled profile of TEI manuscript description components, and on developing documentation and training for ENRICH. This work will continue during 2009.
JC represents Oxford and the TEI in the InterEdition ( http://www.interedition.eu/ ) project, working in the area of interoperability in methodologies between edition producers.
Teaching and promotional activities
Two and three day courses on the TEI were taught by one or more of LB, SR and JC at the University of Maryland (October 2007), Poznan (December 2007), Taiwan (March 2008), Belgrade (June 2008), Oxford (July 2008), Kazan (August 2008), Tours (September 2008). SR also taught a two-day XSL workshop to complement the TEI XML course in July 2008.
LB contributed a well-received presentation about the TEI to a one-day workshop on preservation of language resources at the LREC conference in May, and gave an invited lecture on the TEI at a workshop in Nice in April. Together with Werner Wegstein and Laurent Romary, he organized a successful half-day TEI seminar at the Dublin Core international conference in Berlin in September. In October, he contributed to the development of the first ‘TEI-experts seminar’, a three day TEI training event held in Nancy. Other conference presentations were given in Germany, Ireland, the USA, and Finland.
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).
- 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
- David Sewell (DS), UVa Press Electronic Imprint
CR served as Virginia's respresentative to the Board, and as TEI Secretary. DP served as Honorary Treasurer. DS serves on the TEI Council and acts as de facto Secretary.
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.
- Management of the budget
- Technical and web support
- Training, development, and consulting
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
- CR continued to serve as TEI webmaster, and to update the website as needed. Recent improvements include the implementation of systems for online voting and online conference paper submission.
- SB set up an instance of Roma on U.Va.'s server, to replace the version on the Oxford servers. Dot Akinola assisted with this process.
- SB upgraded the TEI wiki software.
- SB continued to administer the website server.
- DS took over maintenance of the Council and Board mailing lists.
Training, development, and consulting
- The U.Va. Library's Scholars' Lab held a 2-day intensive seminar for humanities faculty and Library staff new to TEI, led by Laura Mandell, associate director of NINES, and Scholars' Lab staff.
- DS gave a workshop on digital editions and TEI at “Camp Edit” in June 2008, the annual Institute for the Editing of Historical Documents at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, sponsored by the Wisconsin Historical Society, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC).
- PR participated in the newly formed Music SIG and continued his development of the Music Encoding Initiative to increase its compatibility with TEI.
- The Scholars' Lab has worked on several faculty-driven TEI projects this year, including Alison Booth's Collective Biographies of Women, Ben Ray's Salem Witchcraft Trials, and Maruta Ray's Latvian Dainas project.
- GM has continued to assess the implications of P5 for the Library's production workflows, custom P4 DTD, and existing instance documents. He has manually translated the bulk of our P4 DTD customizations to a P5 ODD schema, and developed an XSLT stylesheet (based in part on code available from the TEI community) to convert P4 instance documents which adhere to our custom P4 DTD to P5 markup.