TEI Elections 2009

Brett Barney

I am a Research Assistant Professor at the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Senior Associate Editor of the Walt Whitman Archive. TEI encoding has been a central, nearly daily facet of my work since 2000, when I first became involved in the development and implementation of a TEI-conformant markup scheme for the Walt Whitman Archive. In my work at the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities (or its predecessor, the Electronic Text Center) I have participated in various other TEI-based projects, including The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition Online and the Willa Cather Archive. In collaboration with others at UNL, University of Virginia, Duke University, University of Iowa and other institutions, I have been deeply involved in designing TEI DTDs/schemas; writing and maintaining XSLT stylesheets; and developing encoding guidelines and documentation. I have experience with several related XML languages (e.g., EAD, METS, MODS, RDF), 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. My recent experiences with the "Genetic Editions in a Digital Framework" group has been stimulating, and I welcome the opportunity to contribute to the future development of the TEI.

Gabriel Bodard

Gabriel Bodard has been working in Digital Humanities, and with XML and XSLT in particular, since 2001. 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, including the recently published Inscriptions of Aphrodisias, and the ongoing Inscriptions of Roman Tripolitania and Inscriptions of Roman Cyrenaica. He is also founder and co-editor of the Digital Classicist, and has run seminars and conferences and edited collection of essays in this area. He is also on the steering committee of the British Epigraphy Society and a technical observer on the Pleiades Project. 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 and papyrological documents), a regular participant in international workshops, co-author of the EpiDoc Guidelines and Stylesheets, and a consultant on the Integrating Digital Papyrology project, which is building a tagless authoring and editorial workflow environment for a corpus of some tens of thousands of TEI-encoded Greek papyri. He recently led the effort to convert the EpiDoc standards to TEI P5 compliance and built the EpiDoc ODD.

He is an active participant on the TEI council and TEI-L discussion lists, and is keen to help the TEI continue to be a functional and comprehensive standard for literary and linguistic encoding.

Hugh Cayless

Hugh Cayless is a member of the Digital Library Technology Services group at New York University, with responsibility for the Papyrological Navigator. He has been working with TEI for the last 10 years, as one of the founders of the EpiDoc project and on initiatives like DocSouth and the Papyrological Navigator.

Hugh has a Ph.D. in Classics and a Master's degree in Information Science and is an adjunct faculty member of the School of Information and Library Science at UNC Chapel Hill, where he teaches XML. His research interests include encoding ancient texts and linking text, annotation, and image. in 2009 he received an NEH Startup Grant to develop a system for linking manuscript page images to transcriptions and notes using SVG tracings of the text in the page image.

I believe the Council would profit from my experience as both a software engineer and a markup expert. I have a good deal of background in system design, project management, and highly technical issues around markup creation and manipulation.

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.

Markus Flatcher

I am the Project Editor of the Electronic Imprint at the University of Virginia Press (http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu), where we publish TEI-based editions of the papers of the Founding Fathers of the U.S. as well as major nineteenth-century writers, working both with XML conversions of large-scale letterpress editions and born-digital material. I am also one of the editors of the Collected Works of Ferdinand Ebner (1882–1931), a research project funded by the Austrian Science Fund that publishes both print and TEI-based digital texts from the Austrian philosopher of language's 20K MS page estate .

As the UVa Press' project editor for the Electronic Imprint, I engage in tasks and responsibilities typical of a technical editor of large digital scholarly editions today, ranging from TEI workflow and conversion issues to nitty-gritty encoding problems to ad-hoc tool programming in XSLT, XQuery and Perl, as well as in the integration of classic NLP and IR techniques (language identification, document similarity algorithms, etc.) with our existing XML work environment.

As one of the Ebner editors, I deal with the entire life cycle of a hybrid manuscript edition on a daily basis, ranging from archival research to the transcription of old German cursive and Gabelsberger shorthand to TEI markup, from annotation and editorial commentary to the transformation of TEI files for import to InDesign and subsequent layouting and typesetting. I initiated the project's switch from NextPage's Folio Views to TEI in 2002 (P4) and have since overseen its migration and conversion to P5, writing TEI documentation (ODD) and XSL transforms for HTML rendering while regularly training staff on P5-based text encoding. I have also implemented a solution for long-term archiving of scanned material and marked-up text involving an SVN repository and automated backups using a dislocated server.

With M.A.s in English (Historical Linguistics) and Philosophy (Philsophy of Science) from the U of Innsbruck (2003), as well as additional training in archival science, programming, computational linguistics, and formal methods more generally, I have developed an interest in a wide range of topics that are relevant to producing real-life scholarly editions, ranging from tools for TEI encoding and processing to semi-automated tagging, text mining and ontologies.

I would be happy to contribute to the respective TEI SIGs. Also, being a native speaker of German with several years of experience in translating, I would be glad to become active in any further TEI internationalization efforts.

Kevin Hawkins

Kevin Hawkins is electronic publishing librarian at the University of Michigan and will be a visiting researcher at the Digital Humanities Observatory in Dublin. I am co-convenor of the SIG on Libraries and was instrumental both in the revision of *TEI Text Encoding in Libraries: Guidelines for Best Encoding Practices* and in gathering and providing feedback on the draft of TEI Tite. While working on both of these projects, I suggested a number of clarifications to P5. I have served on the program committee for two consecutive members' meetings, the second as local organizer. I also maintain "A Bibliography of Publications related to the Text Encoding Initiative" on behalf of the SIG on Education and am following the work of the new SIG on Scholarly Publishing. As an undergraduate I helped plan encoding for the Dickinson Electronic Archives.

I hope to bring to the Council the experience of libraries and publishers with XML and to foster more conversation and collaboration between scholars, librarians, and publishers.

Website

Martin Holmes

I'm a programmer in the Humanities Computing and Media Centre at the University of Victoria, where I've been involved with TEI-based projects since the 1990s. Because our unit serves all of the departments in the humanities faculty, I tend to work on a wide variety of projects, including digitization of historical documents (, the Colonial Despatches of BC and Vancouver Island, TEI-based journal publication (, The Scandinavian Canadian Studies journal), and digital literary anthologies ( Le mariage sous L'Ancien Régime,. I've also written a TEI authoring tool, the Image Markup Tool.

My particular interests are in image markup using TEI, and in markup practices and schemas for born-digital documents such as TEI-based journal publications. I would like to help create a P5-based TEI schema for the publication of journal articles and other short documents intended for direct-to-Internet publication, along with detailed guidelines for using the schema.

Julianne Nyhan

Julianne Nyhan has a PhD in the areas of History and Digital Humanities, and a Postgraduate Certificate in Teaching and Learning at Third Level from University College Cork (UCC), Ireland. At present, she is a Research Associate in the Kompetenzzentrum für elektronische Erschließungs- und Publikationsverfahren in den Geisteswissenschaften in the University of Trier, Germany. She is also the Book Reviews Editor of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, the co-Editor-in-Chief of a forthcoming, online TEI SIG periodical, the co-Convenor of the TEI Education SIG and a member of the TEI publishing committee. Her research interests include full text digitisation of historical dictionaries and sources; the development of research infrastructures for historical and minority languages; the history of lexicography and the theory and practice of e-learning.

I began learning TEI P3 nearly 10 years ago, when working in the CELT project encoding texts of Irish history, politics and literature. Since then I have used TEI extensively and often with a particular focus on the encoding of historical dictionaries and lexica. Working on the Digital Dinneen project , for example, allowed me to create an enhanced, P5 encoded edition of this important Irish language dictionary and to train the postgraduate students working on the project in aspects of TEI. My current position in the Kompetenzzentrum für elektronische Erschließungs- und Publikationsverfahren, which is also a member of CLARIN, requires me to use, research and communicate about TEI on a daily basis. The Kompetenzzentrum, an internationally orientated research and service institute of the University of Trier, has some 13 core research projects, such as das Wörterbuchnetz , a network of 12 TEI-encoded dictionaries, which allows cross-searching of all dictionaries at once. We are moreover involved in 17 collaborative projects, such as TextGrid, which is developing ‘a modular platform for collaborative editing – a community grid for the humanities’. My work involves using XSLT and other technologies to migrate our data to TEI P5, advising projects, staff and students of the centre about TEI (and in the process learning much from them also), as well as contributing to the design of the MA in Digital Humanities that we hope to offer in 2011, and that TEI will naturally be a key component of. Since late 2008 I have also been the co-Convenor of the TEI Education SIG. We recently received approval from the TEI Board and Council to develop a new TEI SIG publication which will provide a community-driven forum and afford members of the community new educational insights into TEI. We expect the inaugural issue to appear in mid 2010.

As a member of the Council I would especially pursue the following goals:

In order to firmly establish Humanities in the European Research Area (ERA), and beyond, it is clear that frameworks for the assessment and evaluation of Humanities research output must be developed. At present, a number of such frameworks are both emerging and in development. It is likely that such frameworks will be one of a number of tools used in the assessment of candidates applying for academic positions, promotions and research funding etc, as well in the evaluation of research fields at the aggregate level. The TEI and Digital Humanities communities need to keep abreast of emerging National, pan-European and Global assessment and evaluation frameworks, and issue coordinated, community level responses in order to ensure that Digital Humanities scholarship is included in such frameworks and appropriately evaluated. I would be very happy to inform the TEI community about such frameworks and coordinate appropriate responses to the public bodies responsible for their creation.

Given my research area I can also make a significant contribution to developing further the TEI module for encoding lexicographical works, a module where work remains to be done or consolidated in terms of the encoding scheme and its integration with technologies and standards.

I am honoured to have been considered for a role on the TEI Council. If elected I will commit a significant amount of work to fulfilling my core duties as well as pursing the above goals.

Daniel O’Donnell

I am an Associate Professor of English at the University of Lethbridge and the current Chair of the TEI Consortium. I am also founding director (2003-2009) of Digital Medievalist, co-chair of the Medieval Academy's Digital Initiatives Advisory Board and President Elect (English) of the Society for Digital Humanities/Société pour l'étude des médias interactifs (SDH/SEMI). I have been using the TEI since 1996 and published a TEI-encoded critical edition of the Old English poem Cædmon's Hymn in 2005.

I have been chair of the TEI since January 2007. During this period, the TEI has been extremely active. We completed the P5 guidelines and the redesign of our website, introduced a new conference portion to our annual members meeting, added several new Special Interest Groups (SIGs), and expanded our mandate and altered the constitution of the TEI Council to allow a greater emphasis on outreach, education, and the development of use-cases and applications. This year we introduced a new micro-grant competition for our Special Interest Groups and in the very near future should be introducing a new webstore that will allow us to accept credit cards and make it easier to become a member or subscriber and register for our annual meeting on-line. We have also been investigating new Membership benefits, the development of a publication program, and pursuing collaborative arrangements with external agencies and funders.

If re-elected to the TEI Board, I would like to work to ensure that the TEI continues to develop in its current direction. This involves a continued broadening of the membership and subscriber base, increased activity among the SIGs, and a continuation of our emphasis on outreach, education, and the development of new applications. In my years as a board member and ultimately chair of the consortium, 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

After one term on the TEI council, I am delighted to be considered for a second one. My involvement and participation in the TEI community continues to be intense, and TEI is at the core of my research interests as well as of my teaching activities. I have been particularly active in promoting the activities of the Manuscript SIG which I chair, especially within the working group on Genetic Editions which has lead to the organisation of a workshop held in Paris in May 2009 and which was founded by the ALLC, ACH, the Moore Institute (University of Galway) and ultimately by the TEI. I expect the outcomes of the SIG activities will have a great impact on the life of the TEI and it will be my particular interest to promote within the Council the suggestions and proposals which come both from the SIGs and also from the general community of users.

Elena Pierazzo is Research Associate at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London. She works as part of the Digital Texts 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. Since then she has been involved in the TEI and in the TEI Manuscripts SIG, which she chairs together with Malte Rehbein and Amanda Gailey.

Susan Schreibman

Susan Schreibman is currently serving as Vice Chair of the Board of the TEI Consortium. In 2007 she served as local host of the TEI Members Meeting at University of Maryland at which a conference format was very successfully adopted for the first time. In 2008 she served as Chair of the organising committee for the meeting at Kings College London. Since 2004 she has been the Coordinator for the TEI Special Interest Groups. In 2008 she successfully brought a request to the TEI Board to initiate SIG Grants which were awarded in May 2009.

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 served on the TEI Council (2002-06), was a previous co-Chair of the TEI Education SIG and the Manuscript SIG.

If re-elected to the Board, I would continue serving the TEI Community, particularly in the areas of outreach and education. I am also committed to working with the SIGs, helping to promote and strengthen them within the TEI Community. I am also chairing a committee sanctioned by the TEI Board that is investigating the possibility of augmenting the TEI’s publishing activities.

Susan Schreibman is the founding Director of the Digital Humanities Observatory (Dublin, Ireland). Previously she was Assistant Dean and Head of Digital Collections and Research at the University of Maryland Libraries, and Assistant Director of Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities. She is co-editor of The Companion to Digital Humanities (Blackwell, 2004); co-editor of A Companion to Digital Literary Studies (Blackwell, 2008); book series co-editor of Topics in the Digital Humanities (U Illinois Press). She co-edited the proceedings of the 2007 TEI Members Meeting with Sebastian Rahz (forthcoming, LLC). Her research interests include digital humanities, digital libraries, textual editing, digital curation, and Irish poetic modernism.

Notis Toufexis

I am a research associate with the “Grammar of Medieval Greek (1100-1700)” project at the University of Cambridge. I hold a Classics degree from the University of Thessaloniki, Greece and a PhD from Hamburg University, Germany on Early Modern lexicography and the history of Greek in the 16th c. In both my current and an earlier position as a research associate in Hamburg (Collaborative Research Centre on Multilingualism) I have worked with large collections of textual data from documents and literary texts both edited and in manuscript form. I focus on language and its use with a focus on language description, the interplay of registers and the sociolinguistics of the medieval world. My personal website is http://www.toufexis.info.

My research interests are the background of my interest in the TEI. I believe strongly that we need to develop new editions of (Greek) texts transmitted in medieval manuscripts, and that the TEI is the only functional and comprehensive standard for this means. I am especially interested in the creation of digital transcriptions of manuscripts, the process of building an electronic edition based on such transcriptions and the changes that such an approach brings to standard editorial practices. In more recent research I am concerned about the epistemic shift implicit in moving towards the creation of electronic editions of texts in historical languages, or in other words in how electronic editions might help think differently about ancient texts.

I see myself been able to offer expertise in two areas:

a) the linguistic encoding of textual data, especially heterogeneous data (dealing with issues of spelling, register variation, editorial choices etc.) that need to be presented in different ways to serve different users (historical linguists, philologists, etc.)

b) building a strong case for educating potential editors of ancient texts in TEI, so that a new generation of editors can emege, aware of the problems of current editorial practices and the solutions electronic methods based on the TEI can offer.