TEI Elections 2011

Marjorie Burghart

Background: Marjorie Burghart (born 1977) is a research officer at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) based in Lyon, France. She holds a dual degree: she received her MA (1998) and M.Res (2002) in Medieval History, and her M.Sc in Computer Sciences (2000) from the University of Lyon, and is completing her PhD in Medieval History, in the field of sermon studies.

In her research centre, a large unit dedicated to Medieval Studies, she is head of a cross-disciplinary Digital Humanities program. In this position, she coordinates the computing aspects of several projects involving the electronic editing of medieval documents in TEI format (some examples: Sermones.net with the structural and thematic analysis of latin sermons, the Interactive Album of Mediaeval Palaeography offering TEI-encoded paleography exercises, or the “work in progress” Vitae Paparum Avenionensium bringing online a 4-volume 19th century edition combining several layers of annotations with a critical apparatus).

She has lectured on Digital Humanities for medievalists at the university of Freiburg since 2010 and initiated a seminar in Lyon on “Digital Edition and Medieval Sources”. Since 2008 she has been an elected executive board member of the Digital Medievalist community (re-elected in 2010), and since 2011 she is a co-opted member of the Association for Linguistic and Literary Computing (ALLC) Executive Committee, and the ALLC representative on the Publications Committee of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO). With ten years of TEI experience, she is involved in the Manuscript Material TEI SIG, resulting in a paper to be published with Malte Rehbein in the Journal of the TEI. In this SIG, she is the convener of a working group for the revision of the Critical Apparatus module and chapter.

Candidate statement: I am very honoured to be considered for election to the TEI Board. I have long been involved in the TEI community, since my first encounter with the Initiative in 2002, promoting TEI knowledge and use in my research environment, and I feel that I could go further on the Board.

On the Board, better addressing the needs of current and potential TEI users would be my constant preoccupation. I would bring to the front the issues related to TEI-capable tools (or the need of...) and to the ease of use of the TEI and its Guidelines – even to newcomers. My sentiment is that we need to promote the discussion of tools and usages within the community of users, and to recognize the development of TEI-capable tools by community members as a major contribution. This is, to me, the key to a better dissemination of the TEI. My main area of experience and interest is the use of the TEI in research projects, particularly those involving historical sources.

Responses to Questions on Strategic Issues

1. Should the TEI cease to collect membership fees, and cease to pay for meetings, publications, services, etc.? No. An important work has been done for the TEI over the years by the Board and Council, and I am in favour of acknowledging this work by covering the expenses of the Board and Council members for business meetings. Without that, valuable members and candidates from small institutions with limited funding might abandon the idea of being or becoming Board or Council members.
2. Assuming paid membership continues. should institutional members have a choice between paying in cash and paying by supporting the travel of their employees to meetings, or committing time on salary to work on TEI problems?

   The principle seems fair enough, although a preliminary survey might be useful to know the feeling of the institutional members (this may also mean that some institutions will have to readjust the way they pay their membership fee from one year to another, depending on their employee(s) being elected member(s) or not).

   Contribution by supporting the travel expense of elected employees seems rather straightforward and measurable; on the other hand, committing time or salary to work on TEI problems seems slightly different to me: the outcome should be some sort of academic recognition for the person(s) and institution involved, rather than an equivalent in money.

3. Should the TEI have individual members (paying or not) who can vote to elect people to the board and/or council? Yes.
4. Should the email discussions of the TEI Board be publicly accessible? Yes.
5. Should the Board and the Council be combined into a single body, with subsets of that group having the responsibilities now assigned to each separate group?

   I reserve my definitive opinion until I experience more of the functioning of the Board and Council from inside.

   One thing is certain though: the Council needs to be more closely associated with the decisions of the Board.

6. Assuming we continue to collect funds, we will still have limited resources. Given that, in the next two years, which of the following should be the TEI's highest priority? Pick only one: a) providing services that make it easy for scholars to publish and use TEI texts online b) providing workshops, training, and other on-ramp services that help people understand why they might want to use TEI and how to begin to do so c) encouraging the development of third-party tools for TEI users d) ensuring that large amounts of lightly but consistently encoded texts (e.g., TEI Tite) are generated and made publicly available, perhaps in a central repository or at least through some centrally coordinated portal e) developing a roadmap for P6 that positions the TEI in relation to other standards (HTML5, RDF, etc.) f) tackling hard problems not addressed in other encoding schemes, in order to maximize the expressive and interpretive power of TEI

   As this is, I believe, the condition for a better dissemination, I will rate "c) encouraging the development of third-party tools for TEI users" as the highest priority. Although, it does not mean, in my mind, that the TEI should fund these developments: I am calling mainly for more attention to and more recognition of the tools development work, be it from academic research projects or from corporations. In my mind, this first priority is closely linked to "a) providing services that make it easy for scholars to publish and use TEI texts online".

   As for "b) providing workshops, training, and other on-ramp services that help people understand why they might want to use TEI and how to begin to do so", my feeling is that those services are better handled by local community members rather than the central TEI consortium, since they are able to organize training sessions in the local language and know the context and needs of the trainees better. But the TEI could have a role in coordinating the documentation, and entry-level handbooks of the "TEI for Dummies" type, with a holistic approach to digital editing with the TEI.

   Regarding "d) ensuring that large amounts of lightly but consistently encoded texts (e.g., TEI Tite) are generated and made publicly available, perhaps in a central repository or at least through some centrally coordinated portal", I think that the solution to the long-term availability of TEI encoded texts lies in the involvement of traditional archives and libraries into digital preservation and curation. Only those stable institution can guarantee long-term availability and preservation. My feeling is that the TEI should work and lobby in this direction, rather than setting up its own repository.

   "e)" and "f)" are the core of the TEI, and of course this will go on. We will continue to refine the TEI and the Guidelines to tackle hard problems, and my feeling is that we need first and foremost to solve existing problems with the TEI (like the ones posed by the Critical Apparatus module, for instance").

Hugh Cayless

Background: Hugh Cayless is a developer and team leader with over a decade of experience with TEI. He is one of the founders of EpiDoc, a set of guidelines based on the TEI for encoding ancient documents. EpiDoc has become the standard for digitally publishing papyri and inscriptions from the ancient Greek and Roman world, and is being adopted for other languages and cultures. Hugh has worked in Academia and private industry as a programmer, teacher, consultant, and manager, and has written a variety of articles, papers, and blog posts about TEI. He holds a Ph.D. in Classics and an MS in Information Science, both from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He served on the program committee for the 2010 TEI Annual Meeting in Zadar and is an editor for the Journal of the TEI publication of that conference.

Hugh's research interests as they relate to TEI include standoff annotation, on which he has presented at Balisage, and linking image and text, on which he has presented at the TEI annual meeting and at the Digital Humanities 2009 conference. He recently co-directed an NEH Startup Grant project from the Office of Digital Humanities on using Scaleable Vector Graphics in concert with TEI as a means to link texts to page images (see http://docsouth.und.edu/dusenbery). His current work involves the TEI-based publication of thousands of texts, with translations and data drawn from collections and publications of papyri and ostraka (http://papyri.info).

Candidate Statement: I am honored to have been nominated to serve on the Board of the TEI. I believe the TEI Consortium is at a crossroads: after successfully reaching maturity, incubated by its member institutions, it has reached a stage where it needs either to begin expanding its horizons or risk being held back by the very structures that nurtured it. Much of the problem revolves around money, of course. Institutional subscriptions are in decline, and in the current economic environment that seems a trend unlikely to reverse itself soon. In some ways, TEI is a victim of its own success: as the standard has matured, it is in less obvious need of help, and the likelihood of radical change has decreased. There is really no penalty for an organization that decides to be a "free rider"—to use the standard without contributing back. As a board member, I would work to expand the TEI's reach and appeal to its potential user community. For someone who wants to publish texts online, for example, and who doesn't know TEI, we need a compelling narrative that tells them why it is a better solution than, say, HTML and why the cost/benefit ratio for TEI is favorable. If the state of the tools and services around TEI currently isn't such that we can successfully make that case, then TEI needs urgently to focus on improving that state, and I will be active in encouraging such development.

Responses to Questions on Strategic Issues

1. Should the TEI cease to collect membership fees, and cease to pay for meetings, publications, services, etc.? No. The TEI Consortium needs to maintain a revenue stream. The details of how that stream is generated may need to change, but there should be one. Requiring institutional support for participation in the Council and the Board will only make the TEI more insular, which is the very opposite of what I believe needs to happen in order for it to survive and thrive.
2. Assuming paid membership continues. should institutional members have a choice between paying in cash and paying by supporting the travel of their employees to meetings, or committing time on salary to work on TEI problems? Yes, in-kind contributions, in the form of developer time, resources, support for employee participation, and so on should count towards institutional membership. This might enable insitutions that aren't current members to begin participate in the TEI. An institution that is able to begin participating by devoting some developer time is more likely to become a fully participating member than one simply facing a binary decision of whether to subscribe or not.
3. Should the TEI have individual members (paying or not) who can vote to elect people to the board and/or council? Yes. The current structure of the TEI biases it to be inward-looking, and it is vitally important that TEI begin to look outside itself. Individual members and insitutional members should each have a vote.
4. Should the email discussions of the TEI Board be publicly accessible? Probably. Since I'm not privy to their contents now, I have to acknowledge that there may be necessarily private information in the archives. Perhaps the best thing would be to open the board listserve up, but not retroactively (unless current and former members agree). I do think the Board's internal workings need to be much more transparent. Business that should be private can be conducted offlist if necessary, though summaries should be published.
5. Should the Board and the Council be combined into a single body, with subsets of that group having the responsibilities now assigned to each separate group? No, I think the work they do is distinct enough that it's worth maintaining two bodies, but the walls between the two need to be broken down in order to improve relations and understanding between them. Perhaps occasional joint sessions, and/or allowing members of each body to attend meetings of the other would help.
6. Assuming we continue to collect funds, we will still have limited resources. Given that, in the next two years, which of the following should be the TEI's highest priority? Pick only one: a) providing services that make it easy for scholars to publish and use TEI texts online b) providing workshops, training, and other on-ramp services that help people understand why they might want to use TEI and how to begin to do so c) encouraging the development of third-party tools for TEI users d) ensuring that large amounts of lightly but consistently encoded texts (e.g., TEI Tite) are generated and made publicly available, perhaps in a central repository or at least through some centrally coordinated portal e) developing a roadmap for P6 that positions the TEI in relation to other standards (HTML5, RDF, etc.) f) tackling hard problems not addressed in other encoding schemes, in order to maximize the expressive and interpretive power of TEI

   I want to answer "all of the above", but I think the key to success is expanding and nurturing the TEI community, and for that we need a combination of marketing and tools. Tool development must be fostered, because good tools will break down barriers to entry and will generate excitment and interest, and attract potential TEI users. The TEI-C must help publicize and promote these tools, and it must be strategic in choosing which tools to get behind. Tool-development might well lead to services that the TEI-C could provide (even for a fee). Tools and engaged users will help expand the number and uses of texts, and will point to places for future development (P6) and to problems (and, one hopes, solutions) TEI does not now adequately address. An expanding user community will also provide a market for workshops and training, which could be an additional revenue source.

Laura Mandell

Background: Laura Mandell is Professor of English at Texas A&M University and Director of its new Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media and Culture. Though published mostly in the discipline of literary and cultural studies in the field of 18th-century literature, Prof. Mandell began her digital humanities work around the time that the Internet emerged into general notice. She worked in 1993 with Alan Liu on creating the Romantic Chronology, now a database, and then began developing other digital resources and archives, from Anna Barbauld’s Prose Works to the Bijou of 1828, that ultimately became part of the Poetess Archive. In 2003, she began working with Jerome McGann and Bethany Nowviskie on NINES for which she is currently Associate Director, and she launched an eighteenth-century version of NINES (18thConnect.org) which she directs. Recently hired to start a digital humanities center at Texas A&M, Prof. Mandell hopes to collaborate with and foster collaborations among computer scientists, social scientists, librarians, book historians, new media experts, and humanities scholars.

Candidate Statement: My interest is in making TEI approachable by scholars as a way of encouraging them to develop coding and programming skills of their own, or, if not that, as a way of teaching them enough about the problems of preservation, access, and data-mining that they collaborate well with programmers and coders, understanding the cognitive power and intellectual effects of technological decisions.

Responses to Questions on Strategic Issues

1. Should the TEI cease to collect membership fees, and cease to pay for meetings, publications, services, etc.? I believe that we should lower membership fees but not abolish them, and that members who host TEI conferences could pay for them.
2. Assuming paid membership continues. should institutional members have a choice between paying in cash and paying by supporting the travel of their employees to meetings, or committing time on salary to work on TEI problems? Yes, either cash, sending members, or giving time should be acceptable as member contributions.
3. Should the TEI have individual members (paying or not) who can vote to elect people to the board and/or council? Yes, I believe that individuals should be able to join and to vote.
4. Should the email discussions of the TEI Board be publicly accessible? Yes, I believe that board discussions should be posted to a listserv that is publicly available, and that some discussions should be sent out on the main TEI List as well, depending upon member curiosity and interest.
5. Should the Board and the Council be combined into a single body, with subsets of that group having the responsibilities now assigned to each separate group? Yes, I think the Board and Council should be a single entity, though there should be careful attention to how many members can deeply engage in technological issues—perhaps a number assigned to seats proffering technological prowess.
6. Assuming we continue to collect funds, we will still have limited resources. Given that, in the next two years, which of the following should be the TEI's highest priority? Pick only one: a) providing services that make it easy for scholars to publish and use TEI texts online b) providing workshops, training, and other on-ramp services that help people understand why they might want to use TEI and how to begin to do so c) encouraging the development of third-party tools for TEI users d) ensuring that large amounts of lightly but consistently encoded texts (e.g., TEI Tite) are generated and made publicly available, perhaps in a central repository or at least through some centrally coordinated portal e) developing a roadmap for P6 that positions the TEI in relation to other standards (HTML5, RDF, etc.) f) tackling hard problems not addressed in other encoding schemes, in order to maximize the expressive and interpretive power of TEI

   d. central repository should be the TEI’s highest priority.

Martin Mueller

I was trained as a classicist but have always made my living in English departments. I taught at Brandeis for two years, spent a decade at the University of Toronto, where I started the Comparative Literature Program, and since 1976 I have been at Northwestern University, where I am currently a professor of English and Classics. Over the years I have directed the Comparative Literature and Humanities programs, and for seven years I chaired the English department.

My work has moved between straight Classics (a book on the Iliad) and the Nachleben of ancient epic and tragedy, which I pursued in Children Oedipus and other essays on the imitation of ancient tragedy, 1550-1800 as well as in various articles, most recently in “Escape from d-minor: Mozart's Encounter with Ancient Tragedy in Idomeneo (Arion, 2010).

In the nineties my interest in the formulaic language of Homer led me to model repeated phrases in Early Greek epic in a relational environment that exposed and leveraged what I like to call the “query potential of the digital surrogate.” The result of that work was the Chicago Homer (http://www.library.northwestern.edu/homer), which for over a decade has had a lot of visitors from all over the world. I have also been the general editor of the WordHoard project and the co-PI of the MONK project. I am currently active in the Corpora Space initiative of Project Bamboo.

As you know, I resigned as chair of the TEI on August 11, following a vote of no confidence from the TEI Board. Subsequently I was asked by a member of the Council whether I would stand for election to the Board. After thinking about it for a while, I said “why not?” In my August 4 letter to the Board and Council I wrote at length about the intellectual, financial, and organizational challenges faced by the TEI Consortium. You can read the letter at http://ariadne.northwestern.edu/mmueller/teiletter.pdf. Here is a summary of the major points:

1. Whatever else it does, the TEI needs to look for a seat at the table of Big Data. Scientists now talk about the “research data life cycle management.” In the text-centric humanities disciplines this means the care and feeding of digital surrogates of the primary sources on which scholarship in those disciplines depends. The value proposition of the TEI ultimately consists in making good on the promise for the deeper or more extensive inquiries that properly encoded TEI texts offer to scholars, letting them ask new questions or find new ways of answering old question by carrying out more fine-grained inquiries “at scale” across heterogeneous but consistently encoded corpora. The larger the scale, the more dependent scholars will be on libraries or library-like institutions to manage the data and provide access to the tools that support their exploration. The TEI will flourish best if research libraries come to think of it as an important enabling technology for managing digital corpora of such primary sources, which include texts from several millennia and many languages and are unlikely to disclose their full query potential if they are maintained or searched merely as raw text files.
2. While the TEI is in principle global, virtually all of its seventy or so member institutions are located in Europe or North America. Funding is unbalanced in two ways: two thirds of the revenue comes from just twelve members, and three fourths of the direct revenue comes from North America. The TEI needs to become less dependent on a few major contributors and work towards more equal contributions from its European and North American members.
3. The TEI needs a leaner and nimbler organization. Its board is too large and expensive relative to the scope of activities it oversees. The Council may not be too large, but if it wants to have more frequent face-to-face meetings (which I believe to be a very good thing) it may need to put up with a smaller size to stay within the TEI-Consortium’s resources. Since my days at the University of Toronto I have been a fan of unicameral bodies, which reduce the level of mutual ignorance and paranoia endemic to bicameral structures. So I could imagine a “unicameral” Board of Directors, made up of eight “geeks” and four “bean counters” who divide into a Technical Committee and a Management Committee, split their work along the lines of the current Board and Council, but share all information and vote together on major issues. Discussion among the members and the larger TEI community will suggest other ways of becoming leaner and nimbler, and I can happily support any solution that will move us towards this goal. I am also attracted to the idea of the TEI ultimately becoming an open source community, but I am not quite sure whether the time for it has quite come yet.

Responses to Questions on Strategic Issues

1. Should the TEI cease to collect membership fees, and cease to pay for meetings, publications, services, etc.? I hope that the TEI will continue to be supported largely by institutional membership fees from libraries and research organizations of various kinds. Membership fees, however, should have a narrower range with a lower top (e.g. $500 - $1,500) and be levied from a broader base.
2. Assuming paid membership continues. should institutional members have a choice between paying in cash and paying by supporting the travel of their employees to meetings, or committing time on salary to work on TEI problems? This may not be an either/or. The key is developing a budget system that allows for the recognition of support for the TEI, whether through travel costs or released time.
3. Should the TEI have individual members (paying or not) who can vote to elect people to the board and/or council? One option might be to have one member of the Board elected by individual members.If it turns out that individual subscribers grow in numbers, a second Board member could be elected by subscribers. Perhaps more people would subscribe if they could vote, but keep in mind that right now only 2% of the membership revenue comes from individual subscriptions, and I'm not sure whether the TEI has ever had more than two dozen individual subscriber in any given year.
4. Should the email discussions of the TEI Board be publicly accessible? On balance, no. But there ought to be firmer and more regular ways of accounting to the membership for decisions and also for consulting the members while policy items are under discussion
5. Should the Board and the Council be combined into a single body, with subsets of that group having the responsibilities now assigned to each separate group? Yes.
6. Assuming we continue to collect funds, we will still have limited resources. Given that, in the next two years, which of the following should be the TEI's highest priority? Pick only one: a) providing services that make it easy for scholars to publish and use TEI texts online b) providing workshops, training, and other on-ramp services that help people understand why they might want to use TEI and how to begin to do so c) encouraging the development of third-party tools for TEI users d) ensuring that large amounts of lightly but consistently encoded texts (e.g., TEI Tite) are generated and made publicly available, perhaps in a central repository or at least through some centrally coordinated portal e) developing a roadmap for P6 that positions the TEI in relation to other standards (HTML5, RDF, etc.) f) tackling hard problems not addressed in other encoding schemes, in order to maximize the expressive and interpretive power of TEI

   d) because that is the best way of bringing the TEI to the attention of the humanities scholars on whose awareness and support the standard will depend in the long run. But d) also involves a commitment to the development of query tools that let users "decode the encoded."

Elena Pierazzo

Background: I graduated in 1996 from the University of Venice (Italy) and completed my PhD at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa in Italian Philology in 2001. In 2002 I was awarded a one-year fellowship by Harvard University (USA) at Villa I Tatti in Florence (Italy). After a few years at the University of Pisa, I am now Lecturer in Digital Humanities at the Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London, where I chair the Teaching Committee and direct two MA programmes: Digital Humanities and Digital Asset Management. In my previous post at King’s College London I worked for a few years developing major research projects involving the TEI. My work today consists principally in teaching digital publishing and XML-related technologies (including the TEI) at BA, MA and PhD levels.

I have been involved in the TEI since 2000, and have served four years in the Council, and in the TEI Manuscripts SIG which I have co-chaired since its inception in 2004. In the past four years I have also been deeply involved in the design and promotion of the new extensions for Genetic Editing.

Statement: After having served on the TEI Council for two consecutive mandates, I am now delighted to have been nominated for election to the TEI Board. The recent events have demonstrated that governance of the TEI requires some further thought in spite of the recent modifications to the bylaws, in particular with respect to the role of the Board and the way it manages its activities. The recent crisis and the way it has been handled were unacceptable to many of the people that have generously contributed to the growth and health of the TEI in the 30 years or so of its history. This, I believe, has damaged both the TEI itself and the field of Digital Humanities in general, as witnessed by the shock and bewilderment expressed by the community on TEI-L and on many social networks (e.g. Twitter, Facebook and Google+). These events, as well as the request from the Interim Chair of the Board for proposals about the future of the TEI, call for a deep re-thinking of the role of the TEI community and its relationship with the Board and Council. If I am elected to serve on the Board, I will engage in helping to move governance of the TEI toward a more transparent way of working, ensuring that broad consent is sought and pursued not only among the elected members of the Board and the Council but also among the community at large – a community represented mainly but not only by contributors to TEI-L. I have already made some proposals on TEI-L to which I plan to remain faithful http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind1108&L=tei-l&T=0&F=&S=&P=18328, but I will be more than happy to also consider all other proposals (such as, for instance, the direct election of the TEI chair) which go in the direction of more transparency and collegiality in the governance of the TEI.

Responses to Questions on Strategic Issues

1. Should the TEI cease to collect membership fees, and cease to pay for meetings, publications, services, etc.? No. I think the activities supported by the fees are extremely important, for instance SIG grants, projects and Meetings. I would rather see a more balanced expenditure with less money used for travels and more money for more interesting activities.
2. Assuming paid membership continues. should institutional members have a choice between paying in cash and paying by supporting the travel of their employees to meetings, or committing time on salary to work on TEI problems? I don't see why not: contributing to the TEI can take as many forms that the TEI consider important and relevant for its activities. This doesn't sound like a big innovation though, but very much like the partner institutions which might be extended to include this kind of arrangement, though without necessarily having a member on the Board. There could be, for instance, different levels of contribution from partner institutions.
3. Should the TEI have individual members (paying or not) who can vote to elect people to the board and/or council? Yes: individual members should be able to elect people just as institutional ones do.
4. Should the email discussions of the TEI Board be publicly accessible? Yes: there might be some topics that are really sensitive in which case there might be some kind of privacy setting on a topic or something, but in general I think this should be the exception, not the rule.
5. Should the Board and the Council be combined into a single body, with subsets of that group having the responsibilities now assigned to each separate group? Not necessarily: Board and Council have very different functions and activities and work better separately. There should be a much closer relation between the two, though: I have served 4 years on the Council and I have to say very little of the activities of the Board ever reached us. I have no means of knowing if the converse is true as well. On a related topic, I think that there are far too many elected people between the Council and the Board: 12 people on the Council and 8 on the Board, meaning there are 20 people's travels to support, which is really a lot! I would welcome a reduction of numbers there.
6. Assuming we continue to collect funds, we will still have limited resources. Given that, in the next two years, which of the following should be the TEI's highest priority? Pick only one: a) providing services that make it easy for scholars to publish and use TEI texts online b) providing workshops, training, and other on-ramp services that help people understand why they might want to use TEI and how to begin to do so c) encouraging the development of third-party tools for TEI users d) ensuring that large amounts of lightly but consistently encoded texts (e.g., TEI Tite) are generated and made publicly available, perhaps in a central repository or at least through some centrally coordinated portal e) developing a roadmap for P6 that positions the TEI in relation to other standards (HTML5, RDF, etc.) f) tackling hard problems not addressed in other encoding schemes, in order to maximize the expressive and interpretive power of TEI

   I pick this [a) providing services that make it easy for scholars to publish and use TEI texts online] hoping that it includes also a better design of the website, more tutorial and support material. I think there is still a serious need for outreach and evangelisation: the more complex the TEI gets in order to respond to scholarly needs, the more need for tutorials and 'getting started' material there is.

Peter Robinson

Background: I am Professor of Digital Texuality in the Department of English, University of Saskatchewan, Canada. Previously I was co-Director of the Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing in the University of Birmingham, England (2005-2010); Director of the Centre for Technology and the Arts and Professor of Textual Scholarship at De Montfort University, Leicester (1998-2005). I was also co-founder of the European Society for Textual Scholarship, and its president from 2006 to 2010. In humanities computing, I am best known for devising the Canterbury Tales project, which I have led, in one way or another, since its beginnings in 1991.

I have published widely on digital humanities, and particularly on the application of digital methods to textual scholarship. I chaired the textual scholarship group in the ‘P3’ iteration of the TEI Guidelines, and was largely responsible for the primary source transcription section of the same guidelines. Later, I led the MASTER consortium which drafted the manuscript description encodings which (in company with the work of a group led by Consuelo Dutschke) underlies the current TEI manuscript descripton guidelines. In my other day job, I teach, research and publish on medieval literature, particularly the textual traditions of the Canterbury Tales and of Dante’s Commedia. Since 2000, I have also run an independent publishing house, Scholary Digital Editions, which publishes high-quality scholarly editions in digital form.

Candidate statement: In 2001, I was one of the first elected board members of the then newly-established TEI consortium. The two years I served then gave me a ringside view of the TEI as it laid the foundation for the ten years of achievement which have followed. I have had no direct involvement with the TEI since 2004, but have followed closely its activities, and maintained contact with many individuals in the TEI. In this time, I have also developed my own sense of the place of digital humanities in the academy and the wider community. After ten years, it may be argued that the TEI needs to re-examine its direction, organization and practices: the digital world (indeed, the whole world) is not now as it was in 2001. At the same time, the TEI must continue to serve, and retain the support of, the membership it has established since 2001. I believe that I am well-placed to satisfy both needs. I know the TEI community and its needs well; but I am also sufficiently independent from the TEI to be able to see areas where the TEI needs to grow.

Responses to Questions on Strategic Issues

1. Should the TEI cease to collect membership fees, and cease to pay for meetings, publications, services, etc.? No, it should not. The continuing income stream from membership fees has meant that the TEI has been able to undertake a wider range of activities than would have been otherwise possible. This should continue (but with a changed membership model and a review of the TEI's organization; see answers to 3 and
2. Assuming paid membership continues. should institutional members have a choice between paying in cash and paying by supporting the travel of their employees to meetings, or committing time on salary to work on TEI problems? No. This would cause considerable imbalances, with problems as to how we should value such 'in-kind' contributions. I understand the difficulty, but this is not a good solution. Adopting the membership model suggested in my answer to the next question would avoid the issue entirely.
3. Should the TEI have individual members (paying or not) who can vote to elect people to the board and/or council? I believe that the membership model of the TEI needs revision. At present, individual scholars have no voice in TEI elections: institutional members only may vote (a privilege for which they may pay quite handsomely). Ask this question: is the TEI an association of institutions, or an association of scholars? I believe it is the latter. Therefore, the proper model for the TEI is that of a learned society, with a relatively low subscription cost and membership open to many. This would enable many more people to join the TEI, to attend its meetings, to vote in its elections, and to receive its publications, etc. It is possible that the membership fees so generated would be at first less than at present. However, there would be considerable scope for increasing funds by increasing membership, in place of the declining membership and income of the present model.
4. Should the email discussions of the TEI Board be publicly accessible? I don't know of any learned society or scholarly group that does this. No.
5. Should the Board and the Council be combined into a single body, with subsets of that group having the responsibilities now assigned to each separate group? Recent events have shown starkly the dangers of a distinct board and council. But even without these events: after ten years, the TEI should review its membership policy and its organization. I suggest in (3) above that the TEI should become more like a learned society. A common learned society model is to have the membership elect board members, with the board members then responsible for electing a chair and other office holders from their number (thereby precluding the possibility of an un-elected chair). A nominating committee would be charged with ensuring (as now) that there is at least one candidate for each office. The board would then, in consultation with the membership, determine priorities and (for example) create working groups for specific tasks.
6. Assuming we continue to collect funds, we will still have limited resources. Given that, in the next two years, which of the following should be the TEI's highest priority? Pick only one: a) providing services that make it easy for scholars to publish and use TEI texts online b) providing workshops, training, and other on-ramp services that help people understand why they might want to use TEI and how to begin to do so c) encouraging the development of third-party tools for TEI users d) ensuring that large amounts of lightly but consistently encoded texts (e.g., TEI Tite) are generated and made publicly available, perhaps in a central repository or at least through some centrally coordinated portal e) developing a roadmap for P6 that positions the TEI in relation to other standards (HTML5, RDF, etc.) f) tackling hard problems not addressed in other encoding schemes, in order to maximize the expressive and interpretive power of TEI

   Certainly, choice (e). The TEI's core business is the standards we have laboriously created, and which need continual maintenance, extension and dissemination.

Brett Barney

Background: I am a Research Associate Professor at the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Senior Associate Editor of the Walt Whitman Archive. My formal education is in English literature (B.A., BYU; M.A., Idaho State; Ph.D., UNL), with a focus on American literature before 1900. I have been using TEI since 2000, when I was hired by the editors of the Walt Whitman Archive to help develop P3-comliant encoding, which we applied to the transcriptions of printed volumes (previously done with HTML) and used to encode Whitman's poetry manuscripts. I was the primary author of the project's encoding guidelines. I have also designed and done encoding for several other projects, including the Willa Cather Archive and the Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition Online, and I have quite a bit of experience teaching TEI encoding, both in classrooms and in less formal settings. I am currently consultant to the Civil War Washington and the Melville Electronic Library projects.

Candidate statement: When I was elected to the Council two years ago I had just given a talk in which I worried that over time the TEI Consortium had perhaps become too much a cloistered community of "greybeards" and that the tacit requirements for joining the club were unnecessarily severe. At the same time, I didn't have a very good understanding of the day-to-day work of Council members. Over the past two years I have gotten a greater appreciation for the TEI scheme, for the methods by which it is implemented, and for the enormous work that others have contributed to their development. Work on the Council really is humbling (and invigorating, and challenging, etc.). I do still think, though, that the TEI community would be better if it were a friendlier place for the wide range of humanists whom it stands to benefit, and I would like to serve another Council term so that I can lend my efforts to moving it in that direction. Specifically, I believe that I could contribute to: 1) improving the human-readability of the Guidelines; 2) advocating for revisions of the encoding scheme to accommodate the real-world needs of users; 3) developing materials for newbies; and 4) devising a set of modifications that will allow some of the big text collections that are now becoming available to use a fully conformant TEI schema.

Responses to Questions on Strategic Issues

1. Should the TEI cease to collect membership fees, and cease to pay for meetings, publications, services, etc.? As they're worded, I don't have strong opinions about these questions. I do, however, believe that the TEI should, as Lou put it, "work toward a 'contribution' rather than a 'membership' model" and that participation needs to be within practical reach of the widest pool of participants possible. Before deciding that funding for travel to meetings be shifted to individuals' home institutions, for example, we should be confident that doing so would not have the effect of denying participation to independent scholars or to TEI practitioners at institutions that aren't able or willing to fund their participation.
2. Assuming paid membership continues. should institutional members have a choice between paying in cash and paying by supporting the travel of their employees to meetings, or committing time on salary to work on TEI problems? I don't have any objections to such a system in principle, and if that sort of support would be easier for some institutional members to provide, it is possible that we would be able to attract more members. My only concern would be that we not take on a burdensome bureaucratic obligation to support an "exchange" system.
3. Should the TEI have individual members (paying or not) who can vote to elect people to the board and/or council? If individual members/subscribers continue to pay, yes, they should definitely get a vote. If individual membership isn't paid, my answer would depend on the nature of membership in the new regime.
4. Should the email discussions of the TEI Board be publicly accessible? Yes.
5. Should the Board and the Council be combined into a single body, with subsets of that group having the responsibilities now assigned to each separate group? No preferences. If doing so would somehow all us to reduce the total number of persons serving, I'd be in favor. I don't see any reason to think that this would necessarily be the case, though. Simply having a larger group with less specialization of responsibilities would be a retrograde development, I think.
6. Assuming we continue to collect funds, we will still have limited resources. Given that, in the next two years, which of the following should be the TEI's highest priority? Pick only one: a) providing services that make it easy for scholars to publish and use TEI texts online b) providing workshops, training, and other on-ramp services that help people understand why they might want to use TEI and how to begin to do so c) encouraging the development of third-party tools for TEI users d) ensuring that large amounts of lightly but consistently encoded texts (e.g., TEI Tite) are generated and made publicly available, perhaps in a central repository or at least through some centrally coordinated portal e) developing a roadmap for P6 that positions the TEI in relation to other standards (HTML5, RDF, etc.) f) tackling hard problems not addressed in other encoding schemes, in order to maximize the expressive and interpretive power of TEI

   a), with caveats. It is very generally worded, and I wouldn't favor TEI's creating a bunch of new services. I do, however, think that supporting and improving the existing services are extremely important, especially if one includes such activities as publishing the guidelines and other documentation. Among other existing services that I believe deserve improvement are the system for requesting features and reporting errors (currently, Sourceforge) and the tools and documentation for customization (e.g., ODD, Roma, Vesta). Honorable mentions: e) and f).

Gabriel Bodard

Gabriel Bodard has a doctorate in Classics and has worked in Digital Humanities for over ten years, most significantly in the area of digital epigraphy and papyrology. He is one of the architects of the EpiDoc customization of TEI for ancient documentary texts, and has co-edited epigraphic collections including the Inscriptions of Aphrodisias and the Inscriptions of Roman Cyrenaica. He has worked in XML and XSLT development on many projects, both involving ancient documents and otherwise. He currently works as a research associate at the Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London, and divides his time between a digital edition of the Inscriptions of the Ancient Black Sea and Integrating Digital Papyrology, a project to build and disseminate a collaborative scholarly editing platform for digital editions in TEI/EpiDoc.

Within the TEI my interests are in text editing and physical description of manuscripts, person and place catalogues, and Linked Data. I am keen to work with the text transcription and apparatus criticus communities, and the maintenance of the Guidelines. I continue to work on the ODD customization and the guidelines for the EpiDoc world, and regularly run training workshops for scholars in the use of TEI and related technologies.

Responses to Questions on Strategic Issues

1. Should the TEI cease to collect membership fees, and cease to pay for meetings, publications, services, etc.? No, I think the most valuable activities of the TEI are the work of the Council and SIGs on guidelines, tools and other outputs. Having some income to support these activities is essential.
2. Assuming paid membership continues. should institutional members have a choice between paying in cash and paying by supporting the travel of their employees to meetings, or committing time on salary to work on TEI problems? That's one possible model, I suppose, although institutional members don't necessarily have an employee who is on a TEI committee. The option to commit salaried time to work on TEI problems and tools would be excellent, and potentially more valuable (dollar for dollar) than a $500 subscription.
3. Should the TEI have individual members (paying or not) who can vote to elect people to the board and/or council? Yes. It is certainly worth discussing other models which would increase and motivate grass-roots membership, and offering a vote to individual members is one attractive option.
4. Should the email discussions of the TEI Board be publicly accessible? Yes. There may be some financial details that are confidential (individual salaries of subcontractors, e.g.) but except for special cases, all day-to-day running of the TEI-C administration should be completely open, transparent and accountable.
5. Should the Board and the Council be combined into a single body, with subsets of that group having the responsibilities now assigned to each separate group? I don't think they should be combined, because they serve different functions and have different profiles and timescales. There should certainly be more communication between the two bodies, however, and perhaps occasional regular joint meetings/teleconference.
6. Assuming we continue to collect funds, we will still have limited resources. Given that, in the next two years, which of the following should be the TEI's highest priority? Pick only one: a) providing services that make it easy for scholars to publish and use TEI texts online b) providing workshops, training, and other on-ramp services that help people understand why they might want to use TEI and how to begin to do so c) encouraging the development of third-party tools for TEI users d) ensuring that large amounts of lightly but consistently encoded texts (e.g., TEI Tite) are generated and made publicly available, perhaps in a central repository or at least through some centrally coordinated portal e) developing a roadmap for P6 that positions the TEI in relation to other standards (HTML5, RDF, etc.) f) tackling hard problems not addressed in other encoding schemes, in order to maximize the expressive and interpretive power of TEI

   I'll have to say (b), although I think it and (c) and (f) are all part of the daily activities of the TEI-C in any case. Helping to encourage training and other dissemination activities would be a great use of TEI officers' time; encouraging (although not taking responsibility for) tool development could also be funded along the lines of current SIG activities.

Kevin Hawkins

Background: I am Head of Digital Publishing Production for MPublishing at the University of Michigan Library, where I am operations manager for a scholarly publishing operation and project manager for the development of an open-access publishing system on the HathiTrust repository platform. I currently serve as managing editor of the Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative and co-convenor of the SIG on Libraries. I am co-editor of the Best Practices for TEI in Libraries , to be released in fall 2011, and I actively contribute to the documentation of tools in and other maintenance of the TEI wiki.

In my previous term on the Council, I led the task force for TEI Tite (to align the TEI-C's Tite and that in use in AccessTEI) and contributed to the Ad-hoc Committee on Encoding of Bibliographic Citations, which contributed significant revisions to the Guidelines for handling bibliographic metadata. I was also local host for the Council meeting in Chicago.

More at my website.

Candidate statement: I look forward to continuing to offer the perspective of libraries and publishers to the TEI community. Much work remains to be done to make TEI Tite both unambiguous for vendors and a useful starting point for further use by client institutions. I also look forward to promoting the use of TEI in libraries following the release of the Best Practices.

Responses to Questions on Strategic Issues

1. Should the TEI cease to collect membership fees, and cease to pay for meetings, publications, services, etc.?

   I'm not sure. I'm tempted by others' suggestion to run the TEI as an open-source project, but it's really valuable to pay people's expenses to meet and lock themselves in a room in order to get work done.

   On the other hand, the IDPF conducted the massive rewrite of the EPUB specification on an aggressive timeline with with few in-person meetings. The organization was committed to a timeline for the project, and everyone was motivated by this timeline. We don't have this urgency in the TEI, so we end up taking a very long time to do things. I don't know how we can create a sense of urgency in the community.

2. Assuming paid membership continues. should institutional members have a choice between paying in cash and paying by supporting the travel of their employees to meetings, or committing time on salary to work on TEI problems? No. I suspect that this would often lead to institutions not paying in cash but instead claiming to give staff time to work on the TEI while simply adding it as a job responsibility without actually providing resources to contribute to the TEI. Furthermore, if we fund meeting attendance and work is accomplished at these meetings, we would establish a barrier for participation in the TEI for those not affiliated with a member institution, which would be a loss. We want contributions from the best people regardless of their institutional affiliation and ability to convince the institution to join the TEI.
3. Should the TEI have individual members (paying or not) who can vote to elect people to the board and/or council? Probably. I'll leave it to others to figure out a way to handle the different classes of electors.
4. Should the email discussions of the TEI Board be publicly accessible? I would like things to be as open as possible and would like us to model our procedures on similar organizations. I have been unable to determine policies in any comparable organizations, so I can't say for sure what this would be.
5. Should the Board and the Council be combined into a single body, with subsets of that group having the responsibilities now assigned to each separate group? Possibly. In any case I would like to see contact between the Board and Council, which right now rely on the Board Chair and the Council Chair to relay relevant information back and forth. Not much gets relayed to Council, and I suspect that the Board doesn't hear much either. This is especially critical on the choice of Council chair: the incumbent is appointed the Board without formal input from current or past Council members, which is really a lost opportunity.
6. Assuming we continue to collect funds, we will still have limited resources. Given that, in the next two years, which of the following should be the TEI's highest priority? Pick only one: a) providing services that make it easy for scholars to publish and use TEI texts online b) providing workshops, training, and other on-ramp services that help people understand why they might want to use TEI and how to begin to do so c) encouraging the development of third-party tools for TEI users d) ensuring that large amounts of lightly but consistently encoded texts (e.g., TEI Tite) are generated and made publicly available, perhaps in a central repository or at least through some centrally coordinated portal e) developing a roadmap for P6 that positions the TEI in relation to other standards (HTML5, RDF, etc.) f) tackling hard problems not addressed in other encoding schemes, in order to maximize the expressive and interpretive power of TEI

   I vote for option (c): "encouraging the development of third-party tools for TEI users". I hope this would also include third-party services that make it easier for scholars to publish and use TEI texts online, as opposed to (a), which assumes the TEI-C would do this. We can never do everything we would like to do, and our best hope for the future is to get others to make the TEI easier to use.

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. During my previous period on Council (2009-2011), I was a member of the bibliography working group, which has proposed and enacted a number of changes to the schema and guidelines as part of a long-term effort to update and simplify the variety of markup structures and strategies recommended for bibliographical markup; I'd like to continue that work. I've also been responsible for setting up a second Jenkins Continuous Integration Server for the TEI (http://teijenkins.hcmc.uvic.ca), to provide backup for the existing server which checks out and builds the TEI products from SourceForge, as well as documenting the process and providing scripts that others can use to automate the building of other Jenkins servers. I've also begun to make direct changes to the TEI source, and I'd like to continue to build my confidence and usefulness in this area.

Responses to Questions on Strategic Issues

1. Should the TEI cease to collect membership fees, and cease to pay for meetings, publications, services, etc.? No. I believe the TEI needs to have a solid funding base, and its revenue needs to be to some extent predictable, to enable proper long-term planning.
2. Assuming paid membership continues. should institutional members have a choice between paying in cash and paying by supporting the travel of their employees to meetings, or committing time on salary to work on TEI problems? No. Such a system would be very difficult to administer. It would be hard to track whether institutions are actually living up to their commitments, and to determine whether their commitments are consonant with the voting power they wield.
3. Should the TEI have individual members (paying or not) who can vote to elect people to the board and/or council? Yes. Ordinary subscribers should have a vote which is proportional to the financial contribution they make. This would make individuals much less powerful than the sponsoring institutions, but would ensure that a large number of individual subscribers voting in a particular way could influence the outcome of a vote.
4. Should the email discussions of the TEI Board be publicly accessible? Yes, as far as this is possible. I believe there may be some discussions which have to take place in camera, such as contract negotiations, but where this is the case, the Board should explain the reasons for keeping the discussion secret.
5. Should the Board and the Council be combined into a single body, with subsets of that group having the responsibilities now assigned to each separate group? No. The two bodies have profoundly different roles, and combining them will impair the effectiveness of both. Council members, in particular, benefit greatly from the ability to focus on technical issues without being distracted by political or administrative issues.
6. Assuming we continue to collect funds, we will still have limited resources. Given that, in the next two years, which of the following should be the TEI's highest priority? Pick only one: a) providing services that make it easy for scholars to publish and use TEI texts online b) providing workshops, training, and other on-ramp services that help people understand why they might want to use TEI and how to begin to do so c) encouraging the development of third-party tools for TEI users d) ensuring that large amounts of lightly but consistently encoded texts (e.g., TEI Tite) are generated and made publicly available, perhaps in a central repository or at least through some centrally coordinated portal e) developing a roadmap for P6 that positions the TEI in relation to other standards (HTML5, RDF, etc.) f) tackling hard problems not addressed in other encoding schemes, in order to maximize the expressive and interpretive power of TEI

   I would choose: e) developing a roadmap for P6 that positions the TEI in relation to other standards (HTML5, RDF, etc.).

   With some exceptions (such as the Facsimile module and the Genetic Editing proposal), most development of TEI is low-level tinkering, constrained in its effectiveness by the requirement to maintain backward-compatibility with previous iterations of P5. I believe strongly in the need for backward-compatibility, but I do think that we are now at a point where we need to start re-imagining what TEI should look like ten or fifteen years from now. This will inevitably be a long process, but it can begin with the establishment of some formal principles and core values. Once we have at least begun to talk about P6, we will be able to respond to problems and limitations in P5 not only by tinkering (which we'll also need to do) but also by recording ideas and outlines for more profound solutions that might be undertaken in P6. On the other hand, if we don't begin to engage with P6 soon, I think TEI development will tend to stagnate, as the limitations of P5 become increasingly off-putting to potential users.

Doug Reside

Bio: I am currently employed by New York Public Library as the first Digital Curator for the Performing Arts at the institution. Among many other projects, I am currently working on an NEA-funded project to place one TEI-encoded libretto of a public domain musical each month on NYPL’s website. Before coming to the Library, I was Associate Director at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities where I oversaw several TEI projects including the Shakespeare Quartos Archive and Music Theater Online. In addition, with Dot Porter and John Walsh, I conceived and oversaw the initial development of the Text Image Linking Environment (TILE) before handing the project over to Dave Lester as I prepared to leave MITH. I hold a Ph.D. in English and a B.S. in Computer Science and have worked on Digital Humanities research projects since 2003.

Candidate statement: I believe the TEI is at a moment if important self-definition. For some years now we have struggled to achieve significant buy-in from both the technical and academic communities that do not identify as digital humanists. I believe the ideas outlined in former chair Martin Mueller’s 2011 letter represent a good starting point for a plan to make the TEI more relevant. Further, I would like to promote TEI as a space for trans-institutional development of tools that make use of the guidelines.

Responses to Questions on Strategic Issues

1. Should the TEI cease to collect membership fees, and cease to pay for meetings, publications, services, etc.? No. While the topic of the meetings, the use of funds, and the categories of membership might change, I believe the organization should have the ability to fund the activities of its members in a trans-institutional way.
2. Assuming paid membership continues. should institutional members have a choice between paying in cash and paying by supporting the travel of their employees to meetings, or committing time on salary to work on TEI problems? Committing cost-share on specific TEI problems should be accepted as payment for TEI membership. However, the problems and the work should be agreed upon in advance through negotiations with a institutional representative and the TEI council.
3. Should the TEI have individual members (paying or not) who can vote to elect people to the board and/or council? Yes.
4. Should the email discussions of the TEI Board be publicly accessible? There should be a public email list, but of course board members may conduct private business through private email. The default should be openness, though.
5. Should the Board and the Council be combined into a single body, with subsets of that group having the responsibilities now assigned to each separate group? Yes. Recent events have demonstrated the potential for a breakdown in communication between the board and the council. A single administrative body seems more rational. A treasury committee, accountable to the larger administration, can still allow those with interest in financial administration to shield the technical members from such work. However, we will need to develop incentives to participate in all necessary administrative functions (to ensure, for instance, that someone will want to handle travel reimbursements).
6. Assuming we continue to collect funds, we will still have limited resources. Given that, in the next two years, which of the following should be the TEI's highest priority? Pick only one: a) providing services that make it easy for scholars to publish and use TEI texts online b) providing workshops, training, and other on-ramp services that help people understand why they might want to use TEI and how to begin to do so c) encouraging the development of third-party tools for TEI users d) ensuring that large amounts of lightly but consistently encoded texts (e.g., TEI Tite) are generated and made publicly available, perhaps in a central repository or at least through some centrally coordinated portal e) developing a roadmap for P6 that positions the TEI in relation to other standards (HTML5, RDF, etc.) f) tackling hard problems not addressed in other encoding schemes, in order to maximize the expressive and interpretive power of TEI

   A) providing services that make it easy for scholars to publish and use TEI texts online

   The TEI needs to demonstrate the usefulness of the standard if it is to continue to exist. At the same time, these services will less likely to be used widely if they are tied too visibly to any one institution. I would strive to develop work packages that might be completed by programmers at individual institutions as a form of membership dues that could be used by scholars to make use of TEI texts.

   I have selected this option rather than the one for "third party tools" because I feel that these services must focus on end-user use of the TEI rather than TEI editing tools and that the tools should not be 3rd party (that is, should not be seen to belong to an organization other than the TEI.

Paul Schaffner

I would bring at least four assets to TEI Council:

1. I have had the privilege of serving on Council before, for one term (2007-2009), and found that I was good at reducing to their essentials the issues we were asked to address, and at considering them dispassionately, without perceptible bias except a predisposition to believe that those making the report or the request probably knew more about the matter than I did.
2. I have a foot in both the 'finicky markup' and the 'big data' camps, and will be glad to see both needs continue to be met by the TEI scheme and guidelines. I have worked both on small projects with specialized markup (e.g. the digitization of the Middle English Dictionary; extraction of bibliographic data from faculty CVs), and on very large text-corpus projects that emphasize creative application of a tiny subset of core elements (e.g. especially the TCP projects).
3. I have trained about sixty editors in the use of the TEI, and provided instructions indirectly to numerous keyers and encoders at contract data conversion firms, and therefore have first-hand knowledge of how readily (or not) TEI encoding is learned, of where the points of confusion most commonly lie, and of how important it is that the scheme be usable as well as elegant and flexible.
4. I have enjoyed fifteen years' full-time daily practical experience (and it has indeed been a pleasure as well as a challenge) applying TEI-based markup to a mountain of very heterogeneous material, as detailed below.

I run the e-text production shop at the University of Michigan Library's Digital Library Production Service. where I managed the "American Verse" project (1999); the conversion of the Middle English Dictionary and its associated bibliography and corpus of Middle English primary sources (1997-2000); and many smaller projects, mostly involving either transcription of, or extraction from, printed sources. I have spent most of the past ten 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) nearly 50,000 TEI-encoded books and a billion words, and hope to more than double those totals. Among them appears nearly every oddity of language, genre, glyph, character, 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 schemas, their customization, and their documentation and application); with workflow and metadata management; and with training. I daily supervise a staff of about 16 markup editors distributed amongst five centers in four countries; indirectly also the thousands of taggers and keyers employed by conversion firms who do the initial markup, trying hopefully to keep them all more or less consistent. 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 --a writer of modest and often jury-rigged scripts and style sheets--, 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.

Responses to Questions on Strategic Issues

I'm going to answer these out of order, and selectively.

Qu. 5. Should the Board and Council be combined?

Answ. No. For several reasons, among them: (1) Division of labo(u)r especially makes sense when it matches an existing division of aptitude. Though there of course are some who would be good in both positions, there are many more people who would be comfortable in one role to the exclusion of the other, and e.g. many people well-versed in the minutiae of markup who would be invaluable on Council, but would not stand for election if it meant taking on the responsibilities of a Board member as well. (2) To the extent that this change would involve shrinking the TEI Council, and diffusing its focus, I think it is a mistake, arising perhaps from a misunderstanding of how the Council actually works. The Council takes on all the requests and suggestions that come its way, whether they amount to a trickle or a torrent. To do the suggestions justice is a laborious business, requiring not only many hands, but diverse expertise. It helps to have someone on Council experienced (say) in manuscript description, and dictionary markup, and performance texts; users of light markup and dense; representatives of linguistic interests and those of librarians. The Council needs to bring the expertise of the TEI community to bear on a range of niggly questions that is as diverse as the uses to which TEI can be put: it needs to be reasonably large and representative. Fewer members would not be more efficient, it would simply mean more work spread among fewer people less able to judge the merits of the questions before them,

Qu. 1-4 are really "Board-level" questions, about which I have opinions but (as a Council candidate) thankfully no need to stake out a position. FWIW:

Qu. 1. Should the TEI cease to collect fees?

Answ. I have doubts about the viability of an organization without some reliable revenue stream. So my first thought is 'no,' though I would be happy to see the fee structure altered and the allocation of fees redirected to development rather than travel.

Qu. 2. Should institutions be able to pay in kind? (I paraphrase).

Answ. Only if the service rendered is one that is already budgeted for by TEI, otherwise there is no reliable revenue to allocate, and governance of the organization is effectively ceded to the institutional members.

Qu. 3. Should TEI individual members be able to vote?

Answ. For Council, surely yes. Not sure about Board.

Qu. 4. Should Board emails be made public?

Answ. Transparency almost always does more good than harm; all the projects I have been associated with have been exceptionally candid about their practices and failings. For one thing, most questions recur and it is very helpful to know that a given question has been discussed before, and what the arguments were. And of course, a secretive Board is one in which it is hard to have confidence. That said, it is hard to say simply 'yes' (which would in the end be my vote) without acknowledging that formal 'open meeting' rules of all sorts often generate unintended consequences in the form of evasion and anxiety rather than enlightenment. Should every email between two Board members be public? What if the conversation verges on Board matters? Will Board members be inclined to reticence if they know they are being recorded? Etc.

Qu. 6 Which [of the following] should be the TEI's highest priority?

Answ. "The TEI" is an ambiguous expression, since the TEI rarely speaks with one voice, nor should it. In the end, the organization should be open to the direction and initiative of its members. Strengthening the SIG system would be one step to ensure that this remains true. For the TEI Council the TEI is primarily a standards-creating organization, so their highest priority should be option (f) with due attention to (e): maintaining the expressive and interpretive power of TEI, while positioning it relative to complementary schemes. I would interpret the 'other standards' and 'other schemes' mentioned in these points to include not only external schemes but schismatic variants of TEI itself, all of which should be regarded ecumenically: as responding to real user needs, and as potential contributors to orthodox TEI. And I would interpret 'maintenance' to include not only changes in the scheme itself, but refinements to the examples, definitions, and descriptions that make the scheme actually usable and applicable to real texts.

This does not make options (a) - (d) negligible, quite the contrary, but they seem more like tasks for individual TEI projects to take on, and perhaps for the Board to encourage and foster, rather than priorities for Council.

Rebecca Welzenbach

Background: Based at the University of Michigan Library, I am the Project Outreach Librarian for the Text Creation Partnership (TCP), an initiative to create TEI-based editions of early print books corresponding to those in the Early English Books Online, Eighteenth Century Collections Online, and Evans Early American Imprints databases. My responsibilities include raising the profile of (and support for) our project around the world, helping scholars use the TCP texts, collaborating with complementary projects such as MONK and 18thConnect, and coordinating administration of the project with the production teams here at U of M and at Oxford.

From 2009-2011, I was digital publishing project manager in the MPublishing division of the University of Michigan Library, where I managed the ongoing publication of close to thirty e-journals and other scholarly projects published and hosted by the library. This included overseeing, documenting, and carrying out our publishing workflow, which consists of converting scholarly material from various native file formats to XML. I finished my MSI at the University of Michigan's School of Information in 2009 (with a focus in archives and records management).

I became involved with the TEI in 2009 when I helped Kevin Hawkins organize the TEI Members Meeting and Conference in Ann Arbor. I helped to review submissions to the conference that year and subsequently served on the Program Committee for the 2010 and 2011 members meetings. In 2010, I took a week-long introductory course to TEI at the Digital Humanities Observatory's Summer School in Dublin, Ireland. Since then, along with Kevin and Paul Schaffner, I have co-taught a series of day-long introductory TEI/XML workshops. In addition, since 2008, I have provided support to the editors of the Digital Medievalist journal by acting as reviews editor, and this year I am also an advisor and submissions reviewer for the Digital Humanities Summer Institute Colloquium.

Candidate Statement: I am very honored to be nominated to run for TEI Council. Relatively speaking, I am still very new to this community, and so would not bring to the Council the deep expertise or specialized skill sets that other nominees have. However, if elected, I would take very seriously the opportunity for apprenticeship in the TEI guidelines and service to this important group. I would bring to the Council the ability to capture and synthesize varying viewpoints, refine and shape rough ideas, and compose and edit documentation and other types of communication. In this way, I feel that I would be a useful voice on the Council even as I continue to learn the intricacies of the TEI from the other members.

Responses to Questions on Strategic Issues

1. Should the TEI cease to collect membership fees, and cease to pay for meetings, publications, services, etc.? Most organizations and scholarly societies collect membership fees to support their activities, so it seems perfectly appropriate for the TEI to continue to do so. I imagine that the TEI's significant contribution to putting on the annual conference (which is supplemented by sponsorships and funding from the local host) helps to level the playing field a bit, making it possible for institutions to host this event that otherwise might never be able to--I think that's a good thing.
2. Assuming paid membership continues. should institutional members have a choice between paying in cash and paying by supporting the travel of their employees to meetings, or committing time on salary to work on TEI problems? I like the idea that institutional members might commit paid staff time to work on TEI development as an alternative to paying cash, but I'm less convinced that paying for employees to attend meetings is the best use of membership fees. I think both would need to be negotiated on a case-by-case basis. In the first case, the nature of the work and the skills of the person who would be doing it should be clearly defined and well matched. In the second case, paying for employees to attend the conference might be worthwhile if the employee was a board or council member, or leading a SIG, workshop, etc. (that is, if his/her attendance at the meeting would have a significant impact on the event's success, and affect the experience of many other attendees). I would lean toward a policy that the TEI is open to discussing alternative means of payment, but I would avoid guaranteeing these options to every member.
3. Should the TEI have individual members (paying or not) who can vote to elect people to the board and/or council? I can't think of a good reason why not--it would be a shame if someone long involved in the governance of the TEI suddenly lost voting rights because of moving to a different institution or retiring.
4. Should the email discussions of the TEI Board be publicly accessible? Meeting minutes, agendas, and other official documents should be publicly accessible but I shrink from going down the road of seeking public access to all email discussions among the members of the board. What would the parameters be? (e.g., Would all messages using the board's email address be made open, but not if that address was not used?) Transparency is really important, but I'm not sure this is the way to go about it.
5. Should the Board and the Council be combined into a single body, with subsets of that group having the responsibilities now assigned to each separate group? I don't have an opinion about this, or good answer to this question, at this time.
6. Assuming we continue to collect funds, we will still have limited resources. Given that, in the next two years, which of the following should be the TEI's highest priority? Pick only one: a) providing services that make it easy for scholars to publish and use TEI texts online b) providing workshops, training, and other on-ramp services that help people understand why they might want to use TEI and how to begin to do so c) encouraging the development of third-party tools for TEI users d) ensuring that large amounts of lightly but consistently encoded texts (e.g., TEI Tite) are generated and made publicly available, perhaps in a central repository or at least through some centrally coordinated portal e) developing a roadmap for P6 that positions the TEI in relation to other standards (HTML5, RDF, etc.) f) tackling hard problems not addressed in other encoding schemes, in order to maximize the expressive and interpretive power of TEI

   I think the priority that both closely fits the mission of the TEI, and takes into account current developments and trends going on outside it is e) developing a roadmap for P6 that positions the TEI in relation to other standards (HTML5, RDF, etc.)

Board

Council