TEI-C Elections 2013

Michelle Dalmau

Background I am currently the Acting Head of Digital Collections Services for the Indiana University Libraries. As the unit title suggests, I manage several digital library services and initiatives including but not limited to: digital project consultations, digitization services, and electronic text services, and I engage in a great deal of outreach, teaching and training in these areas. Prior to assuming this position in 2013, I was the Digital Projects and Usability Librarian for the Indiana University Digital Library Program (DLP), where I was responsible for coordinating and managing digital library projects with a particular focus on electronic text projects as well as coordinating and leading user studies for the DLP and the greater Indiana University Bloomington Libraries. I have been professionally active in digital libraries and digital humanities initiatives, including the TEI, since 2002 when I joined the DLP. My undergraduate background is in English and Art History, and I hold a Master of Library Science and a Master of Information Science from Indiana University.

My research interests include: the integration of complex metadata structures into the discovery functionality of online collections; the pedagogic use of digital resources, especially text and image resources; and user-centered design and usability.

I am an active participant in the Text Encoding Initiative Consortium (TEI-C), of which the IU Libraries is a member, serving as an official IU representative, and as Co-Chair for the Special Interest Group (SIG) on Libraries, which I resurrected in 2007. Libraries, including ours, are champions of the TEI and use it as _the_ descriptive metadata standard for texts. As Co-Chair for the SIG, I advocate for the needs of academic libraries by encouraging discussions and lobbying for improvements to the TEI in support of text encoding practices in libraries. Most notably, I led the revamping of the Best Practices for TEI in Libraries, a set of guidelines and accompanying schemas that support text encoding and quality control in the context of academic libraries.

These are just a few ways in which I promote the TEI locally at Indiana University, and I look forward to extend my experience to the broader community of TEI users. And if that’s not enough, I am super organized and have experience running and serving on the board of a public art non-profit organization, Your Art Here (2005-2009). If I can successfully work on a board heavy with artists, I am confident I can effectively function on a board of TEIers.

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 the MA in Digital Humanities. 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 and my research is on digital scholarly editing.

Candidate Statement: 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 until 2013; I have also been deeply involved in the design and promotion of the new extensions for documentary and Genetic Editing. In the past two year I have served in the Board of Directors which I have chaired since July 2012.

The past two years of the TEI have been dominated by a deep revision of its governance. Such revision has brought us a new back-office and a new management of finances and memberships, along with a stronger recognition of the role of individual subscribers; a new composition of the Board and the Technical Council; a new and more democratic way to choose their respective Chairs, and a new way to manage the relationship between the two organs. These changes allow now for a new phase of the TEI, where it will be called to respond to the following challenges: (1) lower the threshold, in order to encourage an enlarged user-base; (2) demonstration of value; (3) support for publication of TEI-encoded files; (4) collaboration with tool developers; (5) revaluation of its strategic choices, in particular its exclusive adoption of XML. If elected to serve on the Board, I will commit to these challenges, in order to keep the TEI not only ‘healthy’, but at the cutting edge of the research in the Digital Humanities.

Fabio Ciotti

Background: I'm currently Assistant Professor (tenured) at the University of Roma Tor Vergata, where I teach Computing for Literary Studies: and Theory of Literature Previously I taught at the Universities of IULM Milano, Viterbo, Parma, Roma La Sapienza, Pavia. Most of my teaching activity has been and is about XML and TEI, to the knowledge of which in Italy I gave a significant contribution.

My scientific and research work has regarded various aspects and themes of Humanities and Literary Computing, both from the theoretical and the practical point of view: the applications of computational methods to the analysis of narrative texts; digital text encoding and representation; applications of XML and TEI technologies to literary computing; modeling and creation of digital libraries; applications of new media and computer mediated communication to Humanities research and teaching. Recently my research interests concern the application of Semantic Web principles and technologies to humanities digital libraries and textual corpora.

I've worked as scientific consultant for text encoding and technological infrastructures to diverse digital libraries and archives. The most relevant of them are big TEI based text archive, such as Biblioteca Italiana (Italian literary tradition) and DigilibLT (Late Latin tradition).

I am member of the board of the Associazione per l’Informatica Umanistica e la Cultura Digitale (AIUCD, the Italian digital humanities association) and editor of the association journal Umanistica Digitale; and of ICCU's Gruppo di lavoro e di ricerca sui metadati per i beni culturali (Research group on metadata for cultural heritage). On behalf of AIUCD I have been chair of the Local organization committee and member of Program Committee for the forthcoming TEI Conference 2013 in Roma.

Between my publications there is Il manuale TEI lite. Introduzione alla codifica elettronica dei testi letterari: (Bonnard, Milano 2005), which contained the Italian translation of TEI Lite: Encoding for Interchange: an introduction to the TEI.

James Cummings

James Cummings is the Senior Digital Research Specialist for the IT Services at the University of Oxford. He is a senior member of the Academic IT group; he works across a large range of TEI-related projects and provides research support on behalf of IT Services. James has served on the TEI Technical Council since 2005 and played an active role in the development of TEI P5. He has made feature requests and bug reports as well as implementing various feature requests and bug reports, on the TEI sourceforge site, as well as commenting on many others. James is currently the Chair of the TEI Technical Council and has viewed this role as being the servus servorum TEI (servant of the servants of the TEI). He has represented the Technical Council on the TEI Board and consistently supports more open and transparent representation (such as individual TEI subscribers being allowed to vote for the Technical Council). As part of this drive towards transparency he has encouraged a simplification of the Guidelines release process as the Council has moved to continuous integration servers (which rebuild the whole of the TEI infrastructure and release on every source code commit to the version control repository). He has also recently introduced a repository 'freezing' stage to the release process which gives both the Technical Council and TEI community a chance to review and check the main deliverables of a release, hopefully leading to fewer last minute changes. Developments such as these mean that the TEI Technical Council has moved from only having a select few being able to make a release to any agreed release technician being able to manage the release following the now documented release process. In order to facilitate greater community interaction, James was partly responsible for convincing the TEI Technical Council that the tei-council mailing list archives should be publicly available, and as a result you are able to see some of his (and others') contributions (e.g. 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013) by browsing the archives by author. He has been responsible for the creation of the TEI Newsfeed system which takes the TEI Wordpress blog and transforms it into a list of headlines and news page, as well as feeding the @TEIconsortium twitter account. James helped to set up the TEI wiki where he is one of the administrators and a frequent contributor.

James is tireless in promoting the TEI through advice, consultation, research projects, teaching, answering queries on TEI-L, academic publications, and his blog. He is director of the annual Digital.Humanities @ Oxford Summer School. He also teaches both introductory and advanced workshops on TEI and related technologies (such as XSLT and XQuery) to a wide range of audiences. His Ph.D. is in medieval studies and involved a significant amount of archival transcription. This led to an interest in the relationship of medieval manuscripts to their TEI-encoded digital surrogates. He was an elected member and director of the executive board (2004-2012; Director, 2009-2012) of the Digital Medievalist project, which encourages best practice in digital resource creation for medieval studies.

If re-elected James would continue to support and encourage the TEI Technical Council in its desired move towards an even more resilient open source model.

Stephanie Gehrke

I am honoured by the nomination to election for the TEI technical council. Although I have expertise in interoperability between metadata formats and in the semantic approach I would not consider myself a core TEI expert. During my projects I always was concerned with practical aspects of metadata creation, finding the best solution to allow for the later use of the encoded metadata. From that perspective I accept the nomination.

Biographical notes: Originally I received degrees in Scandinavian studies with an emphasis on intercultural communication and in Theology. After having started to work at the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, a German research library, I got introduced to digital humanities in my second project at the HAB, working on transcriptions and encodings for medieval manuscripts. The next step was the participation in the project Europeana Regia, a joined effort of five European libraries to make the manuscript collections of Charles V of France, the Aragonese Kings of Naples and the "Bibliotheca Carolina" available in the Europeana portal. Half way through the project I became responsible for the WP3 (provision, integration and updating of metadata). The main objective was the creation of homogenous metadata from various sources and supporting the participating libraries in their way to achieve high quality and harmonized metadata. To achieve this I implemented a modular reference transformation, transforming e.g. TEI to ESE.

Currently I work for the Biblissima Project as responsible for the metadata coordination for the portal. The emphasis here extents to semantic features including FRBRoo / CIDOC-CRM as well as the extraction of more information from the sources for the display of the digital facsimile and the handling of annotations (Shared Canvas).

In all these projects I enjoyed working in a team. I believe that also complex problems can be solved by pragmatic solutions without simplifications. My participation in the TEI Technical Council work would focus on interoperability.

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 (The Map of Early Modern London, Le mariage sous L'Ancien Régime). I've also written a TEI authoring tool, the Image Markup Tool.

I've been a member of Council since 2009, and previously focused on image markup, bibliography encoding, and markup practices and schemas for born-digital documents. I'm currently leading the Text Directionality Workgroup, which will produce a new section of the Guidelines with recommendations for encoding texts containing languages written right-to-left or top-to-bottom. I've also been heavily involved in formalizing and documenting the TEI release process, building up a set of instructions that make it possible for new TEI versions to be created and released by a broader range of Council members than was previously possible, and there is much more work to be done there.

I've recently been working on improving the user-friendliness and functionality of the online Guidelines, creating a single simplified home page for the last release, and adding a popup footnote display feature which will be in the next. I'd like to do more work in this area, including adding a citation tool ("Cite this page"), providing a variety of different citation formats.

I also run one of the two Jenkins Continuous Integration Servers for the TEI (http://teijenkins.hcmc.uvic.ca). Along with a similar server in Oxford, this builds and tests the TEI products from our code repositories. I maintain a build script that enables anyone to create a TEI Jenkins server like the ones we use. This is currently based on the 2012 Ubuntu Server Long Term Support release; I look forward to creating a new version based on the upcoming 2014 LTS if I'm re-elected.

My institution is a member of the TEI and has been a strong supporter of my work on Council, so I am able to attend Council meetings and commit regular time to Council work.

Martin de la Iglesia

I am a metadata librarian at Göttingen State and University Library, Germany. After obtaining my MA in Art History and Library Science from Humboldt University Berlin in 2007, I worked as an information specialist and librarian at the Max Planck Society (where I first gained work experience with TEI data) and at ZBW: Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (in a project related to the EconStor repository). In 2011 I came to Göttingen to work as a ‘metadata expert’ on the project Genetic-critical and annotated hybrid-edition of Theodor Fontane's notebooks based on a virtual research environment ( http://www.uni-goettingen.de/en/303691.html ). The project is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and carried out by the Theodor Fontane Research Centre at the University of Göttingen in cooperation with Göttingen State and University Library, in which I'm part of the Metadata and Data Conversion group.

In this project, which is scheduled to run until 2017, we're trying to reproduce as many aspects of Fontane's complex handwriting as possible by using intricate and extensive TEI P5 markup. My task in the project is to cast our philological edition principles into a customised TEI rules subset. In addition to my librarian ‘day job’, I'm also studying towards a PhD in Art History at Heidelberg University, in the area of comics research, and I'm happy to bring that perspective to the TEI too. One result of that perspective is my work for the TEI Text & Graphics SIG, of which I was appointed convenor in 2013. As all of my job is in some way or other related to TEI code, I have quickly become proficient in the TEI language, and I'm able to devote my time and undivided attention to TEI activities.

Alexei Lavrentev

Background: I am a research engineer at ICAR Research Laboratory (CNRS and Lyon University, France). I am member of Digital Medievalist executive board (since 2012), and the French CAHIER Consortium steering committee.

My PhD thesis in French Linguistics (École normale supérieure de Lyon, France, 2009) was dedicated to the study of medieval French punctuation and was based on a corpus of multi-layer TEI-XML transcriptions of manuscripts and incunabula.

I was involved in the Princeton Charrette Project (2002-2006) and in the Saint-Petersburg Hagiography Corpus (2004). Since 2004, I have been working on the BFM Old French Corpus and on various related research and publication projects. I am responsible for the TEI encoding of the BFM texts, for their linguistic annotation and for providing user access to them. I manage the BFM public website and the new web portal for text query and analysis. I am also a co-editor (with Christiane Marchello-Nizia) of the Queste del Saint Graal online edition.

I have taught TEI at a number of tutorials and workshops in Russia and in France since 2006.

As a researcher, I am particularly interested in combining rich TEI philological markup with linguistic annotation and indexing, both "manual" and using NLP tools. This work is closely related to my involvement in the development of the TXM open source corpus search and analysis platform which uses (extended) TEI as its "native" format for corpus encoding.

Jens Østergaard Petersen

I have a background in classical Chinese studies and am part of a small DH department in Heidelberg University. My current TEI project is an attempt to develop an editor for TEI in which inline markup is stored as standoff markup. Concerned with the need for tools to make TEI an integral part of the research process, my focus is on XML databases and XQuery. I see a need for the TEI to be made operable by a larger section of the humanities and a need to integrate research perspectives (literary, rhetorical, linguistic) in tools utilising and elaborating TEI documents.

Paul Schaffner

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 twelve 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 60,000 TEI-encoded books and more than a billion words, and hope to 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 several countries; indirectly also the hundreds 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.

Peter Stadler

Biographical Description I am a research assistant with the Carl-Maria-von-Weber-Gesamtausgabe since 2009 where my main focus is on our digital edition of Weber's letters, diaries and writings. Hence my daily work is full of angle brackets and a lot of X-Technologies around it. I am concerned with a broad spectrum of tasks: text analysis and concepts of text encoding, creation and documentation of appropriate XML schemata with ODD, and presentation of our TEI files on the web (based on eXist and XQuery).

I am involved with the TEI since 2008 as convener of the SIG Correspondence which involves consulting for several scholarly projects dealing with correspondence material. Furthermore I have been regularly teaching TEI courses during our annual Summer School at the University of Paderborn, Germany.

Having received an MA in Musicology and Computational Linguistics from the University of Heidelberg, Germany, I see myself as a ‘Digital Humanist’ with a great interest in the whole range of texts and methods applied to texts. Additionally my department runs several other projects through which I am in close connection with the development of the MEI standard as well as DARIAH and TextGrid where I keep in touch with large scale infrastructure projects.

Candidate Statement I believe that the current Council is doing a great job in maintaining and developing the technical infrastructure of the TEI guidelines. Since I am already familiar with organizational things like the TEI@sourceforge version control system as well as the technical infrastructure from ODD to TEI I hope to mesh with other Council members well. My main concern would be to not to fall behind the current status quo and to enhance ODD and Roma.

Brian Pytlik Zillig

I am Professor and Digital Initiatives Librarian at the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities (CDRH) at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. I have been involved in digital humanities for more than a decade, working on numerous projects, including the Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition Online and the Walt Whitman Archive, and am the creator of TokenX and co-creator of Abbot. I have received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

For the Metadata Offer New Knowledge (MONK) Project, Stephen Ramsay, Martin Mueller, and I created a command-line file conversion application, Abbot, which transforms variant TEI/XML texts into a common interoperable format called TEI-Analytics. As principal investigator for the current Mellon-funded Abbot (2.0) Project, I provide project management and XSLT programming experience, as well as the skills and perspective of a professional academic librarian. My professional activities involve programming, prototype development, Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), data animation, algorithmic XSLT code generation, and XML transformation.

I am the creator of TokenX a licensed open-source application for text analysis. TokenX is designed to provide an easy-to-use interface for text analysis, visualization, deformation, and creative exploration.

I served as co-manager of the Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition Online (funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities), and developed the first XML search and the XSLT stylesheets for that project. I created the XSLT stylesheets for various Walt Whitman Archive projects, including the American editions of Leaves of Grass, Horace Traubel's With Walt Whitman in Camden, and the Whitman periodicals project. Moreover, I developed the XSLT stylesheet that dynamically generates, from several-hundred component files, the Integrated Guide to Walt Whitman's Poetry Manuscripts.

My most recent work has been to build Indigo, a moviemaker application that creates movies of text analysis findings drawn from TEI text corpora. Individual frames from this work were printed onto fabric for the 2012 UNL Biennial Runway show, The Power of Fashion. Twenty ‘text analysis’ garments were created and featured before a sold-out audience. The runway show also featured my six-minute video Attired in Beauty, which was created with my software. That video sought to explore and present new ways -- using color, motion, and opacity -- to represent n-gram sequences drawn from the TEI files provided by the Willa Cather Archive and the Walt Whitman Archive. I recently had an invited animation piece, Containment, appearing in a show at the Tugboat Gallery in Lincoln, along with works by four other artists.

At the 2013 TEI Member's Meeting I will co-present (with Brett Barney) TEI at Thirty Frames Per Second: Animating Textual Data from TEI Documents using XSLT and SVG. This paper will accompany a short animated film, created using my Indigo software prototype.