TEI-C Elections 2015

Deborah Anderson

Biographical statement I am a Researcher in the Department of Linguistics at UC Berkeley and hold a Ph.D. from UCLA in Indo-European Studies (emphasis: linguistics).

Since 2002 I have run the Script Encoding Initiative at UC Berkeley, a project that works with users to get characters and scripts into the Unicode Standard. I am also a Unicode Technical Director and represent UC Berkeley in Unicode Technical Committee meetings, and am on the Unicode Editorial Board. One of my roles in Unicode is to represent the users who typically don’t attend the meetings – be they minority language users and/or academics – and to make sure the Unicode Standard text and its website are (relatively) understandable.

In addition, I serve as a US National Body representative to the ISO subcommittee devoted to coded character sets. The ISO work involves actively working with various communities, explaining the technical aspects of the standard (and ISO voting mechanism), and trying to help reach consensus on outstanding issues.

While the focus of my work is on character encoding, the work also bumps up against mark-up and TEI.

In years past, I organized a meeting on characters in 2001 on the TEI Guidelines on Characters and Character sets (Oct. 2001). More recently, I was a member of the Text Directionality Workgroup which contributed a new section to the Guidelines.

Candidate’s Statement As a candidate for the TEI Technical Council, I would be to bring my expertise on character encoding to the Guidelines, making sure the text relating to Unicode (and its related specifications) is current. A second goal would be to help make sure the Guidelines are readable, especially for beginners. My third goal would be to try to reach out and engage with communities who may not be using TEI – or even know about it – and try to bring them into the fold. From my own work, I know of several ongoing digitization projects in Asia where text encoding has not yet been adopted.

Elisa Beshero-Bondar

Biographical statement I am a teaching professor and textual scholar in the Humanities Division of The University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg, where I enjoy strong institutional support of my work with TEI for educating students, training colleagues, and engaging in collaborative research. My work with the TEI has led me to launch and direct multiple projects that address research questions on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary production and translation methods. The Digital Mitford is the largest of these projects, now engaging twenty researchers and students from three university campuses in editing the writings of Mary Russell Mitford, including about 2,000 letters together with poetry, drama, and prose fiction and extensive prosopography development. My most technically ambitious projects involve the epic poems and prose translations of Robert Southey, working at the intersections of British Romanticism, Pacific voyage narratives, English translation of Renaissance Spanish, genre theory, mapping, and network analysis. Each of my projects has engaged me in intensive discussions with collaborators on how best to apply the TEI P5 to identify and model conflicting structural and semantic units of text. I am experienced, too, in teaching students to code with XML and TEI, as well as XSLT and XQuery, and at my home institution, I have coauthored and now help to supervise an interdisciplinary undergraduate certificate program in digital studies in which students gain experience with project development that involves XML coding and data analysis.

Candidate’s Statement My work with the TEI is fueled by discussion and debate--a dialogic process that drives my learning and refines my collaborative projects. My delight in learning from and debating with generous friends and peers in the TEI community makes me very grateful indeed to be nominated for election to the Technical Council. I am eager to join the discussions of the Council to address best practices and contribute substantively to the refinement of P5 and the development of a P6. I am especially interested in helping to refine modules that support alignment of variant texts and computational analysis of prosody, and as I am new to the Council I expect to learn much from those with longer experience in the community on these and other topics. My own skills and experience perhaps best prepare me to help with the writing the Council must do to provide clear documentation of markup, and to discuss how best to help new users to navigate, learn from, and adapt the many options the TEI Guidelines offer. I am eager to lend my voice to the Council discussion and to documenting the ongoing evolution of the Guidelines.

Alejandro Bia

Biographical statement: Alejandro Bia is a faculty member of the Department of Statistics, Mathematics and Computer Science and a researcher at the Operations Research Center (CIO), both at the Miguel Hernández University (Spain). He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Alicante, a MSc and a BS in Computer Science from ORT University, a Diploma in Computing and Information Systems from Oxford University, and a Diploma in Technological Innovation in Education from the Miguel Hernández University.

He has also lectured for the Cultural Heritage Digitization Course at FUNED (2013-2015), the Master in Digital Humanities (2005-2011), and the Master in Web Technology (2005-2007), at the University of Castilla La Mancha, for the Department of Languages and Information Systems (2002-2004) and the Department of Fundamentals of Economic Analysis (2002) of the University of Alicante, and at ORT University (1990-1996).

He is a frequent instructor of XML-TEI workshops and seminars in, Germany, India, Italy, Mexico, Spain, Switzerland and United Kingdom.

His lecture topics are: text markup using XML and TEI, web application design, digital libraries, software engineering, project management, cibercrime, computer forensics, information security, concurrent programming, operating systems, computer architecture, computer networks and English for computer sciences.

He has participated in several publicly funded projects: the TRACEsofTools project (principal researcher): software tools for contrastive text analysis in parallel bilingual corpus (2013-2016), the Digital Humanities Workbench (DHW) project (2012-2013), the Atenea project (University of Málaga, 2009-2012), the Bibliotheca Europa project (University of Alicante, 2006-2008), for the National Library of Spain (as consultant, 2005) and the in the METAe: Metadata Engine project (EU funded, 2000-2003).

From 1999 to 2004, he has been Head of Research and Development of the Miguel de Cervantes Digital Library at the University of Alicante, the biggest digital library of Spanish literary works and one of the first projects to use TEI in XML format. Previously, he has worked as Special-Projects Manager at NetGate (1996), and as Documentation Editor of the GeneXus project at ARTech (Advanced Research and Technology) (1991-1994).

Candidate's statement Perhaps the most important goal will be to broaden the use of TEI in ways similar to how HTML has been introduced and widespread: e.g., by direct encoding, by simplified encoding (wiki markup and development environments) and by automatic means (code generation, transformations, database handling). This means targeting the TEI towards different types of users with different needs and skills. This strategy implies to flatten the learning curve for beginners by lowering the access barriers for working with TEI, on one side, and to enhance the productivity of power-users by providing ready-made power tools, on the other. In the end, to make it more appealing and time-cost effective to both sides of the user range.

If elected, I would apply my 16 years' experience of working with TEI, my enthusiasm for teaching it and my likes for simplification and minimalism into the Council, to further spread TEI usage.

I could also help spread the TEI in the Spanish speaking world, where DH is gaining momentum.

I will have some institutional support in the provision of time and partial funding for activities such as meetings.

Constance Crompton

Biographical statement: I am an Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities at the University of British Columbia's Okanagan Campus. I serve as the associate director of the Digital Humanities Summer Institute and as Digital Dissemination Coordinator for the Victorian Review (Canada's only peer-reviewed Victorian Studies journal). My work has been published in the Victorian Review, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, and The UBC Law Review, and is forthcoming Digital Humanities Quarterly.

I've been involved in several TEI-encoding projects since 2007, including The Yellow Nineties Online, The Social Edition of the Devonshire Manuscript, and, most recently, the Lesbian and Gay Liberation in Canada project (which I co-direct with Michelle Schwartz of Ryerson University). For the last four years, I have team-taught the TEI at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute. I also teach textual editing via TEI at UBC Okanagan. I have a keen research interest in prosopographic best practice, an interest which I've pursued as the co-lead of the Canadian Research Writing Collaboratory's Prosopography Working Group and one which I hope would be of service to the TEI Technical Council. If granted membership, I would also be very glad to continue the good work that the Council has done in the previous decade to make the TEI Guidelines more user-friendly.

Candidate's statement I am very glad to be considered for TEI Technical Council membership. UBC Okanagan supports the time involved in a service commitment of this kind.

James Cummings

Biographical statement: I am the Senior Academic Research Technology Specialist for IT Services at the University of Oxford. I am a senior member of the Academic IT group and work across a large range of TEI-related projects whilst also providing digital research support on behalf of IT Services. As part of this post I am the founder and a director of the extremely popular Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School. My Ph.D. is in medieval studies and involved a significant amount of archival transcription of documents in 14th-16th Century English and Latin. I 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. I founded, and continue to administrate, the grass-roots openly nominated and openly voted annual DH Awards. I am the University of Oxford supervisor for the Marie Curie Initial Training Network: 'DiXiT' on the creation and publishing of digital scholarly editions. As a member of the TEI Simple project I’m working to add its method of documenting intended processing models to the TEI Guidelines. I work hard in promoting the TEI through advice, consultation, research projects, teaching, answering queries on TEI-L, academic publications, conference papers, twitter, and occasionally my blog. I’m regularly asked to speak about TEI activities and projects and present at the Digital Humanities and TEI conferences. As well as giving more general keynotes and invited lectures, I teach both introductory and advanced workshops on XML, TEI, XPath, XSLT, XQuery and related technologies, often to a wide range of audiences.

Candidate's statement: I have served on the TEI Technical Council since 2005 and was recently chair (until January 2015). I have played an active role in the development and maintenance of TEI P5 and its surrounding infrastructure. Along with the rest of the TEI Technical Council I work hard to demystify its technical infrastructure, for example, the releases of the Guidelines (and associated materials) can now be made by any member of the TEI Technical Council (or other approved person) by following a detailed series of instructions for building a release. These changes, and the greater use of continuous integration servers, were developed during my tenure as Chair of the TEI Technical Council. In order to facilitate greater community interaction, I was partly responsible for convincing the TEI Technical Council that the tei-council mailing list archives should be publicly available. I was responsible for creating the TEI Newsfeed / Wordpress blog system, setting up the @TEIconsortium twitter account, TEI wiki and other outreach activities (for example, I organised and ran a TEI Hackathon workshop at this year's DH 2015 conference). However, the TEI Technical Council is undergoing a period of change, as it contemplates moving from SourceForge to GitHub and attempts to expand the representation of the community on the TEI Technical Council. Since the departure from the Council last year of one of the authors of much of the TEI's technical infrastructure (Sebastian Rahtz) there has been an increased need for documentation and maintenance of these systems. Although I personally nominated many of those standing on this year’s TEI election slate, I feel that it would also be useful to maintain a certain number of mentors to help and guide those new to the technical infrastructure of the TEI. The University of Oxford has been a long-term supporter of the TEI since its creation, and I wish to continue that involvement. If re-elected I would not only continue the drive towards an even more resilient open source model for all TEI Technical Council work, but would assist new members to document and understand these systems.

Stefan Dumont

Biographical Statement: I studied history, politics and public law in Mainz (Germany) and Dijon (France). During my studies, I worked as a web programmer and designer for several research institutes. Since 2011, I have been a research assistant at the TELOTA initiative at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BBAW). In my job I am developing for and consulting different research projects of the BBAW, especially projects concerning digital critical editions of different text types (letters, diaries, lectures etc.). The key technologies for my daily work are TEI-XML, XQuery, XSLT, and eXist-db. Together with a colleague I created - besides the TEI based schemata themselves - a working and publishing environment for TEI encoded digital scholarly editions called 'ediarum' which we presented at the TEI Members Meeting 2013 in Rome.

Since last year, I’ve also developed the web service 'correspSearch' in cooperation with other members of the TEI Correspondence SIG. correspSearch is a web service with website and API which is based on the new TEI element correspDesc and which offers the possibility to connect and search multiple scholarly letter editions at once.

Besides, together with a colleague, I teach an XML, TEI, and XSLT course for students of editorial studies at the Freie Universität Berlin.

Candidate’s Statement: I would like to support the TEI and its community in the council from the perspective of "applied TEI", i.e. I am especially interested in questions of applicability, usability, and processability of TEI encoding.

Greta Franzini

Biographical Statement: I am a Classicist by training. I am currently pursuing a PhD at the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities (https://www.ucl.ac.uk/dh), University of London. There, I conduct interdisciplinary research in Latin philology, codicology, literary criticism and text visualisation. Part of my doctoral studies has resulted in the creation of a Catalogue of Digital Editions (https://sites.google.com/site/digitaleds/home) and the final output of my PhD will consist of an EpiDoc TEI-encoded digital documentary edition of an early Latin manuscript (https://sites.google.com/site/gretafranzini/home). At UCLDH, I have worked as a teaching assistant for the XML module of the MA/MSc Programme (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/dh/courses/mamsc). As well as working on my PhD, I am employed as a fulltime early career researcher (http://etrap.gcdh.de) at the Göttingen Centre for Digital Humanities (GCDH) (http://www.gcdh.de/en/), University of Göttingen. There, I'm involved in research pertaining to historical text reuse and advise on projects and theses of students looking to work with digital editions and TEI. Prior to Göttingen, I worked as part of the Open Greek and Latin Project (http://www.dh.uni-leipzig.de/wo/projects/open-greek-and-latin-project/) at the University of Leipzig, where I coordinated three major digitisation projects aimed at producing open digital versions of a large number of Ancient Greek and Latin printed editions, and for which I comodelled the underlying TEI structure.

Candidate's Statement: If elected, my immediate interest would be to serve as a mediator between smaller TEI-based projects and large-scale encoding efforts, such as the Open Greek and Latin project, in order to raise awareness of the different TEI interests and schemes and how these affect related research. My perception, in fact, is one of an interoperability and communication disconnect between the practices of humanists, who encode text to facilitate philological enquiries, and developers or computer scientists, who seek to automatically query texts and large datasets with minimal preprocessing.

Secondly, and with my experience in versioning systems, I would assist with the necessary and important upcoming migration of the TEI repository from Sourceforge to a new location, while ensuring minimal disruption to TEI users.

And finally, I would encourage an agenda to include the teaching and wider dissemination of the TEI – either as seminars, modules or individual classes – in Digital Humanities programmes (starting with my home institution) as a means of narrowing the gap between Information Technology and the Humanities.

Susanne Haaf

Biographical Statement: Since I finished my studies of German philology and Computational Linguistics I have been working in different projects with a focus on editorial studies, corpus linguistics and the TEI Guidelines, their application, possibilities and limitations in different usage scenarios.

I have been a research assistant at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities since 2010, working for the projects »Deutsches Textarchiv« (German Text Archive) and CLARIN-D. Within the DTA project we developed a TEI format for the homogeneous annotation of large (historical) corpora, the »DTA Base Format« (DTABf). I have been in charge of its maintenance, formalization (ODD, Schematron), further development and documentation. The DTABf was taken into account during the creation of TEI Simple and I have been a member of the TEI Simple Advisory Board.

Previous works, esp. on the edition of Martin Bucer's writings on religious policy of 1545/46, helped me gain experiences with approaches and challenges of text edition.

Besides these occupations I have been teaching classes about digital edition methods, corpus linguistics and the usage of the TEI at different universities and summer schools.

Candidate’s Statement: I have been a user of the TEI for some years now, benefiting from the guidelines and various adjacent services provided by the TEI. To help preserve its status as an important resource for scholars of text-based disciplines I would now like to contribute to the maintenance and further development of the TEI actively. In addition, I am curious to join in on discussions about current and future challenges of the TEI (e.g. interoperability issues, ways to further disseminate the TEI, etc.) and how we could address them.

Diane Jakacki

Biographical Statement: Diane Jakacki is the Digital Scholarship Coordinator and Faculty Teaching Associate in Comparative Humanities at Bucknell University, where she explores and institutes new ways in which Digital Humanities tools and methodologies can be leveraged in research and teaching in an undergraduate liberal arts environment. She earned her PhD at the University of Waterloo, and was a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She is the Technical Director of the Internet Shakespeare Editions, and serves on the editorial and pedagogy advisory boards for the Map of Early Modern London project. She also serves on the Records of Early English Drama's Digital Advisory Committee. She is an assistant director of DHSI, where she teaches the Digital Pedagogy course. She is currently Vice-Chair of the DH2016 Program Committee and will chair the Program Committee for DH2017. She publishes widely on the intersection of digital humanities and early modern studies, is currently editing King Henry VIII for the Internet Shakespeare Editions and When You See Me You Know Me for the Digital Renaissance Editions. Her XML:ID for MoEML and ISE is JAKA1.

Candidate’s Statement: My interest in serving on the TEI Technical Council stems from the work I’m doing with Martin Holmes and Janelle Jenstad at MoEML and ISE, finding ways to encourage interoperability across discrete research projects and thereby find ways to encourage and establish previously unwieldy or impossible intersections for scholars engaged in complementary forms of research. The model we are developing (currently titled LEMDO - Linked Early Modern Data Online) builds from the work that Martin has done with MoEML. I believe strongly in the policy embraced at MoEML - which I am in the process of instituting at ISE - of making TEI markup openly available as part of the published edition.

I am currently also working with James Cummings to find ways to establish a TEI-rooted digital resource for the Records of Early English Drama. Our goal is to establish at a record level a schema and work process that will bring 17,000 pages of print-published archival documents, associated bibliographical and editorial materials in line with new born-digital projects. By this means we hope to ensure publication stability and an opportunity for scholars to engage with records in ways that respond to individual research needs - in essence and ideally producing a significant number of custom “editions”.

I am particularly interested in finding ways to incorporate TEI-based forms of close reading at an undergraduate level and have already successfully taught two first-year courses that involve rich integrations of TEI markup of 17th and 19th century archival materials.

I hope that participation in the TEI Technical Council will help me to learn more about how TEI can be used expansively and proactively.

Tiziana Mancinelli

Biographical Statement: I hold a PhD in Digital Humanities from the University of Reading, in which I completed a dissertation on a scholarly digital edition of a contemporary Italian epic poem (2014). Under the supervision of Elena Pierazzo, I gained competence and experience in XML-related languages such as Xslt/Xpath in order to retrieve and visualise the metadata included in the annotation phase. Prior to this, I undertook research in the field of Scholarly Digital Editions and text analysis encoding, under the supervision of Giuseppe Gigliozzi (1999-2002).

I have developed an in depth knowledge of TEI, which I used when collaborating with the Centro Ricerche Informatica e Letteratura (CRILet) at La Sapienza University in Rome, as well as when encoding large corpora of Italian Literature texts for other online library projects, such as Biblioteca Italiana Online (www.interculturale.it). Through training courses, conferences and meetings I have learnt many programing languages and kept up-to-date with the latest web developments. I have also led many workshops on the introduction of TEI and methodologies for representing the digital text.

I am currently working as a Technical Assistant with Progetto Mambrino- http://www.mambrino.it/ –- at the University of Verona, in which I am helping to create a digital archive of Italian translations of sixth century Spanish chivalry poems. I am also part of a community of young scholars contributing to the Fonte Gaia project in Grenoble, which is creating a blog-discussion on Digital Humanities.

Candidate’s Statement: I would be honored to work and contribute to the TEI consortium.I have a long academic and non- academic experience of working in teams and online, and have had an active interest in and involvement with the use of TEI since 1999, enabling me to follow its improvements. I am confident that I would be able to contribute both technically and theoretically to the development of TEI if I were elected to the TEI council. During my PhD, under the supervision of Elena Pierazzo, I gained more competence and experience in XML-related languages such as Xslt/Xpath in order to retrieve and visualise the metadata included in the previous phase.

My current research studies are focused on Semantic Web and Linked data, and so I would be keen to develop the use of RDF and existing ontologies in relation to this field. Another of my key research interests is the way in which online tools are written to support editors in the process of annotation through automatically generating RDF/OWL documents and importing ontologies and linked data. I am also very interested in programming languages (Python, PHP, Json, Jquery) and the creation of tools for TEI corpora and resources.

I would also like to contribute to the TEI consortium on more theoretical and technical issues, particularly concerning gender and post-colonial studies as well as on web-accessibility considerations with regards to the making of digital editions.

My experience coupled with my high degree of motivation and passion for this project would make me a committed and productive member of the TEI consortium. I would be thrilled at the opportunity to contribute and share my skills and ideas with this important community.

Elli Mylonas

Biographical Statement: I am currently the Senior Digital Humanities Librarian in the Brown University Library, and part of the Center for Digital Scholarship, a library group which works on digital projects with members of the Brown community, participates in activities to increase the knowledge and adoption of digital methods and develops infrastructure to support these goals. I manage and participate in a variety of projects, but my main expertise lies in working with textual materials - identifying appropriate metadata structures, encoding text and transforming it into appropriate output formats using TEI and other data structures. My academic background is in Classics, in which I almost completed a dissertation on Latin Literature.

I have been involved with text encoding from the pre-historic days of SGML and with TEI since its inception, as a member of several of the original working groups. My involvement with text encoding and the TEI is ongoing. I am currently providing technical support to two corpora of ancient inscriptions - US Epigraphy and Inscriptions of Israel/Palestine both of which use the Epidoc customization of TEI for encoding inscriptions and other inscribed ancient texts. I've also been active in the development and maintenance of the Epidoc schema and Guidelines . In addition to these two epigraphic projects, which are heavily invested in the TEI, I work on on a variety of other DH projects, many of which rely on structured data - so I am often engaged in figuring out how to use the right model in the right place. In some cases, this amounts to an unconventional use of TEI - for example encoding detailed metadata, but only partially capturing the body of a text. I am increasingly working on DH projects that require encoding text in non-Roman languages such as Hebrew or Arabic.

I served one term on TEI council already (2013-2014). During that time, I learned to navigate the basic mechanisms used to maintain and improve the TEI. I was responsible for organizing the first TEI hackathon which took place at DH2014 in Lausanne. It was was well attended and the participants as well as the organizers learned a great deal about coding approaches to TEI and applications for TEI data and tools. The TEI subsequently organized a second hackathon at DH2015. During my term on Council. I appreciated the significance of the bugs and features requests that are submitted by the TEI community - and how important these are for the continued growth and usability of the schema and guidelines. However, I also appreciated the larger additions and modifications that come from SIGs or other work groups. I also served as liaison to a group of Greek TEI users who volunteered to create a Greek translation. I would like to serve at least one more term on the TEI technical council, in order to build on the knowledge and work flows that I am already familiar with.

Candidate’s Statement: The TEI is an important part of many DH activities, and discipline- or usage-specific customizations like TEI Simple and Epidoc are making it more so, primarily because they have their own communities, documentation and tool chains. However, TEI could be a still greater part of more DH activities, and it could be better integrated into other popular DH tools. I would like to balance the more responsive corrections and additions that are a large part of the TEI Council's responsibility with more outreach, and strategic planning for future directions. In addition, in order for the TEI to be adopted by emerging international DH communities, it will be important to address the problem of multilingual versions of the guidelines and element specifications. This will be require both organizational and technical efforts.

Henriette Roued-Cunliffe

Biographical Statement: Henriette Roued-Cunliffe is a graduate (DPhil) from the University of Oxford and recently appointed Assistant Professor at the Royal School of Library and Information Science (RSLIS). She has previously held a research position at the Institut für Indologie und Tibetologie, Ludwig‐Maximilians‐Universität, Munich. She has a background in archaeological computing and the development of IT tools used in the reading of handwritten documents. She is an active participant and reviewer in the fields of digital humanities, archaeological computing and text encoding. Her research interest focuses on autodidact information behaviour, cultural heritage and Do-It-Yourself (DIY) culture, as well as IT tools and data sharing in- and outside of cultural institutions.

Candidate’s Statement: I have a great passion for heritage/humanities data, in whatever shape, size or format and believe that by enabling it to be shared openly we are better able to disseminate this material in a multitude of different ways to a much larger audience. I have good experience with TEI encoding as a way to make humanities material more openly accessible via the internet. Doing this opens up for the possibility that different parts of DIY culture can use these datasets in new ways.

My motivation for standing for election for the TEI council is mainly to be involved with tools for sharing TEI encoded datasets via APIs as well as tools for automated encoding of such datasets. I have previously developed the tools in questions and used them on the new website for the Vindolanda Tablets (http://vto2.classics.ox.ac.uk/) using the EpiDoc subset of TEI.

Paul Schaffner

Biographical Statement: 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 sixteen years managing the three Text Creation Partnership (TCP) projects, which have together produced a significant corpus of nearly 75,000 titles. Among them appears nearly every oddity of language, genre, glyph, character, and format that early modern authors and printers could devise. Next year I hope to be moving into slightly different challenges involving dynamic (never-completed) output rather than the production of static resources: cloud-sourced lexicography and the assignment of responsibility and reliability tokens to every piece of every entry.

"Managing" projects like TCP has meant 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 and supervision of as many as 16 markup editors at a time, often 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.

Martina Scholger

Biographical Statement: I am currently a PhD fellow and research associate at the Centre for Information Modelling – Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities at the University of Graz. I studied Art History, and in my dissertation project I do research on the potential of digital scholarly editions in the analysis and reconstruction of artistic association and crafting processes, using the example of work diaries of the Austrian conceptual artist Hartmut Skerbisch.

In addition to teaching text encoding with XML/TEI, processing XML data and digital scholarly editing for humanities students, I also teach at pertinent summer schools, most recently in the context of IDE and DiXit.

Over the past years, I have contributed to the conceptual design, development and implementation of numerous cooperation projects in the field of digital humanities, like the Visual Archive Southeastern Europe (http://gams.uni-graz.at/vase) or the digital scholarly edition on Moral Weeklies (http://gams.uni-graz.at/mws). Since 2014, I have been a member of the Institute for Documentology and Scholarly Editing (IDE).

Peter Stadler

Biographical Statement: 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-db 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. For the term 2014/15 I've been en elected member of the TEI Council where I took an active role in shaping the new <correspDesc> element as well as developing new ways for standoff encoding within the TEI framework.

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 our new center for Musik – Edition – Medien.

Candidate’s Statement: To me, the TEI standard is already quite mature, so a great deal of work (of the TEI Council) lies in maintaining this standard through continous work on improving the documentation, fixing bugs in the specification, and dissemination. Of course, a scholarly standard such as the TEI is never ‘finished’, and a lot of tools and stylesheets surrounding this standard are in the need of updates and new features. I believe I have the relevant skills (philological pedantry, command-line-savvy, TEI and XSLT fluency, tamer of version control systems) for playing an active role in the TEI Council. If elected, I'll especially try to push forward the current standoff proposal as well as the enhancement of ODD and Roma.

Magdalena Turska

Biographical Statement: I studied Computer Science at the University of Mining and Metallurgy in Cracow, Poland and worked as freelance programmer and consultant for medical companies and research programmes in Humanities. I frequently teach TEI, XSLT, XQuery and neighbouring technologies.

I have invented a mark-up scheme not unlike a subset of TEI in 1999, only to learn few years later that the real thing already has been born and well adopted. I was working on research projects in Humanities for years until finally coming into TEI fold with the online edition of vast 16th-century correspondence collection (Ioannes Dantiscus Correspondence) at the University of Warsaw. Now I am a Marie Curie fellow of Digital Scholarly Editions ITN at the University of Oxford IT Services. My main interest lies in workflows for encoding and publishing scholarly editions of historical sources. Following this I was working on TEI Simple project, developing the processing model - an abstract layer to simplify processing of XML files into a number of output formats. Currently I am implementing a blueprint application that incorporates TEI processing model and allows for out-of-the-box publishing of TEI documents that follow a set of well-documented conventions. I am an active member of TEI community, taking part in the ongoing discussion through usual communication channels (TEI-L, but also DiXiT project blog and my personal gitHub account) and extensively engaging in teaching and outreach events across Europe.

Jeffrey Witt

Biographical Statement: I am currently an assistant professor of philosophy at Loyola University Maryland. I completed my Ph.D. in philosophy at Boston College in 2012. My primary research is in the field of late-medieval philosophy and theology, an area where the lack of access to texts and editions remains a primary obstacle to research progress.

Presently, I am the developer and administer of the Sentences Commentary Text Archive , an RDF archive that curates and organizes TEI transcriptions of medieval Sentences commentaries. I am also the developer of the LombardPress web publication framework that uses this archive to display TEI encoded editions. I regularly use TEI critical apparatus module in my work and am eager to be a part of this module's continued development. I am also a participant in the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) community meetings and collaborate with this group to bring TEI transcriptions and manuscript images together in various digital spaces. I sit on the advisory board for the Digital Latin Library: and the METAscripta Project now underway and St. Louis University.

Candidate’s Statement: If elected, I would love to bring to the council my experience of working with Latin medieval manuscripts, using the critical apparatus module, and creating digital and print renderings of TEI encoded critical editions.

If elected, I would especially like to support the work of the critical apparatus SIG. I would like to continue developing the module in ways that allow editors the flexibility to continue marking variants in traditional ways and to respond to new ideas about what a critical edition is or could be.

Secondly, as LinkedData continues to become a more powerful part of the web, I would like to be thinking about ways to facilitate data extraction from TEI documents that would allow us to publish RDF metadata about our encoded documents in useful and innovative ways. This includes further collaboration with the IIIF group and the Open Annotation data model used in their API and collaboration with the CITE architecture currently employed by the Homer Multi-Text Project and Perseus.

Finally, I would like to contribute to the development and documentation of best practices with respect to moving TEI documents to web and print, especially in those complicated cases that require a critical apparatus.

If elected I would be able to attend council meetings and commit time to council work.

Pip Willcox

Candidate's statement With thanks to the TEI community for electing me, I am reaching the end of my one-year term serving on the Board. Most of my energies have gone into familiarizing myself with the organizational side of the TEI to date, and into programme-chairing this year's TEI Members' Meeting and Conference, which will be held in Lyon in October 2015.

As the upcoming conference demonstrates, the community is alive with exciting research and projects, within and linking beyond the TEI. It has been a privilege to read summaries of research into such diverse and exciting fields, and I look forward to sharing the experience of the conference with many of you next month.

I am grateful for being nominated again so I have the opportunity to continue to work to widen knowledge of the TEI beyond its current community, encouraging links to other technologies, and facilitating its refinement to fit the needs of its participants, particularly for working with Buddhist texts and with bibliography.

There are important decisions ahead regarding the back-office organizational structure of the TEI, and I would very much like the opportunity to serve another term on the Board to contribute to these.

Biographical Statement: With a background in scholarly editing and book history, I am an advocate for bringing together people, ideas, and technologies.

I have used TEI to work with manuscript and print since 2001. I have a passion for text, and particular interests in digitally representing the materiality of the physical, scholarly editing, and in widening knowledge of and participation in the TEI. I am committed to opening up working methods and content to new audiences, within and beyond academia.

If re-elected to the Board, I would bring a user’s practical insight into the TEI, distinctively responsive to researchers’ needs through working with the rich set of digital humanities projects and communities across the University of Oxford and their collaborators.

In my current role I am leading the establishment of the Bodleian's new Centre for Digital Scholarship, a multi-disciplinary hub to support collaborative digital innovation in teaching, learning, and research. Amongst the events I am organizing in this capacity are ones which highlight the work of the TEI.

I conceived and ran the Sprint for Shakespeare (http://shakespeare.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/) public campaign and the Bodleian First Folio (http://firstfolio.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/) project, which encoded and published the Bodleian's First Folio of Shakespeare's plays in TEI.

Co-director of the annual Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School (http://digital.humanities.ox.ac.uk/dhoxss/), I also convene its introductory workshop strand. I am an associate member of SOCIAM: The Theory and Practice of Social Machines (http://www.sociam.org/) and of FAST: Fusing Semantic and Audio Technologies for Intelligent Music Production and Consumption (http://c4dm.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/projects.html).

Fabio Ciotti

Biographical Statement: I am Assistant Professor (tenured) at the University of Roma Tor Vergata, where I teach Computing for Literary Studies: and Theory of Literature. 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 have 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 President of the board of Associazione per l’Informatica Umanistica e la Cultura Digitale (AIUCD, the Italian digital humanities association), member of the Exec of EADH and chair of the membership committee of ADHO. I am also involved in the DARIAH European infrastructure. During the last two years I have served in the TEI Technical Council. I organized the TEI Conference 2013 in Roma, continuing my work to extend the knowledge of the TEI in Italy. Statement

I have spent the last 2 years in the TEI Technical Council, giving my contributions to the substantial technical development that TEI P5 has undergone in these last times. This experience has given me a deep understanding of how the TEI really works from the technical point of view.

Candidate's statement If I will be elected in the Board, I think I can give my contribution to the Consortium and the community in various way:

• given my commitment with EADH and ADHO, and my involvement with DARIAH European research infrastructure I would like to help TEI to extend its presence and role as a research infrastructure and to strengthen its relationships with the most important international DH organizations; this could also help TEI to get financing for its activities;
• during the two years spent in the Council some strategic issues have been debated, like the need to start the work for the next major version of the Guidelines, or the relationships with other standards, or the recurring debate about the XML pros and cons. I would like to help and support this strategical debate; this of course means involving the community but also adapting the internal organization of the TEI-C bodies;
• the issue of multilingualism and multiculturalism is becoming central in the DH community: I would like to bring this issue also inside TEI Consortium and to promote concrete actions in that direction, as in the development of the Guidelines, as in the scientific and social communication of TEI community.

Kathryn Tomasek

Biographical Statement: Kathryn Tomasek teaches U.S. History and Digital History at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, where she is Associate Professor of History. She holds a B.A. from Rice University as well as both an M.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin - Madison. Tomasek has attended DHSI in Victoria as well as many TEI and DH meetings. She was a member of the American Historical Association's Ad Hoc Committee on the Professional Evaluation of Digital Scholarship by Historians in 2014-2015, and she serves currently on THATCamp Council.

Candidate's statement The TEI has been central to my teaching and research for more than ten years. I am a historian of the nineteenth-century United States, and my research focuses on account books. I am an outspoken advocate for use of the TEI Guidelines by historians in the USA, where most people who do digital history refuse outright to consider using TEI. Since historians in Europe and elsewhere do use the TEI in digital editions, I encourage my domestic colleagues to adopt the TEI as a step towards production of better comparative historical data across national boundaries. My own efforts to work across national boundaries are currently supported by a grant from the Bilateral Digital Humanities Program of the National Endowment for the Humanities (USA) and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation).

As a woman who uses and supports the TEI, I will be happy to serve if elected, but to be clear, I am a faculty member rather than a technical expert. While I have more than ten year's experience using the Guidelines, I am only now learning XSLT. I find this learning adventure a lot of fun, but I am definitely a newbie in this area.

The TEI introduced me to the generous and innovative international community of Digital Humanities, and I am honored to have been nominated to stand for election to the TEI Board.

Susanna Allés-Torrent

Biographical statement: Susanna Allés-Torrent is a Lecturer in Digital Humanities in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University. She previously was Adjunct professor at the University of Barcelona and held a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC, Spain), where she worked with digital lexicography and Medieval Latin Dictionaries. Nowadays, she teaches several courses in DH, digital scholarly edition and Text Encoding Initiative. Her interests include the connections of Medieval studies with digital textual editing, text encoding, markup languages, data mining and text analysis.

Candidate statement: I am happy to run for the elections of the TAPAS advisory board. Currently, I am a lecturer at the Department of Latin American and Iberian Studies at Columbia University, where I teach several courses in DH. I have participated in several projects of digital scholarly editions as well as lexicographic works and I have been working with TEI for five years and teaching several TEI introduction courses. I have witnessed from the distance the development of the TAPAS project, since my stay at the Center for Digital Scholarship at Brown University in 2012. Now I am willing to be part of the discussions and the future developments of the project. My input would be grounded in three main axes: first, as an independent scholar using TEI, second as a teacher underscoring the need of new materials and new tools of TEI archiving, editing and presentation; third, my expertise in (digital) textual scholarship and philology.

Mark Caprio

Biographical statement: Mark Caprio is an assistant professor at Providence College, Providence, Rhode Island and Head of Digital Publishing & Metadata Services in the Phillips Memorial Library+Commons. Mark has been creating and managing digital content in academic settings for fifteen years. During that time, he has held positions as Instructional Technology Librarian, Digital Media Librarian, Digital Repository Program Manager (Boston College, Boston, Massachusetts) and for the last five years as Head of Digital Publishing & Metadata Services. His research focuses on the intersection of scholarly communication and digital publishing, and the structure and interconnections of sustainable digital knowledge ecosystems.

Candidate Statement: I am honored to have been nominated to serve on the TAPAS Advisory Board. As an assistant professor and Head of Digital Publishing & Metadata Services, I work with other faculty and students investigating affordances through digital teaching, learning and research structures. As an academic, I am concerned at the lack of resources for scholars at smaller institutions engaged in exploration of digital scholarly methods and new publication forms. As humanities research becomes increasingly digital, it requires greater local resources. I foresee a growing gap between those who have the necessary training and support to enter the digital scholarly dialogue and those who do not. TAPAS very directly and significantly addresses this inequity by providing an infrastructure for open-access publishing and data analysis of TEI-encoded materials. I have both informally and formally participated in the design and testing of TAPAS during its development phase, have been a TAPAS beta-tester, and am currently part of the TAPAS community. As a member of the TAPAS Advisory Board, I would continue to bring the perspective of a small liberal-arts college.

Elena González-Blanco

Biographical statement: Elena González-Blanco is a Faculty member of the Spanish Literature and Literary Theory Department at Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia UNED (Open University) of Spain in Madrid. Her main research and teaching areas are Comparative Medieval Literature, Metrics and Poetry, and Digital Humanities. She holds a Ph.D in Spanish Literature, a M.A. in Digital Libraries and Information Systems, a M.A. in Spanish Philology and an M.A. in Classics. Her academic career is characterized by international mobility, as she speaks fluently English, French, German and Italian. Elena has spent research stays in Germany (Munich 1997, 2001 and Bonn 2002), USA (Chicago 2003, Boston 2007-09 and 2010), United Kingdom (London 2009 and Oxford 2011), Italy (Florence 2004), Swiss (Bern 2012), Hungary (Budapest 2013), Argentina (2013) and Mexico (2014).

She has a high publication record with 45 papers in academic journals and book chapters published and she has presented papers and talks in many international conferences.

She is the Director of the Digital Humanities Lab at UNED: LINHD (Laboratorio de Innovación en Humanidades Digitales) , constituent member of the first Clarin-K Center, and organizer of the last DayofDH 2015.

She has been the Academic Secretary from the Faculty of Philology at UNED (2011-12), she is the Coordinator of the Masters program Máster en Formación e Investigación Literaria y Teatral en el Contexto Europeo and she is the Director of the professional program Experto Profesional en Humanidades Digitales, and the coordinator of the institutional UNED linked data project UNEDATA.

Elena González-Blanco is a very active member of the Digital Humanities community. She is member of the Executive Committee of EADH since 2013 www.eadh.org, member of Centernet International Executive Committee for DH centers www.centernet.org, member of the Executive Committee of the ADHO SIG GO::DH since 2013, and the Secretary of the Spanish Association for Digital Humanities: HDH (Humanidades Digitales Hispánicas, Sociedad Internacional), whose 2nd International Conference will be held by UNED in Madrid in October 2015. She also takes part of the editorial board of http://dirtdirectory.org. She has worked in collaboration of the Cost Action Medioevo Europeo. She leads the project ReMetCa (Digital Repertoire on Medieval Castilian Metrics, built with TEI-XML), and DiRePo (Digital Repertoire of European Poetry).

Institutional webpage: http://www.uned.es/personal/elenagonzalezblanco

Publications (full-text): https://uned.academia.edu/ElenaGonzálezBlancoGarcía

Personal blog: http://filindig.hypotheses.org/

Researcher unique identifier(s) http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0448-1812

Candidate statement: Being a member of TAPAS Board sounds exciting, especially because I feel that my presence as a member of the Spanish community is important to enrich the perspectives of the TEI Community, and I hope to be able approaching our community to the TEI world and bringing our collections to TAPAS repository. Acquiring standards is very important and sharing them with the community is even more. TAPAS is a great repository which is worth to be developed further with news apps and tools. If I become a member of the board I will work on topics like user involvement, dissemination, metadata and exchange formats, publication user-friendly interfaces and preservation plans for XML data. It sounds a challenging project with an interesting community and team which I am enthusiastic in working with.

Magdalena Turska

Candidate statement: I see TAPAS as a rare opportunity to transfer the responsibilities for mature TEI-based editions from editors to archivists. From both the individual project and repository perspective I believe it has the potential to improve chances for long-term preservation and discoverability of important historical and literary material as well as to promote greater openness of encoded sources and better encoding standards, all of which are the values I would like to promote.

I studied Computer Science at the University of Mining and Metallurgy in Cracow, Poland and worked as freelance programmer and consultant for medical companies and research programmes in Humanities. I frequently teach TEI, XSLT, XQuery and neighbouring technologies.

Molly O’Hagan Hardy

Biographical statement: Molly O’Hagan Hardy is the Digital Humanities Curator at the American Antiquarian Society (AAS), where she manages the Isaiah Thomas Broadside Ballads digital project, the Database of the Early American Book Trades, and the Digital Antiquarian initiative. She received in PhD from the University of Texas Austin in 2011, completing a dissertation on debates around literary property and race in the eighteenth-century transatlantic world. Molly serves as the e-resources review editor for the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP) News. Her work has appeared in The New Centennial Review and Book History, and she is a contributor to the forthcoming Debates in Digital Humanities (University of Minnesota Press) and D19: Digital Pedagogies and Nineteenth Century American Literatures (University of Michigan Press). Molly’s digital edition of A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People, During the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia (1794) is one of TAPAS’s pilot projects.

Candidate statement: For over 200 years, the American Antiquarian Society (AAS), where I am the Digital Humanities Curator, has dedicated itself “to collecting, preserving, and making widely accessible the early historical record of our nation.” The processes and tools needed to fulfill this portion of our mission will take in the digital age remain constant questions at the AAS and at many special collections libraries. New modes of preservation have arisen, and in the realm of textual editing, as Marilyn Deegan has written, this “involve[s] a complete rethink of the economics of producing and handling these works [for]… libraries collecting and preserving electronic editions.” When I began work at AAS two years ago, TEI was little known here and even less considered as a viable part of the process of making our collections available online. Through unique collaborations among universities, database companies, and AAS, we have started to publish our first TEI-encoded texts. Our efforts are still modest, but we are now seeing what we need to do to build the infrastructure for TEI-encoding to become a part of not only our textual editing process, but also our digital preservation process.

TAPAS can play a central role in AAS’s and other special collections’ creation of digital editions and in their preservation efforts. If given the opportunity to serve on this board, I would advocate for special collections’ interests in shaping the direction of TAPAS as it works to fulfill its mission to make TEI-publishing accessible to those who lack institutional support and resources. Between the end of graduate school and before I landed a permanent job, the promise of TAPAS, which was still in development stages, gave me hope that my own work on Richard Allen and Absalom Jones’s A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People (1794) would see the light of day. My edition, which I still consider in progress but is developing in-step with TAPAS’s expanding capabilities, is one of the pilot collections on the site. As one who lacked institutional resources early in my career, I was in many ways the intended audience for TAPAS’s mission, and I would very much welcome the opportunity to give back to this community of TEI users and enthusiasts, especially those who work with and for special collections.

Emily Christina Murphy

Biographical statement: Emily Christina Murphy is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at Queen’s University, Canada. Her dissertation project focuses on representations of female literary and popular celebrity and mental illness in the modernist period, a project that has cultivated interests in modernist journalism, political activism, and public and private writing. Her forthcoming publications in the digital humanities include a co-edited issue on undergraduate pedagogy in Digital Humanities Quarterly with Dr. Shannon Smith and a white paper on feminism, modernist literature, and open access ontologies published with the Modernist Versions Project upon the launch of the project's website. She is Instructor and Assistant Director of the Digital Humanities Field School at Herstmonceux Castle, and has co-taught digital humanities methodologies at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute and the British Library Digital Scholarship Training Programme.

Candidate statement: I am pleased to accept my nomination to the TAPAS Advisory Board for the 2015/2016 board member elections. I believe that my presence on the board will offer valuable perspective in three areas. First, I have two years of experience in pedagogy across diverse contexts using TEI as my primary teaching technology. This allows me to speak to a wide range of uses for the TEI and needs of its users in pedagogical environments. Second, I am currently a doctoral candidate, and this position within the university structure will allow me to speak to the needs and expectations of the next generation of teachers and researchers. Third, I am affiliated with a university without developed resources for the use of technology in humanities research or teaching. This affiliation provides me with particular insight into the needs of institutions that may be most heavily dependent on the infrastructural support offered by projects like TAPAS.