TEI-C Elections 2018


Contents

Introduction

In 2018, TEI Members will hold an election to fill 5 open positions on the TEI Technical Council and 3 on the TEI Board of Directors; each newly elected member will serve a two-year term, 2018 and 2019. We are also electing 1 new member to the TAPAS advisory board.

The following persons have been nominated to the TEI Nominating committee and have agreed to stand as candidates for election to the TEI Technical Council, the TEI Board, and the TAPAS advisory Board. They have all supplied a statement covering two aspects:
  1. a candidate statement in which they discuss their reasons for wishing to serve on the Board, TAPAS or Technical Council and what their particular goals would be.
  2. a biographical description focusing on their education, training, research, etc., relevant to the TEI.

A Note on Voting

Voting will be conducted via the OpaVote website, which uses the open-source balloting software OpenSTV for tabulation. OpenSTV is a widely used open-source Single Transferable Vote program.

TEI Member voters, identified by email address, will receive a URL at which to cast their ballots. Upon closing of the election, all voters who cast a vote will be sent an email with a link to the results of the election, from which it is also possible to download the actual final ballots for verification. Individual members may vote in the TEI Technical Council elections. The nominated representative of institutions with membership may vote for both the TEI Board and TEI Technical Council.

Voting will open in a few days.

Voting closes on September 10, 2018 at 23:59 Hawaii-Aleutian Standard Time (HAST) as it offers the latest global midnight.

Candidate Statements: TEI Technical Council

Syd Bauman

Statement of purpose: Syd would like to see progress in several areas:

‘User-oriented’ efforts, e.g., creating customized documentation, recommendations, and customizations for particular constituencies or user groups; improving the look-and-feel (and flexibility) of custom documentation; and creating or commissioning reference implementations.

Expanding the scope of the Guidelines, e.g. to include greater support for legal documents, a method for encoding acrostics, and perhaps a module addressing social media.

Technical improvements to the Guidelines, e.g., further automated constraint checking, improvements to the ODD language and the stylesheets that process them, changes in TEI pointers to better align TEI with the existing W3C XPointer framework, and improvements to the automated deprecation system.

Biography: Syd came to the TEI through an interest in markup and markup languages. He became interested in SGML just prior to its publication in 1986, but did not start engaging with a real markup language until late 1990. At that time he was already working at the Brown University Women Writers Project, where his first major task was to convert WWP legacy data to be in line with the newly published TEI P1. He still works at the WWP as a Senior Programmer/Analyst and ever since that first challenge, he’s been thinking of ways to improve the TEI.

From 2001 to 2007 Syd served the TEI as the North American Editor, and since 2013 on the Technical Council; thus he is familiar with the workings of the Council. He has been very active in the TEI community as a frequent presenter on TEI topics at conferences; by consulting closely with nearly ½ dozen TEI projects, and providing occasional assistance to another dozen or so; as a member of several SIGs and editor of the Library SIG’s _Best Practices for TEI in Libraries_; as the chair of the Council’s Stylesheets task force; and of course, through teaching numerous TEI workshops and seminars.

Syd has an AB from Brown University in political science, and has worked as a systems programmer and a freelance computer typesetter. He frequently teaches TEI workshops and seminars, and consults for a variety of humanities computing projects. He has been an Emergency Medical Technician since 1983.

Vanessa Bigot Juloux

Statement of purpose: Among other digital approaches, using TEI in order to analyze an artifact (text, inscription, seal…), is very promising but unfortunately not popular in my field, the ancient Near Eastern cultures (and neighboring), for two reasons. While the first reason is common to the lack of digital practices, that is, “the fear of what we cannot understand”, the second reason is the lack of practical examples applied to my field of research. Although Epidoc is used for ancient documents, it mostly focuses on Greco-Roman world. Thus, my interest would (in fact “is”) to work on the adding of practical examples applied to ANE researches, especially on taxonomy, damage, and supplied text. The written material of ANE has various particularities, among which the cuneiform signs, and the diversity of languages (i.e., Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Akkadian of Ugarit, Ugaritic) and system of writing (i.e., alphabetic, syllabic, logogram), but above all, the damage supports of writing (mostly clay tablets), which implied, of course, different readings/interpretation. After my doctoral thesis, I have scheduled to suggest a SIG to work on several problems related to the damages of ANE writing material. However, I would like to start the adding of a few practical examples of damage/gap/supplied elements for ANE studies to bridge the lack on the TEI guidelines.

TEI's taxonomy element and its children hold great potential for anthropological investigations of cultural texts. Of course, its interest in research is not only for ancient near eastern scholars but for all who use an anthropological approach for the understanding of a text in order to study a culture/civilization.

In joining the Council I hope to encourage more of my colleagues to work with the TEI for encoding and investigating taxonomies.

Last, I am also interested to work on the adding of XSL encoding examples from TEI practical examples pages (as it exists for “bibliography”). This will be very helpful to have one or several examples of XSLT encoding (i.e., a template that matches a surface with conditional processing). As we know, TEI encoding necessitates working with additional encoding languages (ex., XSLT, JS, jQuery, CSS) to be able to transform, analyze, and display the research; however these are currently difficult for people to learn. I strongly believe that people are discouraged from long-term work with the TEI due to a basic question, “what I am going to do with my TEI encoding, and how?” Although there are trainings in order to display the research, most of the time, students/participants have a lack of time to practice for their own research. And when time comes to develop their own work, they have forgotten part of what has been previously learned. Additionally, in the short time dedicated to the training, they are not able to study all encoding options.

Biography: I hold an advanced degree in Ugaritic from the Ecole des Langues et des Civilisations de l’Orient Ancien (ELCOA) at the Institut Catholique in Paris. I am currently a Ph.D candidate in my fifth year at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (EPHE) and Paris Sciences et Lettres (PSL) in Religions and Systems of Thought. My research focuses on Ugaritic narrative texts and violent behavior for political purposes (emphasis: action's analyse). My method is mostly based on analytical taxonomies encoded in TEI in order to parse data within R. However, the first aim of this research is to develop a new hermeneutics, a hermeneutics of action from TEI markup and analytical taxonomies. I have recently developed open-access guidelines (DITA) for analyzing actions in TEI .

Among other activities, since 2015, I have been (co-)organizing webinars, meetings and conferences on digital humanities—however, I would rather prefer to talk about digital practices since they are “new” methods to “traditional” methods, as I suggest in a forthcoming co-authored paper preliminarily entitled “Digital Practices vs. Digital Humanities: Reflections to Bridge the Gap in Order to Improve Research Methods and Collaboration.” My primary goal was (and still is) to make digital practices more accessible to a wide audience including non-digital practitioners and students, in order to encourage collaboration among researchers.

Since 2016, I have been co-organizing and co-chairing sessions on digital humanities at the American School of Oriental Research (ASOR) and the Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology (CAA) annual meetings; I am also co-organizing and co-chairing an ASOR/EPHE European Symposium (2018) on digital humanities. At this occasion, I am co-organizing and co-chairing a round-table in order to set up a network (2019) for helping ancient Near Eastern scholars in their projects using digital practices, and for encouraging collaborative projects among researchers. I am co-editing a volume entitled “CyberResearch on the Ancient Near East and Neighboring Regions” (Brill and in Knowledge Unlatched Free access, forthcoming in July 2018) and I am currently co-editing the second volume (forthcoming 2019). In these volumes, a customized and collaborative cyber-glossary supports readers who are not familiar with “digital” terms and methods.

Gerrit Brüning

Statement of purpose: If elected, I would build on my broad experience in genetic and diplomatic manuscript encoding and help to significantly improve the relevant chapter 11 of the TEI Guidelines.

Together with colleagues in the TEI Manuscripts Special Interest Group, I have identified a number of issues which trace back to the incorporation of the genetic (or “document-focused”) encoding model in version 2 of P5. Some of these issues were already submitted to the Council, but they are complex in nature as they are intertwined with the entire structure of the chapter. Others are still under way. In its current state, the chapter is fairly difficult to comprehend especially for newcomers.

If elected, I would concentrate on making chapter 11 more clear, consistent and balanced with respect to the distinction between “document-focused” and “text-focused” ways of encoding. In line with this, I will contribute to fill remaining gaps in both approaches.

Biography: I am currently a postdoc researcher at the department of German at Goethe University Frankfurt where I teach literary studies. I obtained my PhD in German literature with a dissertation on the Goethe–Schiller correspondence.

Since 2009, I have been actively involved in the TEI through my work on the digital edition of Goethe’s Faust (beta.faustedition.net) as part of which I recently established a critical text of the tragedy’s second part. The Faust project contributed substantially to the development of the “Encoding Model for Genetic Editions” which was later integrated in chapter 11 of the TEI Guidelines. By working on the project, I have acquired expertise on genetic manuscript encoding and computer-aided textual criticism. Since 2013, I have served as co-convener of the TEI Manuscripts Special Interest Group. I have been teaching several TEI courses and seminars at several universities in Germany and Austria and am consulting with the “Musil online” project (musilonline.at).

My current research focus is on digital philology with an emphasis on computer-aided analysis of textual history.

Hugh Cayless

Statement of purpose: I have served three terms on the Council, including three years as Chair. Since stepping down, I have focused on the TEI's infrastructure and on making some of its older moving parts work better. I hope to continue to work on updating and enhancing OxGarage, the TEI's support for digital critical editions, new services supporting TEI collections and displaying TEI on the web.

Biography: Hugh Cayless is a Senior Digital Humanities Developer at the Duke Collaboratory for Classics Computing (DC3). Hugh has worked on Digital Humanities projects with a focus on ancient studies since the late 1990s and holds a Ph.D. in Classics and an M.S. in Information Science from UNC Chapel Hill. He is proficient in several programming languages and database systems. His current research focuses on the development of model-driven interfaces for digital critical editions and on Linked Open Data APIs for distributing texts.

Tiziana Mancinelli

Statement of purpose: I would be honored to work and contribute to the TEI consortium, particularly given my work with many communities in different countries from which can gather needs and desiderata with respect to the evolution and future directions of the TEI.

I would particularly like to work on the issue of web-accessibility with regards to the creating of digital editions, with possible improvements to the Guidelines. I would also like to develop further sample applications useful to support students and researchers in their own projects. As I am currently working on IIIF I would commit to developing and tools linked to IIIF and TEI.

I would also like to contribute to the TEI consortium on more theoretical and technical issues, particularly concerning gender and post-colonial studies. 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.

Biography: I am currently a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Venice in the ERC project BIFLOW (Bilingualism in Florentine and Tuscan Works, ca. 1260 – ca. 1416), working on Francesco Barberino's medieval manuscript. I am also collaborating with the CCeH (Cologne Center for eHumanities) on their Magica Levantiva project, which is a catalogue of unpublished ancient Greek magical texts. I am a Visiting Professor (2016-2017 and 2017-2018) at the University of Verona’s Modern Languages Department, planning and running a course on digital humanities and supervising students from undergraduate to PhD level. I hold a PhD in Digital Humanities from the University of Reading, in which I completed a dissertation on a scholarly digital edition. I gained expertise in XML-related languages such as Xslt/Xpath in order to retrieve and visualise the metadata included in the annotation phase. Recently I have developed my understanding of and experience with IIIF and several programming languages, as well as keeping up-to-date with the latest web developments. I have also led many workshops and summer schools on the introduction of TEI, XML related languages and methodologies for representing the digital text. I am an executive board member of the Associazione per l'Informatica Umanistica e la Cultura Digitale (2018-2021) and am on the editorial board of Umanistica Digitale (from 2017-).

Duncan Paterson

Statement of purpose: Both when teaching beginner classes, and when coordinating with experienced developers I often encounter a sense that TEI is “too complicated and does not apply to non-Western sources.” While I strongly disagree with both assessments, I think that they hint at areas in genuine need of improvement to which I wish to contribute should I be elected:
a) Making the Guidelines more inclusive, by addressing a wider cultural variety of textual features in its prose.
b) Improving i18n support of TEI, and when working with multi-lingual documents.
c) Aligning aspects of TEI with other standards, such as CSS or HTML, where these provide better support for global audiences.

I would be honored to join the Technical Council to continue its tradition of providing an open platform that connects scholarly research to the realm of global data standards.

Biography: I’m a PhD candidate in intellectual history at Heidelberg University, working on East Asian book history. My dissertation focuses on commercial xylographic prints and how they influence knowledge circulation in East Asia during the 16th century. This involves addressing the technical challenges of competing national standards, which are still the norm when dealing with digital repositories of historical CJK documents.

As programmer, I am an active contributor to various open source projects (Github profile), including exist-db, tei-publisher, and TEI. I am a member of the digital research group at “Cluster of Excellence: Asia and Europe in a Global Context”, which is heavily invested in TEI, VRA-Core, and AAT-Taiwan. We assist projects dealing with sources in a wide range of “difficult” languages and uncommon formats (The Heidelberg Research Architecture) which live at the edge of where data-model meets real world object. I was responsible for the conversion of the lexical, prosopographical, and bibliographical datasets for “Modern-Chinese-Scientific-Terminologies" [WSC] and its subsequent merger with the “Modern History Database" [MHDB].

Jonathan Robie

Statement of purpose: I am interested in using queries to exploit the information found in marked up texts. TEI has encoded vast amounts of text, but many projects have given much less thought to queries and transformations that exploit the information they contain.

In America, digital humanities often has a strong focus on distant reading, which is an excellent approach if you have a massive number of texts that cannot reasonably be carefully read by a human being. I am much more interested in the texts that people read repeatedly in depth, leaving a trail of data and metadata behind them in the form of markup and annotations. TEI markup enhances a text, creating a rich structure that contains relationships that betray a great deal about the meaning of the text. XQuery, XPath, and XSLT provide very powerful ways to explore this structure and learn from the text. This is particularly compelling for communities that care deeply about a given text - queries can explore both the text itself and the many ways the text has been understood.

I would like to help researchers use queries to explore texts, markup, and annotations together to exploit the wisdom and knowledge of the people who read these texts.

Biography: I am one of the inventors of XQuery and have been an editor of XQuery and XPath from the beginning of XQuery in 1998 until the final XQuery 3.1 specification in 2017. In 2005 I was selected as an InfoWorld Innovator of the Year for my work on XML query languages. I was also an editor of W3C DOM (levels 1 and 2) and have been a member of the W3C XML Schema, XSLT, and XML Infoset Working Groups. During this time, my day jobs involved working on query systems, data design, and API design for commercial software vendors including EMC Documentum, Red Hat, Software AG, Progress, Texcel, and POET Software.

My passion is biblical languages. I have written a Greek Syntax package for querying syntax trees in the Jupyter Notebook environment (Greek Syntax Tutorial). I also maintain the Lowfat Syntax Trees (optimized for querying with XQuery / XPath) and have developed a Domain Specific Language (DSL) for syntax called Treedown with a parser that transforms it to XML for querying.

Together with Randall Tan, I founded biblicalhumanities.org, which publishes open datasets, promotes guidelines for open data in biblical studies, and tracks open data resources on our dashboard. I am now working with the Copenhagen Alliance, a new coalition with similar goals.

Sarah Stanley

Statement of purpose: I served my first term on the TEI council for the past two years, and I was release technician for Release 3.2.0. I am interested in the uses of TEI in libraries and instructional settings, and particularly in the use of TEI for the development of open educational resources for humanities classrooms. I have used TEI personographies as a model for teaching the principles of humanities data, and I have incorporated TEI customization into instruction as a means of teaching about humanistic research. If elected, I would like to continue to think about how to promote the broader use of TEI as an essential educational tool. Related to this, I am particularly interested in exploring how to make the guidelines more legible to newcomers.

I would also like to continue work with the newly-formed Newspapers Special Interest Group to explore issues of the representation of physical and structural features of periodicals.

Biography: Sarah Stanley is​ ​currently​ ​the​ ​Digital​ Humanities Librarian at Florida State University's​ ​Office​ ​of​ ​Digital​ ​Research​ ​and Scholarship​.​ ​She​ ​received​ her ​Master’s​ ​in​ ​English​ ​from​ ​Northeastern University​ ​in​ ​2015,​ ​where​ ​she ​worked​ ​for​ ​the​ ​Women​ ​Writers​ ​Project​ ​and​ ​Early​ ​Caribbean​ ​Digital Archive.​

She has served on Council for the past two years, and she is currently working on several TEI-related projects with FSU faculty and students. These projects involve activities such as using TEI personographies to build prosopography datasets, building an Islandora Solution pack for creating comparative editions, and representing periodicals and newspapers with the TEI.

Raffaele Viglianti

Statement of purpose: I have served two terms on the TEI council and my approach has focused on finding practical solutions and seeking a middle ground in the council’s discussions. My goal is moving the TEI Guidelines and schema forward effectively and reducing barriers to achieving proficiency in TEI. I have been pursuing an agenda that highlights the merits of ODD customizations and have been working on tools to facilitate the use of ODD by the TEI community at large. A redesign of Roma is currently underway as a result.

I would continue to bring to the council my expertise in using TEI in combination with other formats and standards (such as MEI) and support the extension of TEI to reflect an up-to-date concept of “text”. Moreover, I would work to keep the council focused on a global outlook for the TEI, by supporting multilingual initiatives, seeking to work with underrepresented communities, prioritizing issues that challenge TEI’s cultural biases embedded in its guidelines and modeling.

Biography: I am a Research Associate at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland and I have served two terms on the TEI council. I have been actively involved in the TEI for 10 years as the convenor of the Music SIG, which resulted in the introduction of the notatedMusic element to the standard and a number of customizations to encode TEI with music notation. I often teach TEI and ODD as part of postgraduate courses, workshops, and summer schools.

I also dedicate time to develop tools for lowering barriers to using the TEI. I was awarded the first Rahtz Prize for TEI Ingenuity (2017) for a graphic tool to encode stand-off markup called CoreBuilder. I maintain, with Hugh Cayless, CETEIcean, a JavaScript library to render TEI in the browser without the need for XSLT. And I am currently developing a replacement for Roma to be completed by the end of my current term on council (2018).

At MITH, I work on research and development of TEI and Linked Open Data projects, including the Shelley-Godwin Archive, one of the first projects to use the TEI’s new vocabulary for the transcription of primary sources. Before MITH, I was a Research Assistant at the Department of Digital Humanities (DDH) at King’s College London for 6 years, where I have been involved in the technical development of TEI-based projects, spanning several disciplines and dealing with different kinds of documents and texts.

I hold a PhD in Digital Musicology and I worked on scholarly digital editions of music, with a focus on romantic opera. As a result of this research, I have established strong ties with the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) community, which applies TEI-like practices to the encoding of music notation. Within this community, I have promoted and established the use of ODD for MEI’s specification and guidelines. As a result, the latest and forthcoming releases of MEI are ODD-powered.

Jeffrey Witt

Statement of purpose: If elected, I would like to bring my experience of working with the IIIF community to the TEI technical council. As the IIIF community grows and institutions are making their images of cultural heritage objects available via the IIIF API, there are more and more questions about how we can bring texts into conversation with these images. Likewise, the pace of development is fast. IIIF is now on the verge of releasing 3.0 specification, switching from the Open Annotation specification to the Web Annotation specification, all of which have a significant impact on the ways in which we can relate texts to images. As a member of the council, I would like to take an active interest in these questions, helping to define best practices and workflows for relating TEI encoded texts (and their derivatives) to IIIF images.

Secondly, I continue to be interested in using TEI to support multiple kinds of publication, on the web and in print. I am therefore interested in developing and defining best practices that continue to make it easy to publish TEI and keep up with the fast pace of web development.

Finally, because of my experience with using TEI encoded texts to aggregate texts and construct an RDF connected graph of textual information, I’m interested in contributing to discussions about the best ways that TEI can connect to ongoing developments within the world of Linked Open Data and the semantic web.

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

Biography: I (Jeffrey Witt) am currently an associate 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 Scholastic Commentaries and Texts Archive, an RDF archive that curates and organizes TEI transcriptions of medieval scholastic corpus into a networked corpus. I am also the developer of the LombardPress publication framework that uses this archive to display TEI encoded editions on the web and in print. I regularly use TEI in my work and maintain a customized TEI schema for critical and diplomatic transcription. This schema is currently being used to structure more than 10 million Latin words included in the SCTA repository. I am also an active participant in the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) community and currently serve as co-chair of the manuscript community group. I regularly lead workshops around the world in both TEI and IIIF.

Candidate Statements: Candidate Statements: TEI Board of Directors

Christiane Fritze

Statement of purpose: I feel honoured for the nomination to the TEI Board and would be glad to serve the TEI community which was my first entry point to the world of real international scientific collaboration. In the course of my career I have had the chance to work with TEI from various different roles and perspectives. My first and probably most intense contact with TEI was as a champion and consultant for research projects new to TEI. If accepted, I would like to put an emphasis on reaching out to new communities with again new encoding challenges (e.g. historic climate data) just because I believe in the usefulness of standards and am enthusiastic about unified data. In tandem with connecting people, I also consider it essential for the TEI community to strengthen its connections with complementary standards and new technologies. If accepted to the TEI board, I would be glad to contribute my experiences as a former moderator in the IIIF community, and support growing technological links such as Transkribus and others.

Biography: I am currently working for the Austrian National Library (ONB). Two of my key projects in this role include the Austrian Books Online project which is a Google Books Library Project as well as the conception and implementation of a sustainable infrastructure for digital editions at ONB. As such I coordinate steps of mass digitisation for historical books with challenging logistics on the one hand, on the other I develop a service concept for the building and operation of the library’s digital edition infrastructure as well as am consulting the editorial teams in all TEI relevant matters.

Before this, I worked as scientific coordinator of the German chapter of the European Infrastructure Consortium DARIAH (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities) at the Göttingen State and University Library; and as a research associate at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities in several Digital Humanities projects including TELOTA (the DH hub of the Academy), the German Text Archive and was tasked with setting up of the Interdisciplinary Research Association for Digital Humanities in Berlin. My first contact with TEI (P4) I had while pretagging texts for the Digital Dictionary of the German Language (DWDS) in 2001. Since then, I have been working on TEI encoding, data transformation into TEI, and TEI data modelling and representation.

In addition to these activities, I regularly teach XML technologies, TEI encoding and digital edition-related matters on a regular bases in IDE-schools (Institute for Documentology and Scholarly Edition, IDE) as well as in university courses.

Gimena del Rio Riande

Statement of purpose: While I believe that the Anglophone dominance has not favored the intensive use of the TEI in the Spanish-speaking world, and this is a subject that should be revised beyond the translation of the TEI Guidelines, I believe that one of the problems that some communities find when approaching the TEI are related to its inadequacy in academies that lack digital infrastructures or technical support, and also with interests that go beyond Digital Scholarly Editions (journals, use in libraries and archives). I am interested in extending the TEI from its "canonical" approaches and help in finding out how a standard established in certain latitudes, such as TEI, can be adapted and reappropriated by other communities, mainly the Latin American.

Biography: I am a Researcher at the Seminario de Edicion y Crítica Textual (SECRIT-IIBICRIT) of the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET. Buenos Aires, Argentina) and External Professor at LINHD-UNED (Madrid) and at the University of Buenos Aires. My main academic interests deal with Digital Scholarly Edition, the use, and methodologies of scholarly digital tools as “situated practices”, and the interaction of the global and the local in the development of academic disciplines. I have been working since 2013 in creating and working with different DH communities of practice in Latin America and Spain, especially in Argentina, where I organized the first Digital Humanities Conference in 2014. I co-founded the first Spanish Digital Humanities journal, the Revista de Humanidades Digitales (RHD). I am the vicepresident of the Asociación Argentina de Humanidades Digitales (AAHD) and member of the Board of Directors of FORCE11, Pelagios Commons Committee and Humanidades Digitales Hispánicas Association. I am member of the board of editors at Hypothèses/Open Edition, Open Methods-DARIAH, Revista Relaciones (México), Bibliographica (México) and Digital Studies/Le Champ Numérique (Canada). I direct the first DH lab in Argentina at the Centro Argentino de Información Científica y Tecnológica (CAICYT, CONICET).

Roberto Rosselli Del Turco

Statement of purpose: If elected, I would bring my expertise in teaching TEI, and using it for my own projects, to further its development and to make it more usable and accessible for a wider community of scholars and researchers. I would also take advantage of my experience in building a TEI-related tool (EVT) to encourage the growth of a healthy ecosystem of tools to that purpose. I am also interested in improving support for digital critical/diplomatic editions, an area where the TEI schemas and Guidelines are already doing great, but which is of course susceptible to improvement. Speaking of the Guidelines, I would love to make them more neophyte-friendly and richer, so that even more sophisticated features related to TEI encoding and processing can be documented and offered to users.

Biography: Roberto Rosselli Del Turco is an Assistant Professor at the Università degli studi di Torino, where he teaches Germanic Philology, Old English language and literature, and Digital Humanities. He is also an Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities at the University of Pisa. He has published widely in the Digital Humanities and Anglo-Saxon fields of study.

He is a founder of and contributor to the Digital Medievalist project, a site devoted to creating and helping a community of scholars whose research and teaching projects use image, text, sound and technology.

In 2011 he is one of the founders of the Associazione per l’Informatica Umanistica e la Cultura Digitale (Italian Association for Digital Humanities), and he has served as a member of the Executive Council of the association until the end of 2017.

He is the editor of the Digital Vercelli Book , an ongoing project that aims at providing a full edition of this important manuscript. He is lead developer of EVT - Edition Visualization Technology, a software tool created at the University of Pisa to navigate and visualize digital editions based on the TEI XML encoding standard which was born within the DVB project. He is also co-director of the Visionary Cross project , an international project aiming at producing an advanced multimedia edition of key Anglo-Saxon texts and monuments, in particular the Dream of the Rood poem and the Ruthwell and Bewcastle preaching crosses.

Pip Willcox

Statement of purpose: It is an honour to be nominated for election for a third term on the Board, and if elected it will be a privilege to serve the TEI community.

My priorities for the Board’s work remain to increase membership of our community and to work towards reducing barriers to using the TEI. My particular interests lie in widening participation in a global context as well as within regions where TEI is already established. This can be encouraged through training, through ensuring the community is an accessible and welcoming environment for anyone with an interest in using the Guidelines, and through dissemination of the use of existing tools and platforms such as TAPAS.

The TEI’s use in libraries and archives for descriptive metadata is a field I’m well placed to support and continue to advocate for. Linking the TEI even more closely to other technologies will also encourage its uptake and technological sustainability, going hand in hand with the financial sustainability increased membership will bring, that will in turn enable the excellent work of the Council to continue.

I remain committed to disseminating knowledge of the TEI and have offered training in the TEI at my home institution, as well at the Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School, the Digital Humanities of Southern Africa conference, and the University of Manchester.

Biography: I am Head of the Centre for Digital Scholarship at the Bodleian Libraries, Senior Researcher at the University of Oxford’s e-Research Centre, and Digital Humanities Academic Programme Manager. I direct the annual Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School, and am a Visiting Lecturer and Special Advisor in Digital Humanities Scholarship and e-Research at the South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR).

TEI-based projects I have worked on include the Bodleian First Folio, Shelley’s Poetical Essay, the Shakespeare Quartos Archive, and Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership.

My current research is into Social Machines, with SOCIAM: The Theory and Practice of Social Machines, and an Experimental Humanities approach to Ada Lovelace with FAST: Fusing Semantic and Audio Technologies for Intelligent Music Production and Consumption.

Lee Zickel

Statement of purpose: For several years, I have been a TEI instructor and understand the positive impact that the Consortium has on our community. The degree to which TEI is a core competency in, and a key introductory technology to, the Digital Humanities is the reason I have continued to be a strong supporter and promoter of it throughout my academic career. In addition to the TEI workshops and consulting I do in my current university position, I am frequently in close contact with my institution's faculty, staff, and administration, always seeking out new avenues to advocate for TEI. The opportunity to continue these efforts on a larger scale, and with like-minded collaborators, represents a welcome challenge.

Biography: I am a Multidisciplinary PhD Candidate in Cognitive Linguistics and Design & Innovation. With my "student-hat" on, my work focuses on extended and distributed cognition and object mediated communication, using board games as the material anchor. I am also the Humanities and Social Sciences Technologist in the Research Computing and Cyberinfrastructure group at CWRU. There, I both consult on various research projects and teach introductory workshops for faculty.

Candidate Statements: TAPAS Advisory Board

Anne Baillot

Statement of purpose: As a managing editor of the Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative, I have facilitated the connection between TEI users and TAPAS by actively contributing to the introduction of a new submission format, the data paper, and recommending TAPAS as a trusted repository in this context. I am convinced that we need a solid repository infrastructure for the TEI community to be able to grow on a larger and more solid basis in the future. Long time accessibility, trustworthiness of repositories, open access to primary and secondary sources are crucial issues in the developments of digital-based Humanities. The way TAPAS will develop will be essential in the way the TEI in particular and Digital Humanities in general will evolve in the coming years. I would very much like to contribute to giving momentum to this project, to think globally about its evolution and to provide institutional and personal energy for the TAPAS governance.

Biography: Anne Baillot is a Full Professor of German Studies at Le Mans Université (France). She studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and holds a PhD in German Studies of the University Paris-VIII Vincennes Saint-Denis. She was a Junior Research Group Leader in Modern German Literature at the Humboldt-Universität (Berlin) between 2010 and 2016, where she developed and edited the digital scholarly edition of manuscripts, letters and texts, Intellectual Berlin around 1800. Between 2016 and 2017, she was an expert in digital methods for the humanities for the DARIAH ERIC. Since 2016, she is the managing editor of the Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative. Her areas of expertise include epistolarity, digital scholarly editions, cultural heritage research. She is a fervent defender of open access.

Mary Isbell

Statement of purpose: I was first introduced to the TEI after defending my dissertation, and learned the fundamentals and advanced concepts through courses at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute and seminars and workshops organized by the Women Writers Project. The TEI community has certainly provided me with ample training in the principles of descriptive markup, but it is the publishing service TAPAS provides that has made it possible for me to continue to invest energy in this methodology. Though I am the only faculty member at my institution who knows what the TEI is, my research can continue in this area because of TAPAS. There are many scholars in precisely my situation, and I know that research in the humanities is already richer for the support provided by TAPAS.

Because of TAPAS, I am also able to teach undergraduate students how to produce TEI data. The classroom initiative at TAPAS transformed my teaching. Simply put, I would not have attempted to offer an undergraduate course on digital editing if I had not learned about the TAPAS platform. I now offer this course regularly as a prerequisite for a text encoding lab that provides an exciting research experience for undergraduates in the humanities. My goal as a member of the advisory board will be to help more scholars learn about this initiative and assist in making it as useful as possible to scholars and students. I am especially interested in exploring the possibilities for partnership between TAPAS and GitHub Education.

Biography: Mary Isbell is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of New Haven, where she directs the First-Year Writing Program and the University Writing Center. She received her Ph.D. in English from the University of Connecticut. She has published in _Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies_ and _Victorian Literature and Culture_. Her digital edition of extracts from _The Young Idea_, a handwritten shipboard newspaper, was published with _Scholarly Editing_. Her current book project on shipboard theatricals will be accompanied by an archive of artifacts encoded in accordance with the TEI.

Gimena del Rio Riande

Statement of purpose: Textual and data repositories have proven to work very well in regions with weak economies and weak academic infrastructures, such as Latin America. Many latin american researchers are interested in working with the TEI and have started some projects, but find it difficult to preserve and share their materials. Although TAPAS does not offer full open access, a policy that is very extended in the region, it can be a good way to bring the TEI to a community that lacks of digital infrastructures of this kind but is becoming very interested in digital edition.

Biography: I am a Researcher at the Seminario de Edicion y Crítica Textual (SECRIT-IIBICRIT) of the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET. Buenos Aires, Argentina) and External Professor at LINHD-UNED (Madrid) and at the University of Buenos Aires. My main academic interests deal with Digital Scholarly Edition, the use, and methodologies of scholarly digital tools as “situated practices”, and the interaction of the global and the local in the development of academic disciplines. I have been working since 2013 in creating and working with different DH communities of practice in Latin America and Spain, especially in Argentina, where I organized the first Digital Humanities Conference in 2014. I co-founded the first Spanish Digital Humanities journal, the Revista de Humanidades Digitales (RHD). I am the vicepresident of the Asociación Argentina de Humanidades Digitales (AAHD) and member of the Board of Directors of FORCE11, Pelagios Commons Committee and Humanidades Digitales Hispánicas Association. I am member of the board of editors at Hypothèses/Open Edition, Open Methods-DARIAH, Revista Relaciones (México), Bibliographica (México) and Digital Studies/Le Champ Numérique (Canada). I direct the first DH lab in Argentina at the Centro Argentino de Información Científica y Tecnológica (CAICYT, CONICET).

Itay Zandbank

Statement of purpose: For the past 4 years I've been working closely with academic researchers from all fields, developing tools they need to perform their research. The DH researchers I meet are in dire need of TEI tools. They keep using tools that were developed for programmers (XML editors, XML databases and GIT repositories), and they struggle with them.

An organization whose purpose is to help the development if such tools is of vital importance. I would be happy to share my experience and knowledge, hoping to advance digital humanities world-wide.

Biography: I am a software developer with over 25 years of professional experience. For the past 4 years I've been heading a company that develops tools solely for researchers in all fields including digital humanities.