Election Results 2025

The results of the TEI Consortium 2025 Election were announced at TEI 2025 in Kraków. In 2025, TEI Members held an election to fill 3 open positions on the TEI Technical Council (3-year term). There was 1 open position on the TEI Board of Directors (3-year term). While many more people were nominated for both TEI-C Technical Council and TEI-C Board of Directors, those who agreed to stand for election were:

TEI-C Technical Council Slate:

• Helena Bermúdez Sabel
• Elli Bleeker
• Maria Fronczak
• Joanna Hałaczkiewicz
• Dario Kampkaspar
• Naoki Kokaze
• Stephan Kurz
• Patricia O'Connor
• Ariane Pinche
• Klaus Rettinghaus
• Yifan Wang

Elected: Helena Bermúdez Sabel, Elli Bleeker and Patricia O’Connor

TEI-C Board of Directors Slate:

• Dimitra Grigoriou

Elected: Dimitra Grigoriou (unopposed, no vote held)

The TEI Consortium thanks all of those who agreed to stand for being willing to donate time to the maintenance of the Consortium and its outputs like the TEI Guidelines. We encourage all those who were nominated to consider standing for election in upcoming years.

2025 Winners of the Rahtz Prize and Community Prize

The TEI Consortium is pleased to announce the winners of the 2025 Rahtz Prize for TEI Ingenuity and the TEI Community Award.

The winner of the 2025 Rahtz Prize for TEI Ingenuity is LEAF-Writer by Susan Brown, James Cummings, Luciano Frizzera, Mihaela Ilovan, and Diane Jakacki. The Rahtz Prize committee found the LEAF-Writer project to be “remarkable for the careful and thorough development of software that anyone involved with TEI would deem necessary, yet no one had been able to develop before. Additionally, its integration with Linked Open Data is crucial for the progressive use of TEI data, and the fact that it facilitates this so seamlessly is truly innovative.”

The winner of the 2025 Community Prize is The Endings Project by Claire Carlin, Ewa Czaykowska-Higgins, Janelle Jenstad, Elizabeth Grove-White, Corey Davis, John Durno, Lisa Goddard, J. Matthew Huculak, Martin Holmes, Stewart Arneil, Greg Newton, and Joey Takeda. The committee described The Endings Project as “one of the most significant contributions to scholarly digital publishing of the last decade, regularly mentioned in Digital Humanities venues supporting the longevity and preservation of DH projects. This project is distinguished by its extension of TEI values far beyond our community.”

This year’s Rahtz and Community Prize Committee consisted of Elisa Beshero-Bondar, Kiyonori Nagasaki, and Raffaele Viglianti.

Congratulations to this year's winners and sincere thanks to the wider TEI Community for your continued efforts to develop, maintain, and expand the TEI Guidelines.

Patch Release of the TEI Guidelines 4.10.2

On 4 September 2025, the TEI Consortium released a second small but significant “patch” of the TEI Guidelines as version 4.10.2, in order to address a bug in the content model of that we introduced in the 4.10.0 release. The bug inadvertently set a requirement for the <speaker> element within <sp> when previously it had been optional. For details on the patch and ongoing work to simplify the content modeling, please see the tickets linked in the release notes below.

Martin Holmes and Syd Bauman were, once again, our release technicians, assisted by Helena Bermúdez Sabel, Hugh Cayless and Trish O'Connor. The release process was helped along by our ever-vigilant Council members and friends, with very special thanks to Carsten Milling for raising the ticket earlier this week alerting us to the problem.

As always, we rely on you all to report bugs and make feature requests for the Guidelines on GitHub at https://github.com/TEIC/TEI/issues and in our TEI Slack. Your input tells us what to work on, and we cannot do without it! You will find all of the TEI Consortium's software projects in our GitHub organization https://github.com/TEIC, where you can report issues and make feature requests. The latest release of the Guidelines is available from all the usual places, including the TEI website at https://tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/index.html and the GitHub site at https://github.com/TEIC/TEI/releases/tag/P5_Release_4.10.2.

This patch (like the previous one) did not require a new release of the Stylesheets, so the current version of the Stylesheets remains 7.59.0. The Debian package has been updated at http://packages.tei-c.org/deb/, and the TEI Guidelines and the Stylesheets are available for download at https://sourceforge.net/projects/tei/files/.

The oXygen TEI plugin has been updated with the latest version as well. Here is an explanation of “How to automatically update your TEI framework in oXygen": https://github.com/TEIC/oxygen-tei/blob/master/oxygen-tei-plugin.md.

TEI P5 version 4.10.2 release notes

Release 4.10.2 is a patch release to fix a bug in the content model of sp. The patch is needed because in the 4.10.0 and 4.10.1 releases, the speaker element was inadvertently required as a child of sp, when previously it was not. (#2758, PR #2759 (not merged), and PR #2760). The release notes for release 4.10.0 have also been revised to include information about the change introduced to the content model of sp.

Note: patch releases do not have codenames.

TEI-C Elections 2025

• Introduction

• A Note on Voting

• Candidate Statements: TEI Technical Council

  • Helena Bermúdez Sabel
  • Elli Bleeker
  • Maria Fronczak
  • Joanna Hałaczkiewicz
  • Dario Kampkaspar
  • Naoki Kokaze
  • Stephan Kurz
  • Patricia O'Connor
  • Ariane Pinche
  • Klaus Rettinghaus
  • Yifan Wang

• Candidate Statements: TEI Board

  • Dimitra Grigoriou

Introduction

In 2025, TEI Members will hold an election to fill 3 open positions on the TEI Technical Council (3-year term). There is 1 open position on the TEI Board of Directors (3-year term).

The following people have been nominated and have agreed to stand as candidates for election to the TEI Technical Council and the TEI 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 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 on September 1st, 2025.

Voting closes on September 19th, 2025 at 09:00 CEST.

Candidate Statements: TEI Technical Council

Helena Bermúdez Sabel

Affiliation: JinnTec

Statement of purpose:

I have been serving as a member of the TEI Technical Council since 2021, and I would love to continue the work carried out during these last years. I am the current chair of the Stylesheets Group, and I am a member of the TEI Stylesheets Task Force charged with the development of another TEI ODD processor, and of the TEI Lite 2.0 Working Group which is currently developing a new version of TEI Lite.

Besides having a strong interest in several schema-related aspects as seen by my participation in the endeavours mentioned above, as a linguist, I am very interested in further employing the TEI to model to less common applications, such as graph-based annotations of complex linguistic features, like syntactic analysis and semantic ambiguity. I have ongoing projects focused on the development of automatic converters from the most common formats used by natural language processing tools to TEI, and from TEI to RDF serialization formats.

Biography:

I am Head of Digital Editions in JinnTec, which has given me the opportunity to participate in the development of several, very diverse and unique TEI-based edition projects.

I hold a PhD in Medieval Studies from the Universidade de Santiago de Compostela (2019). My doctoral research involved the development of a digital edition model in TEI that enables the quantitative study of linguistic variation through the automatic comparison of witnesses.

I also have solid experience in Digital Humanities teaching, in particular giving specialised workshops and seminars in digital philology and XML technologies.

My avid interest in data modeling and the formalization of annotation schemes makes me very keen on continuing to have an active role in the TEI community.

Elli Bleeker

Affiliation: Huygens Institute

Statement of purpose:

I am pleased to seek re-election to the TEI Technical Council. During my time on Council so far, I have focused on maintaining standards, processing feature requests, resolving bugs, and improving guidelines and documentation. This foundational work remains essential, and I am committed to continuing these efforts. It has also proven to be the best way to acquire a thorough knowledge of the TEI infrastructure — knowledge I plan to make more accessible to new Council members and scholars at all technical levels. If re-elected, I will prioritize contributing to TEI by Example and related educational initiatives such as the SIG Pedagogy. This includes collecting and organizing existing teaching materials while ensuring their long-term accessibility. Additionally, I will continue to refine the encoding guidelines for manuscript description from a genetic perspective, building on the Encoding Model for Genetic Editions (Burnard et al., 2010). Specifically, I will examine how these guidelines can be updated to reflect current developments in shared vocabularies for textual variation.

Serving on the TEI Technical Council is sometimes challenging but always rewarding work. The technical challenges are engaging and instructive, and collaborating with dedicated colleagues makes the role particularly enjoyable. Due to health issues and maternity leave, I was only able to serve the final year of my three-year term, and I am eager to continue the work that has just begun. (Incidentally, I want to acknowledge the Council's understanding and flexibility during my leave of absence—their support reflects the collaborative spirit that makes this community so valuable.) Finally, I am fortunate to have institutional support for my TEI work, which enables me to dedicate the necessary time and resources to Council responsibilities.

Biography:

I work as a researcher at the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands and the DHLab of the KNAW Humanities Cluster. The Huygens Institute is a leading European institute in digital scholarly editing and therefore recognizes the value of the TEI, providing institutional support for this kind of work. I have a background in French literature, book history, and manuscript studies, but over the years I've received hands-on training in text modeling, semi-automated collation, and digital scholarly editing. Coming to XML and text encoding from a humanities background rather than a technical one gives me particular insight into the challenges scholars face when learning these technologies, making me well-positioned to contribute to the pedagogical aspects of TEI work.

Maria Fronczak

Affiliation: Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences

Statement of purpose:

I would like to advocate for two causes: first, the development of recommendations for applying the TEI Guidelines; and second, the issues of versioning, citability, and long-term preservation of digital editions.

The flexibility of using the TEI guidelines is a great advantage, but it comes at a price. Less experienced users often struggle with choosing how to encode text; moreover, similar projects may choose different approaches, which reduces the interoperability of encoded data. Furthermore, the lack of clear recommendations for most standard cases negatively impacts the reusability of software solutions for preparing or visualizing digital editions. There are initiatives to define encoding recommendations for the main types of digital editions, which I find very valuable and inspiring. I believe it is worth pursuing this topic on the TEI Technical Council forum, in dialogue with the community and the teams already working on the issue, in order to develop recommendations for recurring, standard situations, without sacrificing the overall flexibility of the TEI Guidelines.

Working both at a research institute and an academic library, I am acutely aware of the insufficient position of digital editions in scholarly discussions, where outdated print editions are often cited instead of digital editions, which may not be considered as legitimate sources. I see the issues of versioning, citability, and durability of digital editions among the main reasons for this problem. While I realize that those issues are not solely technical, and I do acknowledge that a comprehensive approach is needed, there are also some key technical questions that I would like to raise.

Biography:

A graduate of computer science and interfaculty studies in the humanities, currently working at the Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences and the University of Warsaw Library, where she makes use of her vast experience in software engineering when architecting and implementing solutions for scientific research and library operations. She has been involved in several digital humanities and cultural heritage projects, including digital editions projects; and her current responsibilities include preparing the infrastructure for digital editions at the Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences.

Joanna Hałaczkiewicz

Affiliation: Jagiellonian University (Kraków, Poland)

Statement of purpose:

Being nominated to the TEI Consortium Technical Council is a great honor for me. I have gained experience in designing and encoding digital scholarly editions of Polish literature from the contemporary, Renaissance, and Baroque periods. The values I aim to promote in TEI encoding are flexibility, interoperability, and – most importantly – simplicity.

The true richness of the TEI standard – namely, its ability to encode a wide variety of data – can also be overwhelming for scholars at the early stages of their Digital Humanities journey. As a member of the Technical Council, I would like to support the community of TEI beginners and especially encourage researchers who are skeptical of Digital Humanities to explore the broader possibilities offered by the TEI standard.

I am particularly interested in developing multimodal publishing workflows, where digital scholarly editions are developed in parallel with printed materials and e-books, playing an integral role in the overall publication process. Another area of my interest involves the application of artificial intelligence to automate editorial tasks such as transliteration, text modernization, and annotation.

Biography:

I am an assistant at the Faculty of Polish Studies at the Jagiellonian University, holding a PhD in literary studies. I combine teaching – in the fields of textual criticism, editing, and publishing studies – with research, as a member of the LabEdyt (Laboratory of Digital Editing) team at the Jagiellonian Centre for Digital Humanities.

I am involved in several digital scholarly edition projects, including an edition of Szymon Laks’s correspondence with Krystyna and Czesław Bednarczyk (1975–1983), an edition of the homiletic works of Piotr Skarga (16th century), an edition of a manuscript containing Baroque poetry by Wacław Potocki („Moralia”), Neolatina Sarmatica (a digital repository of critical editions of Latin texts authored by writers associated with the former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth), and a web platform dedicated to the history of the 20th-century Polish publishing house in London: Poets' and Painters' Press – Oficyna Poetów i Malarzy.

Dario Kampkaspar

Affiliation: University and State Library Darmstadt

Statement of purpose:

I am excited and honoured to be nominated to stand for the TEI Council and thus contribute to the future of the TEI. For me, this means that while I have certain key interests, I’ll concentrate on what is most needed within the council: the TEI and its bodies are a group effort!

Over the past years and decades, the complexity of the TEI has increased continuously; there can be quite a learning curve, especially as there are often multiple ways of doing things. This is not a downside of the TEI but its strength as it enables its use in many different areas. But it might be helpful to more explicitly outline suggestions how phenomena could be addressed for certain use cases. Hence, one focus for me would be to work towards these kinds of suggestions (which would be a combination of a customization and an expanded documentation) so as to make the first steps in the TEI world easier and improve interoperability.

By now, the model to describe a text’s meta data or the entities (in the broadest sense) related to it, has become very powerful. I would like to work towards a clear distinction of meta data and the actual text (be it transcribed or born digital). This will strengthen the value of the TEI in describing not only bibliographic meta data but also entities.

Connected to both these efforts is my hope to be able to have a fresh look a many elements’ content models – or, more general, the class system – as there are often elements allowed that do not seem to make many sense. This often stems from an element’s possible use both within the text as well as for describing meta data or entities. This will be a long task but also help reduce complexity and thus make learning (and teaching) the TEI a lot easier.

I hope that, if elected, I can contribute to the open, fair and inclusive community the TEI is.

Biography:

Currently, I am the head of the Centre for Digital Editions at the University and State Library in Darmstadt, Germany. The projects I’m involved in span from in-depth scholarly editions to large corpus building (240 years of newspapers) and mass conversion of different formats to TEI. Also, I am actively contributing to the development of the framework for digital editions used in the library.

My key interests are closely related to this background – the need to keep a large number of projects up and running while making sure that the markup is as consistent as possible.

I hold a degree in (medieval and early modern) history and English linguistics and literature.

Naoki Kokaze

Affiliation: Chiba University

Statement of purpose:

I am writing to express my enthusiastic interest in the nomination for the TEI Technical Council. My work in digital history/humanities with a focus on historical financial records of Japan and Europe has been deeply intertwined with the principles and technologies of the Text Encoding Initiative, and I am eager to contribute more formally to its future development.

I am aware that the TEI Technical Council has historically had limited representation from the Asian research community. I believe my perspective as a researcher based in Japan can bring a valuable new dimension to the Council's work. My participation would not only enhance the Council's international diversity but also offer fresh insights into the unique challenges and opportunities presented by East Asian texts, such as how to best model non-linear or multi-layered text structures common in Japanese historical documents. As detailed in my biography, my extensive, practical experience with TEI has prepared me to contribute effectively to these challenges.

If elected, I am committed to leveraging my background to advance the TEI's mission. I hope to contribute by:

• Acting as a bridge between the TEI and the growing digital humanities community in Asia, fostering greater collaboration and adoption.
• Sharing my expertise in handling complex non-Latin text structures to help ensure the TEI remains a truly global standard.

The TEI Consortium is the most vital community for advancing digital scholarly methods in the humanities. I have the utmost respect for its work and would be honored to dedicate my time and expertise to the Technical Council.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

Biography:

I am an Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities at Chiba University, Japan, where I design a postgraduate DH curriculum. I received my MA degree in DH as the Best Overall Student in the MA in Digital Humanities at King's College London 2018/19, focusing on the usability of TEI and semantic web technologies for the analysis of digital history.

I have led a project that involved creating a TEI-based digital scholarly edition of ancient Japanese administrative document, Engi-shiki. In this project, we proposed new tag sets and contributed to the development of <unitDecl> and <unitDef>, in an article for the Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative, titled "Toward a Model for Marking up Non-SI Units and Measurements." Furthermore, I first-authored a paper in the journal of Digital Scholarship in the Humanities on the analysis of early-modern Spanish ledger using TEI/DEPCHA (Digital Edition Publishing Cooperative for Historical Accounts).

Drawing from my experience in structuring and comparing Japanese and European historical accounting records with TEI, my research begins by focusing on the unique characteristics of these primary sources, but my ultimate goal is to derive broader lessons and general insights that are applicable across different cultural contexts.

Stephan Kurz

Affiliation: Austrian Academy of Sciences, Institute for Habsburg and Balkan Studies

Statement of purpose:

For the past six years I have been working on digital scholarly edition projects working with historical sources, with two project teams who I continuously support in their use of the TEI. Both projects have enabled me to profit from as well as contribute to the TEI community in offline and online channels. This extended my knowledge of the TEI Guidelines, which was previously limited to scholarly edition practice of literary works. This focus has necessitated lots of extra-textual knowledge about persons, places, orgs and, importantly, events and their relations.

My goal during a term on the TEI Technical Council would be to finalize previous work on event in conjunction with the other ›-ographies‹ (i.e. standOff descendant elements and their in-text relatives).

I would be honored to return the lots of favours the TEI community has done me since 2008, by taking the time to more actively contribute to the Guidelines and the TEI as an organization.

Biography:

Working for the Austrian Academy of Sciences’ Institute for Habsburg and Balkan Studies as a technical editor for the ›Ministerratsprotokolle der Habsburgermonarchie 1848–1918‹ edition of governmental documents (in print and on the web), as well as for the ›Digital Scholarly Edition of Habsburg-Ottoman Diplomatic Sources 1500–1918‹ (QhoD) online edition project. Former German studies lecturer at University of Zagreb, Croatia, and University of Vienna, Austria. PhD thesis on German-language epistolary novels (correspDesc, but also objectDesc and genre theory beyond textClass). Experience in the book trade (financed my studies by working in proofreading, copyediting, graphic design, typesetting, publishing, a large digitization project at a university library, as well as at a bookseller’s). Accustomed to organizational matters through various academic committees and representation of doctoral candidates on national and European level. Typography aficionado, LaTeX (ab)user.

Patricia O'Connor

Affiliation: Independent Researcher

Statement of purpose:

When I was elected to the Technical Council three years ago it was my intention to make the TEI documentation more accessible for those encountering the TEI for the first time. In my time as a member of the Technical Council I have updated the Technical Council documentation for Updating the P5 subset. This is a procedure that needs to be completed on a monthly basis by a Council member. I assumed responsibility for ensuring that the documentation aligns with current practice and that the procedure is also accessible for new Council Members who are building the P5 subset for the very first time. I have also updated the documentation for Building a Release, a procedure that is vital for the release of future versions of the TEI Guidelines. As one of the assistant release technicians for the previous release of the TEI Guidelines, I volunteered to correct the documentation to guarantee that it is accurate and avoids any unnecessary delays for future releases. Additionally, I created a cheat sheet or a beginners guide for the new Technical Council members that are unfamiliar with git or the command line. For the past three years I have gained invaluable experience in maintaining and updating the TEI Guidelines, including deprecating elements and updating content models. I am also a new member of the EpiDoc Action Group, a group that is dedicated to maintaining guidelines for Epigraphic Documents in TEI XML and I would greatly appreciate the opportunity to represent the EpiDoc Action Group on the TEI Technical Council and facilitate collaboration between the TEI and EpiDoc communities. I have had the great honour and privilege to learn from more experienced Council members and I seek re-election to the Technical Council so that I could continue learning about and actively contributing to the maintenance of the TEI Guidelines.

Biography:

I specialise in text encoding, and my experience with TEI encompasses early medieval manuscripts, 19th century correspondence, as well as Celtic inscriptions. Currently, I am responsible for encoding ogham inscriptions across Ireland and Britain in EpiDoc TEI-XML format in accordance with the EpiDoc Guidelines for the joint OG(H)AM project between Maynooth and Glasgow universities. I have also worked with Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) technology and the eScriptorium platform for fire-damaged medieval manuscripts as part of the RESCAPÉ and PRAIRIE projects at the École nationale des chartes. For the ‘Transatlantic Intellectual Networks’ project at Newcastle University, I transcribed, edited, and encoded 19th century correspondence in TEI-XML. As part of the ‘A Consolidated Library of Anglo-Saxon Poetry’ (CLASP) project at Oxford University, I produced transcriptions of Old English and Anglo-Latin poetic texts. I look forward to expanding my knowledge and experience by participating in future TEI and EpiDoc projects.

I hold a Digital Humanities PhD from University College Cork. My doctoral research was focused on creating a digital documentary edition of an early eleventh century Old English manuscript witness of the Old English Bede and its marginalia. I am committed to developing my knowledge of TEI. I was the co-instructor for the introductory workshop on ‘Building Digital Editions with the TEI’ at University College Cork (2023). At the École nationale des chartes (2024), I was a co-instructor on the postgraduate module ‘Structuring XML and TEI-XML’. I am also a co-instructor for the ‘Navigating and Processing Data from the TEI with XPath and XSLT’ workshop at the TEI 2025 conference in Krakow. During my PhD, summer schools such as the 'Medieval and Modern Manuscript Studies in the Digital Age' summer school at Cambridge University Library (CUL) and King’s College London (2016) were invaluable for providing in-depth training in text encoding and I hope to continue expanding the TEI community by teaching TEI-XML at workshops and summer schools. I am a newly appointed member of the EpiDoc Action Group and I am also the Digital Officer for the Teachers of Old English in Britain and Ireland (TOEBI), and would be delighted to promote the activities of the TEI Technical Council in both of these roles.

Ariane Pinche

Affiliation: CNRS

Statement of purpose:

First of all, I am deeply honored to be considered for a position on the TEI Technical Council. I am a medieval philologist at the CNRS, with a strong interest in the digital representation of medieval texts. My engagement with the field of Digital Humanities began with work on TEI-based digital editions. During my early training on the Hyperdonat project, I was an early adopter of ODD, using it both as an XML schema and to document data modelling decisions. My PhD thesis consisted of a digital edition of Li Confessor by Wauchier de Denain, which involved representing the physical structure of manuscript BnF fr. 412, collating the manuscript tradition and enriching the text with linguistic annotation —all with the aim of producing a rigorously documented scholarly edition. I also integrated the CTS (Canonical Text Service) protocol to ensure compatibility with the CapiTainS ecosystem. From 2018 to 2021, I taught digital editing (XML-TEI, ODD, and XSLT) at the École nationale des chartes, in the Master's programme Technologies numériques appliquées à l’histoire, where I had previously been a student. Although I now work full-time as a researcher, I remain deeply committed to knowledge transmission. I currently teach digital editing and automatic text transcription to early-career researchers and research support staff, notably at the EnExDi Spring University and in various workshops and training events. If elected to the Technical Council, I would be honoured to contribute to ongoing discussions around text encoding and the continued evolution of the TEI standard. I am committed to representing the needs of scholars working with manuscripts and to strengthening the dialogue between automated processing workflows and TEI. I would also work to ensure strong connections with the French-speaking community and the networks I am actively involved in, such as Biblissima+, the Consortium Ariane-HN, and Humanistica.

Biography:

I am a researcher (chargée de recherche) at the CNRS, working in medieval studies and digital humanities at CIHAM (UMR 5648) in Lyon. My primary area of research is the vernacular hagiographic tradition, with a particular interest in the circulation and reception of texts across manuscripts and communities. I am especially focused on the mechanisms of compilation in French ‘legendiers’ and on how digital tools can help us better understand their structure and transmission. To explore these large and complex corpora, I have been involved in the development of automatic handwriting recognition models for medieval manuscripts, notably within the international project CATMuS (Consistent Approaches to Transcribing ManuScripts). This work has led me to reflect on the ways in which the TEI standard can support semi-automatic editorial workflows – from transcription to enriched, layered textual representations that allow for multiple levels of interpretation.

Klaus Rettinghaus

Statement of purpose:

I am honored to have been nominated for the Technical Council. As a musicologist and developer, I have been working on and with TEI for many years. I have contributed to several digital editions and served as a reviewer for the Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative. For several years I have been an active member of the Correspondence SIG and have also participated in the development of the TEI schema. This community is open and welcoming and I would be happy to actively contribute to the Council with my technical expertise in any possible way.

Biography:

Klaus studied physics in Berlin. After graduating, he studied musicology, LIS and theology at the Humboldt University in Berlin. He received his doctorate in 2012 with a thesis on Otto Nicolai's sacred works. From 2011, he was a research assistant at the Saxon Academy of Sciences in Leipzig, where he also worked on the Bach digital project. From 2020, he was employed as a developer at the Berlin start-up Enote. He worked as a lecturer at the Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy University of Music and Theater in Leipzig. He was a board member of the Music Encoding Initiative and is also a member of its technical team. Klaus works as an editor and develops tools for the digital humanities and is especially interested in exchange formats.

Yifan Wang

Affiliation: International Institute for Digital Humanities, Tokyo

Statement of purpose:

Throughout my academic life, I have been always fascinated by “notation”, which includes writing, language, data, format, or their interactions. Then, working for years on ancient Buddhist texts, I become more and more interested in transmission and transformation of human knowledge across times, languages, and technologies, which is not unlike the recent movement from paper to digital data. For a TEI user who has learned linguistics, philology, translation, and programming—and perhaps most importantly, who was an XML kid in the middle school—I am honoured to have a chance to serve on and learn further from TEI, a digital and global infrastructure for the current and future humanities research.

Leveraging my knowledge, I would commit myself to expanding usability and applicability of TEI, especially on better support of scripts, languages, and disciplines from East Asian, Indic, or other regional academic spheres in the Guidelines. I would find the way through discussion and coordination with the Initiative’s working groups, SIGs, as well as other experts and communities, local or technical, to knowing and fulfilling each own basic requirements in TEI. The Guidelines are already a vast accumulation of the common assets by past and current great contributors. I am ready to help, as a member familiar with the standard drafting process, enrich them to be even more universal by incorporating, and harmonizing with, previously unaccounted fields.

Biography:

Currently, a Fellow at the International Institute for Digital Humanities, as well as a (very close) PhD candidate in library and information sciences at the University of Tokyo, awaiting defense at the time of writing. My BA and MA degrees are in linguistics. My research interests are around written languages, informatics of scripts, and writing system studies, while my PhD thesis focuses on medieval Han script variant characters (practised in China, Korea, and Japan). Involved for ten years in the SAT project (SAT Daizōkyō Text Database Committee), mainly working on digitalization of the Taishō Tripiṭaka (a compilation of Chinese Buddhist scriptures) and research of medieval character dictionaries. An active member in standardization processes: ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 2 (as IRG expert) for ISO/IEC 10646 (Universal coded character set) and the Unicode Standard, ISO/TC 37 (as delegate and WG expert) for ISO 639 (ISO language code), ISO 21646, and related standards. Also a freelance translator and a L10N/i18n engineer mainly in the field of video games.

Academic activities: “Design of Document Repository Management System Based on Graph Database” (2018; awarded IPSJ SIG Computers and the Humanities Student Award), “What Are We Calling ‘Latin Script’? Name and Reality in the Grammatological Terminology” (2019), “慧琳撰『一切経音義』の符号化をめぐって [On the encoding of Huilin’s Yiqiejing Yinyi]” (2019), “Xu Yiqiejing Yinyi and Issues on TEI Markup of Chinese Literature” (2021; awarded Jinmoncom 2021 Student Award), “『續一切経音義』を通じた外字と割注の課題 [Problems on gaiji and warichū as seen in Xu Yiqiejing Yinyi]” (2022; in: ISBN 978-4-90-965884-5)

Standardization activities: “On Encoding Policy of Gongche Notations and Upcoming Para-ideographs” (2019), “Proposal to Encode 20 Additional Kanbun Marks” (2021), “Suggestions for Future IRG Workflow and Procedures” (2021), “SAT Submission for the IRG Working Set 2024” (2024)

Candidate Statements: TEI Board

Dimitra Grigoriou

Affiliation: Instistute for Habsburg and Balkan Studies, Austrian Academy of Sciences

Statement of purpose:

In my current role, I am fortunate to contribute to a diverse range of digital humanities projects centered on digital editions and the application of TEI/XML. This work not only deepens my technical expertise but allows me to actively support and guide colleagues in the use of the TEI and its guidelines. Through this collaborative environment, I have come to appreciate the importance of fostering a strong, supportive TEI community—one that is accessible, inclusive, and forward-looking.

I am passionate about maintaining, supporting, and advancing the TEI standard by helping to develop practical solutions that respond directly to the evolving needs of editors and researchers. My goal is to make TEI not just a technical standard, but a flexible, user-centered tool that empowers scholars at every stage of their digital editing journey.

Beyond my technical engagement, I have a strong interest in pedagogy and mentorship. I actively promote the introduction of TEI/XML to early-career scholars and students through teaching, training sessions, and internships. I believe that introducing young researchers to structured text encoding is key to ensuring the future vitality of digital scholarship. Equally important is fostering ongoing dialogue between scholars in the humanities, bridging gaps between disciplines, and nurturing a spirit of collaboration.

If elected, I will dedicate myself to expanding awareness of TEI across diverse academic and cultural communities. I aim to develop more accessible training opportunities, encourage inclusive participation regardless of experience level, and amplify the voices of users who wish to contribute to the continued evolution of the TEI Guidelines. I believe the TEI community thrives when it reflects a wide range of perspectives and use cases—and I am committed to ensuring that this vision becomes a reality.

Biography:

Dimitra Grigoriou is a linguist with a strong background in English language, linguistics, and digital humanities. She studied English Language and Literature at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and holds two Master's degrees: one in English Language and Linguistics from the University of Vienna and another in Digital Methods for the Humanities from the Athens University of Economics and Business. Her research focuses on the encoding of Ancient Greek mathematical texts, particularly Euclid’s geometry, using the TEI/XML standard.

Fluent in seven languages, she is passionate about language structure and digital scholarship. In summer semester 2024, she taught the course Computational Background Skills for Digital Humanities at the University of Vienna and actively promotes digital humanities through initiatives such as KinderUni. She has also contributed to the FWF project Auden Musulin Papers: A Digital Edition of W. H. Auden's Letters to Stella Musulin. Since August 2024, she has been working as a digital humanities technician in the long-term projects QhoD and Minutes of the Council of Ministers – Habsburg Monarchy, with a strong interest in mentoring young researchers through internships.

Patch Release of the TEI Guidelines 4.10.1

On 28 August 2025, the TEI Consortium released a small but significant “patch” of the TEI Guidelines as version 4.10.1. The patch removed a Schematron constraint that we had introduced in the recent 4.10.0 release, because the constraint proved problematic for TEI projects when their TEI headers use elements that are members of att.declarable without the attributes for selection. For details on the issue, please see the explanation and tickets linked in the release notes below.

Martin Holmes and Syd Bauman were our release technicians, and the release process was helped along by our ever-vigilant Council members and friends, with special thanks to Martin Prell for alerting us to the problem in the TEI Slack.

As always, we rely on you all to report bugs and make feature requests for the Guidelines on GitHub at https://github.com/TEIC/TEI/issues and in our TEI Slack. Your input tells us what to work on, and we cannot do without it! You will find all of the TEI Consortium's software projects in our GitHub organization https://github.com/TEIC, where you can report issues and make feature requests. The latest release of the Guidelines is available from all the usual places, including the TEI website at https://tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/index.html and the GitHub site at https://github.com/TEIC/TEI/releases/tag/P5_Release_4.10.1.

The patch did not require a new release of the Stylesheets, so the current version of the Stylesheets remains 7.59.0. The Debian package has been updated at http://packages.tei-c.org/deb/, and the TEI Guidelines and the Stylesheets are available for download at https://sourceforge.net/projects/tei/files/.

The oXygen TEI plugin has been updated with the latest version as well. Here is an explanation of “How to automatically update your TEI framework in oXygen": https://github.com/TEIC/oxygen-tei/blob/master/oxygen-tei-plugin.md.

TEI P5 version 4.10.1 release notes

Release 4.10.1 is a patch release to remove a Schematron constraint introduced in the 4.10.0 release. This constraint flagged as an error the case of two or more sibling declarable elements appearing in the TEI header without the required attributes. Because TEI projects use these elements in the TEI Header in contexts that do not involve att.declarable, we are removing the Schematron rule introduced in 4.10.0. For now the language guiding the constraint is still present in the prose, as it has been since P2. (#2750 and PR # 2751).

Note: patch releases do not have codenames.

New Release of the TEI Guidelines 4.10.0 / Stylesheets 7.59.0

On 15 August 2025, The TEI Consortium released version 4.10.0 of the TEI Guidelines, codenamed “The Olinguito Release” celebrating the discovery of the olinguito in South America which was announced by the Smithsonian Institution on this date in 2013. This release includes version 7.59.0 of the TEI Stylesheets.

Helena Bermúdez Sabel, Elli Bleeker, and Patricia O’Connor were our release technicians, and the release process was helped along by our ever-vigilant Council members and friends, with special thanks to Syd Bauman, Hugh Cayless, Martin Holmes, and Peter Stadler. For details about what has changed in the new version, please see the release notes below.

You will find the new release of the TEI Stylesheets, made in conjunction with the 4.10.0 release, at https://github.com/TEIC/Stylesheets/releases/tag/v7.59.0. The Debian package has been updated at http://packages.tei-c.org/deb/, and the TEI Guidelines and the Stylesheets are available for download at https://sourceforge.net/projects/tei/files/.

The oXygen TEI plugin has been updated with the latest version as well. A description on “How to automatically update your TEI framework in oXygen” can be found at https://github.com/TEIC/oxygen-tei/blob/master/oxygen-tei-plugin.md.

TEI P5 version 4.10.0 and Stylesheets version 7.59.0 release notes

Release 4.10.0 is codenamed ‘The Olinguito Release’.

This release introduces new features and resolves a number of issues raised by the TEI community. The majority of these changes and corrections are a consequence of feature requests or bugs reported by the TEI community using the GitHub tracking system. A full list of the issues resolved in the course of this release cycle may be found under the 4.10.0 milestone. Many thanks to the community contributors who reported issues, sent bug fixes, and helped with the drafting that led to this release, including: GitHub user a1ix2, John Bampton, Piotr Bański, Lou Burnard, Hugh Cayless, Ash Clark, Tomaž Erjavec, David Maus, Natsuko Nakagawa, Matija Ogrin, Klaus Rettinghaus, and GitHub user rvdb.

The following changes are particularly worth highlighting in this release:

Changes to content models

• The facsimile element is now permitted to self-nest to represent relationships among collections of manuscripts. (#2565 and PR #2654).
• The byline element has been added to closer (#2658 and PR #2735).
• The content models of place, event, person, and org now include ref in addition to ptr (#2651 and PR #2689).
• The value of the rotate attribute has been changed from teidata.count to teidata.numeric in order to permit negative and non-integer values (#2637 and PR #2638).

Changes to the build process for publishing the Guidelines

• With this release, the Guidelines are no longer served in the outdated and proprietary Kindle .mobi format, since they can be read in the EPUB format in the Kindle application (#2574 and PR #2600).
• We have updated the Guidelines build process to apply SchXslt, which implements Schematron validation with XSLT (PR #2509).

ODD-breaking change and deprecation

The following change introduced with this release could invalidate ODD customizations in TEI projects. Those maintaining ODD customizations of the TEI should be aware of the following change, and may need to adapt their ODD files accordingly.

• Writers of Schematron in ODD customizations will find that Schematron assert and report tests must be established within a rule with a context attribute. A missing context was previously deprecated with a warning, but now generates an error (PR #2680).

Improvements of prose and examples

• The Dedication and the Preface and Acknowledgments have been significantly revised with this release. The dedication now includes our founding editor of the TEI consortium and Guidelines, C. Michael Sperberg-McQueen (1954-2024), and provides ‘about’ links for each person listed. The Preface and Acknowledgments are now updated for the first time since the launch of P5 in 2007, and they now list TEI Board members who have served over the past two decades (#2741, #2284, #2688, and PR #2743).
• This release provides a revision and a new example of dictionary encoding adapted from the TEI Lex-0 specification (#2718 and PR #2746).
• An example in Core Tags for Drama has been revised to replace p with ab as better suited to encode a passage without asserting whether the passage is either prose or verse (#2719 and PR #2731).
• XPath examples were corrected in Chapter 3 (#2690).
• This release revises an existing dictionary example to help clarify the difference between ed and edRef (#2653 and PR #2730).
• The definition of ident on remarks has been modified from teidata.text to teidata.name and its description had been revised (#2681 and PR #2682).
• Many element specifications have been revised to list reference locations indicating where they are mentioned in the Guidelines (#2652 and PR #2722).
• German translations have been added to glosses and descriptions of global attributes (PR #2674).
• Attribute descriptions in multiple languages have been harmonised for consistency (#2663 and PR #2695).

Documentation

• Improvements to TEI Council Working Papers (TCW) 22 and 31 (Documentation PR #18 and PR #19).

Housekeeping

• The encoding of list elements in the Guidelines has been revised to apply the rend attribute consistently for ordered lists (#2683 and PR #2693).
• Broken links have been repaired (PR #2673 and PR #2679).
• Improvements in the JavaScript handling of pop-up notes (PR #2692).

TEI Stylesheets

In addition, many improvements have been made to the XSLT stylesheets (which provide processing of TEI ODD files for Roma and TEIGarage as well as other TEI conversions). The Stylesheets are maintained separately from the Guidelines at https://github.com/TEIC/Stylesheets. A full list of the issues resolved in the course of this release cycle may be found under the 7.59.0 milestone.

Highlights of this release follow.

• Repairs to teitohtml.xsl to ensure the type of ab is output as the value of an HTML class (Stylesheets 723 and PR #724).
• The transformtei bin file can now process filenames with spaces (Stylesheets PR #738).
• Improved processing of Schematron in ODD processing (Stylesheets PR #731, #749, #750, PR #751, and PR #762).
• Repairs of broken links pointing to information about deprecation warnings (Stylesheets #694 and PR #747).
• Improvements in the Stylesheets test suite (Stylesheets #728, #755, and PR #756).
• Emendations of broken links in the Stylesheets README (Stylesheets #703 and PR #710)
• Modification of odd.css to modify the styling of new attribute lists in HTML ODD documentation (Stylesheets #657 and PR #682).

Call for Hosts for TEI 2027

The Consortium of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI-C) is seeking potential hosts for the TEI 2027 Conference. The TEI-C is a vibrant international community which develops and maintains a standard for the representation of texts in digital form. As you know, its chief deliverable is a set of Guidelines which specify encoding methods for machine-readable texts, chiefly in the humanities, social sciences and linguistics. In addition to the Guidelines themselves, the Consortium provides a variety of resources for learning TEI, information on projects using the TEI, software developed for or adapted to the TEI, and runs an international conference with an annual general meeting.

The annual TEI Consortium Conference is usually held sometime in the months of August to November and brings together members of and contributors to the TEI community to share research, teach workshops, showcase tools and techniques as well as provide a report of the state of the TEI-C as part of the Annual General Meeting.

We are now seeking applications to host the TEI 2027 conference. (The hosts for TEI 2026 have already been decided and will be announced at TEI 2025 in Kraków.)

The TEI-C attempts to ensure that the annual meeting is held in a variety of locations reflecting the distribution of TEI members and TEI-related activities, with particular interest in institutions that have not previously hosted a TEI Conference and Members’ Meeting. As the TEI community continues to grow globally, the TEI-C is committed to inclusivity. We are also committed to supporting conference settings that are safe and welcoming to all.

Local organizers at the host institution(s) are responsible for providing facilities for all conference-related activities, including pre-conference workshops and SIG meetings, developing the conference web site, producing a collection of abstracts, organizing a conference dinner, and coordinating appropriate social events. The TEI-C Conference attracts approximately 100-150 participants and spans 3-4 days, depending on the proposals submitted and the workshops offered. The entire event not only includes the conference sessions, but the TEI-C Technical Council often meets for 2 days before the conference, the TEI-C Board has a meeting during the conference, there are usually pre-conference workshops, special interest group meetings, and some conferences have included optional additional social events.

The conference is entirely financed through conference registration fees, plus a $7,000 USD subvention from the TEI-C, and any contributions that the Local Conference Organising Committee is able to obtain from sponsors.

To apply to host the conference, please submit a PDF of a descriptive host application to James.Cummings@newcastle.ac.uk by 8 September 2025. The host application requires thorough logistical, timing, fiscal, social attractions, and other information from the prospective meeting host(s) to enable the TEI-C Board of Directors to fully review the applications with special emphasis on:

• the level of support and underwriting (financial and logistical) the institution can offer to ensure the success of the meeting;
• the venue itself and its suitability for a meeting of this size and type;
• the kinds of support the organizers can draw upon locally to ensure the logistical success of the meeting.

Conference hosts are expected to abide by and help facilitate the TEI-C Code of Conduct at https://tei-c.org/about/code-of-conduct/).

Additional information about conference expectations and requirements, including detailed information about the application process can be found at: http://members.tei-c.org/hosting.

Prospective hosts are invited to discuss their plans informally with members of the TEI-C Board of Directors https://tei-c.org/about/board-of-directors/ before submitting an application. Any questions not covered by the hosting page http://members.tei-c.org/hosting may also be sent to James.Cummings@newcastle.ac.uk.

Applications are due 8 September 2025, and will be reviewed by the members of the TEI-C Board of Directors.

25th TEI Conference — Register Now!

Dear colleagues — please join us for the annual Text Encoding Initiative conference in Kraków, Poland, 16-20 September!

The theme of this year’s TEI conference is “New Territories” and celebrates the twenty-fifth anniversary of the conference. In addition to a rich program of presentations, workshops, a banquet, and exciting outings (which can be viewed here), we are thrilled to have three great speakers joining us: Jadwiga Kita-Huber (Jagiellonian University), Sebastian Winkler (European Research Council), and Julia Flanders (Northeastern University).

Registration is open through 15 August. The registration form can be accessed here.

We look forward to seeing you in Kraków!!