TEI Annual Members Meeting - Report

TEI 2022-23 Annual Report

The Annual General Meeting of the TEI Consortium was held on 7 September, 2023 at Paderborn, Germany. The meeting took place during the TEI-MEC "Encoding Cultures" conference. (9:15-10:30 am local time) The following is a report of that meeting.

The meeting was convened by Diane Jakacki, Board of Directors Chair.

Board Members present:

  • Constance Crompton
  • James Cummings
  • Gimena del Rio Riande
  • Diane Jakacki
  • Wolfgang Meier

Officers present:

  • Elisa Beshero-Bondar (Technical Council Chair)
  • Hugh Cayless (Treasurer)

The meeting comprised reports from officers and SIGs, business, and announcements. Reports

Board of Directors

(Diane Jakacki):

2022-23 Activity

  • Considered/proposed new elections model
  • Reviewed listserv migration options with Council
  • Began process of reviewing and updating Bylaws
  • Worked with Council on plans for website migration
  • Shepherded designs and launch of new TEI logo

2023-24 Goals

  • Propose new membership model - toward vote by membership
  • Prepare for membership drive
  • Propose general Bylaws update
  • Support and participate in development of new website
  • Develop opportunities for inclusion in TEI events and governance

Technical Council

(Elisa Beshero-Bondar):

  • Completed and closed 115 tickets and pull requests
  • Issued two releases:
    • Version 4.5.0, "the Release of One's Own", October 26, 2022: (added a new element and revised , , and , allowed for nested elements)
    • Version 4.6.0, "the Peace Release" of the TEI Guidelines, April 4, 2023  ( may now include model.pPart.transcriptional, including supplied, redo, and damage )
  • Met face-to-face twice, during the LINCS conference in Guelph, Ontario in May 2023 and in Paderborn in September 2023
    • Hatched plans for a new "TEI Lite 2" customization
    • Worked on i8n and improving accessibility of the Guidelines "spec" pages
    • Contributed to planning of a more robust TEI-C website
  • TEI Stylesheets Co-op group
  • Another TEI Odd Processor (ATOP) task force: Weekly meetings on upgrading the processing of customization ODDs

Treasurer's Report

(Hugh Cayless)

  • With return to post-Pandemic style activities, spending has increased to pre-2019 levels, with expenses focused mainly on meeting/travel and financial/management services
  • Income is down from pre-2019 levels, and that trend looks to continue into the future based on declining number of institutional members vs. individual members
  • TEI-C is in a strong cash position, with 14.4 months of reserves (current estimate). We're not in financial trouble, but need to evaluate future income vs. expenses

Membership

(Cayless): Breakdown: Membership type: Number

  • Sustaining Partner ($5,000) = 2
  • Patron ($2,500) = 3
  • Friend ($1,500) = 5
  • Contributor ($500) = 15
  • Supporter ($250) = 25
  • Individual ($50) = 281

The trend in academic institutions toward continued austerity suggests that the Sustaining Partner and Patron institutional membership levels will not provide increased membership income in the near future.

Infrastucture

(Beshero-Bondar, Cayless)

  • Mailing Lists: With staff at Brown moving to other institutions or now retired, the TEI listservs hosted there (18 separate accounts) are vulnerable to lack of support and cancellation.
    • Board and Council discussed and pursued multiple options, including changing to a different mailing list platform, considering whether it is sustainable to continue to align with institutions based on employees active in TEI, and/or professional hosting services.
    • Beshero-Bondar approached Penn State about long-term hosting of listservs (all 18 accounts, plus complete archive including searchable access)
    • Penn State and Brown are testing transfer, with preliminary tests successful, and a goal of end of 2023 for complete transfer pending successful transfer of searchable archives.
  • Website: Cayless has for a long time advocated for moving the website from the current Wordpress instance to a more efficient, sustainable, streamlined, flattened structure.
    • Cayless presented a prototype of a site in 11ty, which can be maintained in the current GitHub repositories in Markdown files.
    • Cayless estimated that transition to the new site would take approximately a year.

jTEI

(Tanja Wissik, read by Jakacki) Editors

  • Joel Kalvesmaki, Washington, DC (2019-23) (chair)
  • Pietro Liuzzo, Bibliotheca Hertziana (2019-24)
  • Tanja Wissik, Austrian Academy of Sciences (2019-25)

Technical Editor

  • Ron Van den Branden, Belgium

Advisory Board

  • Elli Mylonas, Brown University (2022-24)
  • Federico Boschetti, CNR, Italy (2022-24)
  • Constance Crompton, University of Ottawa (2021-23)
  • Stefan Dumont, Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (2021-23)
  • Jonathan Prag, University of Oxford (2021-23)
  • Gimena del Rio Riande, IIBICRIT-CONICET, Argentina (2022-24)

Overview

  • jTEI Editors are appointed by the Board for terms of 4 years, renewable.
  • Chair of the editors rotates each year
  • One editor works with the guest volume editor on a particular issue
  • Editors meet monthly
  • Editors regularly update and revise author guidelines, workflow, and policy (e.g., internal conflict of interest)
  • All jTEI articles available though DOAJ
  • Agreement with EBSCO for indexing the jTEI

Publications

  • Rolling Issue
    • 2023: 1 article published
  • Issue 14
    • completely published
    • Edited by Georg Vogeler
    • 13 articles (including editors introduction)
  • Issue 15
    • 4 articles submitted (peer review decisions send to authors)
  • Issue 16
  • Issue 17
    • Edited by James Cummings, Martina Scholger and Tiago Sousa Garcia
    • 9 articles submitted (going through peer review)
  • Planned
    • Special issue as curated proceedings for this year’s joint TEI-MEC conference

SIGs

Correspondence SIG

  • Co-conveners: Stefan Dumont and Sabine Seifert
    • Further development of Correspondence Metadata Interchange Format (CMIF)
    • Further work on manual "Encoding Correspondence", opening of GitHub tickets

Ontologies SIG

  • Co-conveners: Connie Crompton and Kathryn Tomasek
    • Desired SIG Projects**
    • Linked data training materials designed with TEI users in mind
    • Bridge building with ontology maintaining organizations (e.g. ICS-Forth CIDOC-CRM)
    • Lists of resources, authorities, ontologies on the TEI Wiki
    • Survey of TEI users and creators: who is also using linked data and how? Can we see more examples?

Text & Graphics SIG

  • Co-conveners: Martin de la Iglesia and John Walsh
    • Report from SIG meeting:
      • Interplay between TEI and other formats (IIIF, SVG, (Geo)JSON, ...): when to use what? How to connect? (cf. #1508])
      • Are we describing physical objects or digital representations? Or both? How to distinguish? (cf. #2148)
      • facsimile//zone vs. sourceDoc//zone (Release 4.5.0, cf. #2300)
      • proposed new element (cf. #1861)

Graph Technologies

  • Applied Text as Graph (ATAG) https://git.thm.de/aksz15/atag
    • Up to now used in:
      • https://liberepistolarum.mni.thm.de/home
      • https://sozinianer.mni.thm.de/home
  • Future Work:
    • Apply TEI Standards
    • Web-based editor
    • Generic publication system

Music SIG

2008 – 2018

  • Drafted and proposed
    • Contributed section **14.3 Notated Music** in Written Text to the TEI Guidelines
    • Provides ODDs for embedding MEI into TEI (updated on request) github.com/TEI-Music-SIG/tei-mei

2023

  • Co-convenors: Raff Viglianti & Torsten Roeder
    • Provide a catalyst for projects combining text and music notation
    • Join the mailing list!

TEI for Linguists SIG (LingSIG)

  • Co-conveners: Piotr Bański, Susanne Haaf

    • Andreas Witt stepped down
    • Susanne new since early 2023
    • Technical Council Liaisons
      • Helena Bermúdez Sabel
      • Magdalena Turska
    • Liaison
      • Peter Stadler

  • LingSIG virtual meetings in 2023

  • Presentations on work regarding TEI and linguistics (so far by Susanne Haaf, Eduard Drenth, Joel Kalvesmaki)

  • Topics:

    • Issue of further linguistic inline annotations in TEI (att.linguistic)
    • morphosyntactic annotations
    • dependency relationships
    • Collection of linguistic projects working with TEI

  • Virtual meetings (once every one to two months) will continue

East Asian/Japanese SIG

  • Co-conveners: Kiyonori Nagasaki and Charles Mueller
    • The Structure
      • SIG EAJ is managed by the steering committee (SC)
        • Kazuhiro Okada (Keio University)
        • Kiyonori Nagasaki (International Institute for Digital Humanities)
        • Natsuko Nakagawa (National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics)
        • Satoru Nakamura (The University of Tokyo)
      • SC decides and manages activities of the SIG
    • Activities
      • Workshop We hold workshops every week, alternating between translations, encoding, and research presentations.
      • Discussion on development of the guidelines
      • Extension of the language code (ISO639-3)
      • Translating spec files on the Google spreadsheet prepared by M. Holmes
      • Now translating chapter 3.
      • Encoding a linguistic material of Japanese dialect. https://tei.dhii.jp/
      • On a GitHub account https://github.com/TEI-EAJ
      • Making TEI-guidelines for Japanese literature
        • To share easy and appropriate methods among related people
      • Developing and providing some TEI-utilization tools
        • To show convenience of TEI-encoded texts (e.g. correspondence)
      • Grant
        • The activity has been funded for around 100,000 USD over three years by JSPS (Japan Society for Promotion of Science).

TEI for MS

  • SIG meeting on Tuesday, Sept 13, 2:30pm to 4pm in Newcastle (minutes have been taken)
  • The mailing list was not very active during the year since.
  • Work on some issues concerning , mainly about loosening the content model of itself, to give up the order of top-level-children

Business

Proposal to Amend TEI Bylaws - Elections

The Board proposes that the TEI Bylaws be amended with regard to the mechanism for voting, such that both Board members and Council members are elected by all members of the Consortium.

  • Proposal was read by Jakacki
  • Proposal was seconded by Beshero-Bondar
  • Vote was unanimous in favour

NB: Jakacki has since updated published bylaws to include change.

2023 Conference

The Board expressed thanks to Raffaele Viglianti (Program Committee Chair) and Peter Stadler Johannes Kepper (co-Local Organizers). Applause was thunderous!

Election

There were two open positions for the Board of Directors and four open positions for Technical Council, plus need for one short-term position while Elli Bleeker is on leave.

Candidates for Board of Directors positions:

  • Julius Beneoluchi Odili
  • Karen Bourrier
  • Gimena del Rio Riande
  • Diane Jakacki
  • David Maus
  • Kevin McMullen
  • Emmanuel Ngue Um

Candidates for Technical Council

  • Syd Bauman
  • Nicholas Cole
  • Matthew Evan Davis
  • Gustavo Fernández Riva
  • Torsten Roeder
  • Joey Takeda
  • Raffaele Viglianti

Results:

  • Board: Gimena del Rio Riande, Diane Jakacki
  • Council: Syd Bauman, Torsten Roeder, Joey Takeda, Raffaele Viglianti

Announcements

Call for nominations for the Sebastian Rahtz Prize for TEI Ingenuity remains open until 15 September 2023. Next Conference

Gimena del Rio Riande announced that TEI 2024 will be held in Buenos Aires, Argentina, with provisional dates 7-11 October 2024. Applause was thunderous!

New Business

  • David Maus (DM): Website overhaul: editorial board needed to maintain the website long term
  • James Cummings: reminds that poster slides should be sent for the conference’s poster session
  • DM: wiki dormant for 4 years, decide if it should be kept or dropped
    • Hugh Cayless: discussions are already underway; either revitalize or pull the good bits
    • DM: SIG require wiki as publication space; replacement needed
    • Elisa Beshero-Bondar (EBB): website repository based on markdown, so it is comparable to a wiki
  • Diane Jakacki (DJ): new website architecture enables us to give more people active editorial access
    • EBB: seconds idea of editorial board; how many members should it have?
    • DM: 3 or 4 people; communication officer could be head of the editorial board
    • DJ: editorial board members do not need/should not come from the board or council
  • DM: ATOP group: have something which starts to work for ODD customizations, so real projects are wanted for testing

The proposal was met with great enthusiasm. NB: The Board will formalize the plan in Sept-Oct 2023, with the goal of having the editorial board in place by end of 2023.

With no further business, the meeting was adjourned at 10:30 am local time.