TEI Members Meeting Minutes: 2012-11-10

TEI Members Meeting Minutes: 2012-11-10

Minutes from 2011 meeting approved

Announcement of the Location of the 2013 TEI Conference and Members Meeting (Elena Pierazzo)

  • The 2013 TEI Conference and Members Meeting will take place in Italy at the University of Rome "La Sapienza" and will be hosted by the Italian Associazione per l'Informatica Umanistica e la Cultura Digitale, in collaboration with the research Centre DIGILAB Sapienza.
  • Elena and others express gratitude to Arianna Ciula for helping to organize the Rome.

Election Results (David Sewell)

  • Results announced by David Sewell, witnessed by J.C. and J.W.
  • Elected to TEI Technical Council, 2-year terms, 2013-14: Syd Bauman, Hugh Cayless, Elli Mylonas, Sebastian Rhatz
  • Elected to TEI Board of Directors, 2-year terms, 2013-14: Lou Burnard, John Walsh, Arianna Ciula, Glen Worthey

Treasurer's Report (John Unsworth)

  • Review of TEI income and expenses
  • Review and demo of new membership management software (from http://wildapricot.com) and site: http://members.tei-c.org/). The management software provides functionality for managing memberships, providing access to member benefits, announcements about TEI-related events, discussion forums, etc.
  • Review of Bank of America accounts
    • Two accounts
      • Main account for general income/expenses.
      • Auxiliary account (monies left over from Mellon grant; auxiliary account may also be appropriate account for conference fees)
    • Certificate of Deposit (amount? maturity date?)
    • Total assets of approximately $200,000 (USD).
    • Accountant Richard Ruttenberg has been retained to take on some bookkeeping tasks, primarily filing of taxes.
  • Discussed possibility of TEI and ADHO exchanging services, with TEI provide financial services in exchange for web hosting and system administration services provided by ADHO.

Partner Updates: Oxford, Virginia, TGE Adonis (David Sewell)

  • Oxford
    • Staffing and Institutional Matters
      • University of Oxford's TEI commitment is led from Oxford e-Research Centre, with most of the practical work coming from IT Services.
      • A significant amount of staff time spent by:
        • Sebastian Rahtz (elected member of the TEI Technical Council)
        • James Cummings (Chair of the TEI Technical Council)
        • Martin Wynne (institutional representative to the TEI Board)
      • We do not track specific number of hours since some level of TEI advice and support included in our roles
    • Technical Activities
    • Sebastian Rahtz and James Cummings took lead in continuing work on the family of TEI-C XSL Stylesheets for conversion of TEI to many different formats.
    • The development and support of the TEI-C technical infrastructure for maintenance of the Guidelines, including work on packaging for Debian and oxygen, the continuous integration system using Jenkins, and the OxGarage web service for document conversion.
    • The increasing automation of our build and continuous integration system (Jenkins).
    • Bespoke TEI training workshops on TEI for specific research project.
    • Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School 2012: week long set of workshops and lectures including both introductory and advanced workshops on TEI; DHOXSS 2013 will be 8-12 July 2013 and will have a TEI workshop.
    • Lots of work on conversion of ECCO/EEBO-TCP texts and rationalization of their markup.
    • Spindle Project: Speech-to-Text transcriptions of podcasts from Oxford as TEI.
    • Everything openly licensed and freely available.
  • Virginia
    • Over the past year Virginia has continued to support the TEI website infrastructure and financial services, until the very recent appointment of John Unsworth as treasurer. Virginia has decided not to continue as a partner, but has graciously agreed to continue supporting current services it provides through a transition period, though not indefinitely.
    • Thanks were offered to Virginia for their longtime support of the TEI as a host institution and partner, and for their graciousness in continuing support during a transition period.
  • TGE Adonis
    • Lou Burnard is engaged in a variety of activities for TGE Adonis to promote and support TEI in France.

SIG Report (James Cummings)

  • Board and Council agreed to do away with the position of SIG Coordinator and move those responsibilities to the Council Chair, or someone nominated by the Council Chair. The Council Chair will manage the communication between the Council and the SIGs, on matters relevant to the Council. The local conference organizers will co-ordinate with the SIG chairs to arrange meeting space for SIGs meeting at the annual conference.
  • Discussed the possibility of issuing a code bounty for someone to develop a replacement to the Roma ODD processor.

Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative (Kevin Hawkins)

  • The Board created the Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative in 2010. It is published on <Revues.org>, with the editorial workflow handled using Open Journal Systems (OJS) at journal.tei-c.org.
  • Since the last business meeting, the journal has published two issues (numbers 2 and 3). Issue 4 is undergoing copyediting now and issue 5 submissions are being gathered and discussed for the peer review process. A call has gone out for issue 6, which will include selected papers from this conference.
  • In 2010 the Board confirming three editors (Susan Schreibman, Kevin Hawkins, and Markus Flatscher) for staggered terms. The term for Markus ended in 2011, and the Board approved Ron Van den Branden as our new technical editor. Kevin's term will end at the end of 2012 and Susan's at the end of 2013.
  • Due to expressed interest in the journal including reviews of projects, the Board also approved Tanya Clement as our first reviews editor beginning in 2012 as well. Tanya is taking the lead on figuring out how this will work.
  • Originally Susan and Kevin planned that one or the other would copyedit each article, but we soon realized that the articles needed so much work that we both needed to go through every article. So for the first three issues, Susan and Kevin each spent many hours copyediting articles and found that the volume of work was unsustainable. Susan and Kevin both felt that it would be helpful to have a skilled copyeditor who review each article for stylistic matters followed by Susan or Kevin handling higher-level content. Kevin knows of a copyeditor who has worked on encoding projects for MPublishing and the Text Creation Partnership at the University of Michigan and was willing to take on the project at an agreeable rate, so we proposed a grant from the Board for paying the freelancer for issues 4 and 5, reporting back to the Board to review the expenditure. The Board granted the proposal but asked for a report in time for tomorrow's Board meeting, which we provided. The copyeditor has been working on issue 4, and Kevin has just forwarded an invoice for a portion of the work on issue 4.
  • Summary of Q&A following report
    1. Q: Pushing back to authors to make them submit something like camera-ready copy? A: Yes, we're getting stricter with what we accept.
    2. Q: Make TEI of articles available and accept submissions in TEI format? A: Working with Revues.org on cleaning up their TEI. We currently accept in TEI and hope to improve our workflow with some sort of template.

Council report from Council Chair James Cummings

Communication Policy

  • EP presented the communication policy proposed by the Board and available at http://www.tei-c.org/Board/bw11.xml. In brief discussion there was general approval of the policy and no objections were raised.

Chair's Report and Open Discussion of General Issues for Community

  • Board chair Elena Pierazzo discussed number of issues facing the TEI community and issues under consideration by the Board and asked for feedback from those in attendance.
  • Issues discussed included:
    • The recent transition to a new Chair (Elena) and Treasurer (John Unsworth)
    • membership issues: roles, responsibilities, and benefits for institutional and individual members
    • internationalization efforts
    • outreach and education
      • status of TEI Education SIG
      • TEI Bibliography migration to Zotero
      • Efforts to revive work on a Getting Started with the TEI document
      • proposal of repository of tutorials/slides for teaching TEI
  • Governance issues under consideration: number of elected members, role of partners, role of officers, relationship between board of directors and technical council.