News

InterFace 2011 — 27-29 July 2011, University College London

InterFace is a symposium for humanities and technology. In 2011 it is being jointly hosted by colleges across London and will be an invaluable opportunity for participants to visit this active hub of digital scholarship and practice.

The symposium aims to foster collaboration and shared understanding between scholars in the humanities and in computer science, especially where their efforts converge on exchange of subject matter and method. With a focus on the interests and concerns of Ph.D students and early career researchers, the programme will include networking activities, opportunities for research exposition, and various training and workshop activities.

A core component of the programme will be a lightning talks session in which each participant will make a two-minute presentation on their research. The session will be lively and dynamic. Each presentation
must be exactly two minutes long, making use of necessary, interesting, appropriate, or entertaining visual or sound aids, and condensing a whole Ph.D’s worth of ideas and work into this short slot.

Participants will be able to join workshops in:

• social network analysis
• bibliographic software
• data visualisation
• linked data

There will be talks on:

• user studies and social research
• discourse analysis in science and technology
• how to get your work published
• how to apply for research funding

There will also be two keynote talks given by speakers whose work marks the leading edge of technology in scholarship and practice. The speakers will be:

• Steven Scrivener (University of Arts London) Design research and creative production
• Melissa Terras (UCL) Digitisation of cultural heritage and image processing

Finally, the symposium will conclude with an unconference; a participatory, collaborative, and informal event in which the form and content is decided on by participants as it unfolds and in which discussion and production is emphasised over presentation and analysis. Participants may wish to share their own skills, learn a new skill, establish and develop a collaborative project, or hold a focused discussion.

We are now seeking applications for participation in InterFace. Applications are encouraged from Ph.D students and early career researchers in all humanities and computing disciplines. The key component of your application will be a 150-word abstract for your proposed lightning talk.

You can submit your application here:

http://www.interface2011.org.uk/submit

The deadline for applications is Friday 25 February 2011.

The committee will select participants from among the applications received and successful applicants will be informed on Monday 4 April 2011. If your application is accepted, you will then be invited to register. A participation fee will be charged to cover costs of lunches, refreshments, venue, and speakers. This fee will be £35.

Key Dates:

• Friday 25 February Deadline for applications
• Friday 1 April Notification of successful applications
• Monday 18 April Deadline for registration for successful applicants
• Monday 27 July InterFace 2011 begins

The first version, a beta version, of the digital archive of Edvard Munch’s texts is now online at http://www.emunch.no/

The archive is primarily in Norwegian, but we have start pages in English, French and German (links on flags in the top of the page, in the front page’s main part and in the red menu, so hopefully you’ll manage to find your way). The general information in French and German is limited, I’m afraid, but we will provide more in due time. The texts, mostly letters, written by Munch himself in French and German are directly accessible from the French and German pages. We provide translations in English and French of some of Munch’s texts.

The encoding guidelines we have used are available in English, cf. the English page. There are also a few articles in English on Munch related themes. Guidelines for transcribing Munch’s texts in French and German are available in French and German alongside articles discussing Munch’s use of French and German.

The general guidelines for transcribing Munch’s texts will be translated to English in due time. Eventually we will also provide a list of terms used to categorize Munch’s texts in Norwegian – English – French – German, to facilitate browsing even though the archive is in Norwegian. We hope to be able in the years to come to supply the archive with even more resources in English, French and German.

We also plan to provide some information on the technical aspects of the website. In short, the website is built using Apache Cocoon and the eXist XML database. It is currently hosted by the Unit for Digital Documentation at the University of Oslo.

We are happy to answer questions and hope to receive feedback from you.

Thank you!

Kind regards, Hilde Bøe

—
Hilde Bøe
Scholarly and Technical Editor

hilde.boe@munch.museum.no | hildeboee@gmail.com
http://emunch.no/
http://www.munch.museum.no/

It is with great pleasure that I am able to announce that Martin Mueller has been elected to be the next Chair and CEO of the TEI.

Martin will be taking over during a time of great transition as the TEI changes to a fully democratic board and administrative structure.

Martin will be assuming the chair’s role effective immediately in programme activity (e.g. on Council and on the Conference programme commitee). I will continue to lead on business and administrative matters until March 1, at which point Martin will take over all duties as Chair and CEO of the Consortium.

Daniel O’Donnell

The Text Encoding Initiative Special Interest Group in Music is pleased to announce the results of a TEI-funded project to bring music encoding into TEI documents.

Music, like many other art forms, is often mentioned, discussed and described in writings of various kinds. This applies to both historical and contemporary documents, even though the way of notating music has changed considerably in western history. In most cases, music notation enters the text flow in a way similar to figures, images or graphs. On other occasions, elements of music notation are treated as characters in running text.

The TEI with Music Notation customization introduces a way of signalling the presence of music notation in text, but defers to other representations to describe the music notation itself, which is not covered by TEI guidelines. In fact, several commercial, academic and standard bodies have developed digital representations of music notation and, given the topic’s complexity, these representations often focus on different aspects and adopt different methodologies. Therefore, the customization defines a container element to encode the occurrence of music notation and allows linking to the data format preferred by the encoder. This element is called notatedMusic, which has been proposed to enter the TEI specifications and TEI’s namespace in a feature request available here for further discussion.

The customization also allows the use of elements from the Music Encoding Iniative (MEI) format that is modelled on the TEI, aims to be independent from rendering software and provides encoding methods for different research approaches in musicology. MEI provides a vocabulary for the representation of Common Western Music Notation, mensural and neume notation and aims to offer extension mechanisms to include other notation systems and non-standard notational components. Moreover, it accommodates a number of modules to express declarative knowledge about the music being encoded, such as analysis, critical commentary,ambiguity, variants, etc. The MEI format was released in its first stable version in summer 2010.

We would like to invite those of you who are interested in the encoding of texts which contain music notation to access the documentation, the ODD and the schema on the SIG’s webspace:

http://www.tei-c.org/SIG/Music/twm/index.html

We consider this output as a beta release and we are very interested in collecting comments, feedback and discussing possible use scenarios. Please join our mailing list if you would like to discuss any aspect of this customization.

With kind regards,
Raffaele Viglianti

—
Raffaele Viglianti
PhD Candidate and PGRA
Centre for Computing in the Humanities
King’s College London

It is with great pleasure that I am able to announce that the 2011 TEI Conference and Members Meeting will be hosted by the University of Würzburg and its Centre for Digital Editing in cooperation with the German Archive of Literature / Museum of Modern Literature Marbach.

The proposed conference dates are 10-16 October 2011.

The conference programme committee and local organisation will be led by Laurent Romary for the TEI and Fotis Jannidis, Roland Kamzelak (German Archive of Literature Marbach), Malte Rehbein (manager), and Werner Wegstein for the local organisation.

The specific wording of the theme of the conference is to be determined by the committee and will appear in the call for papers. But it should include an emphasis on digital editing in keeping with the emphasis of the Centre at the University. As always papers on all aspects of markup will be considered.

As part of the planning for the conference, the local organisers intend to offer delegates an excursion to Marbach to visit the German Archive of Literature, the Schiller Museum (Marbach is the birthplace of Friedrich Schiller), and the Museum of Modern Literature. Special rates have already been negotiated with local hotels.

Stay tuned for additional details as they become available.

From: Ron Van den Branden <ron.vandenbranden@KANTL.BE>
To: TEI-L@listserv.brown.edu
Subject: [TEI-L] TEI-L mirrors: polished and shining

Hi all,

Thanks to the patient help of Jason Hunter (MarkMail) and Hugo Teixeira (Nabble), the TEI-L archive is
now mirrored properly on:

-MarkMail: <http://markmail.org/list/edu.brown.listserv.tei-l>
-Nabble: <http://tei-l.970651.n3.nabble.com/>

Both contain the full TEI-L archive and are actively accumulating all new messages that are being posted. It has taken some extra spare time to fix (or at least improve on) the character encoding issues of my previous effort, but the result should look much better now. Thanks for the hints on character encoding on this list. For the record: I have taken the manual route Martin suggested, using the excellent Notepad++ editor to convert all 15K+ messages to UTF-8 and spot encoding difficulties. It won’t be perfect, but hopefully good enough to be of use.

Kind regards,

Ron

At the 2010 Members Meeting in Croatia, the membership voted in favour of the Board’s proposal for changes to the Bylaws. Amongst some housecleaning, the proposals included major changes in the structure and voting membership of the Board and the relationship of “Host” Institutions to the Consortium.

The vote was unanimous amongst the ballots cast. However, the total number of ballots fell just short of the required number for quorum. In its subsequent meeting, the Board took the membership vote as a strong recommendation and used its power to amend most sections of the Bylaws (except those pertaining to the size of the Board) to effect the proposed changes. In addition to these changes, the Board also made a number of other changes in terminology, for example, renaming the “Host institutions” to “Partner institutions” to better reflect their new role.

Because of the complexity of the changes, the Board’s initial approval was in principle, reserving final pending the drafting of specific language and check on consistency. This process was completed in January 2011 and approved by the Board on Friday, January 14, 2011.

The new Bylaws are now in effect and available on the Consortium’s website: http://www.tei-c.org/About/bylaws.xml. Special elections required for the transition to the new Board structure should be announced soon.