News

Call for Participation: International Symposium on XML Document Interchange

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Call for Participation International Symposium on XML Document Interchange: Fact or Fiction or, “That XML file you sent me: what do you expect me to do with it?”

Since the dawn of markup languages, XML and its precursors have been sold as enabling document interchange. Does it work? Do we have document interchange? We send each other “documents” and pull documents out of the Cloud all the time. A lot of those documents are HTML and PDF, some are XML. Does XML really support document interchange?

Questions that motivate the symposium include: What are minimum requirements for interchange, and what must sender and recipient do to foster success? Are there levels of interchange? Can interchange be done “blind” without negotiation on both ends? How can quality of service be defined and measured, and what methods aid in graceful degradation of service? How does interchange differ from long-term sustainability of documents and document collections? How do we balance semantic interchange with fidelity to an original? What challenges are users having interchanging XML documents, and how are they overcoming them?

This one-day symposium will bring together researchers, government analysts, documentation specialists, consumers of documents, and XML practitioners to discuss the problems and challenges of document interchange. What is being done now and what more we can do?

How:

More Information:

Schedule:

  • 11 March 2011 – Peer review applications due
  • 8 April 2011 – Paper submissions due
  • 8 April 2011 – Applications due for student support awards
  • 20 May 2011 – Speakers notified
  • 8 July 2011 – Final papers due
  • 1 August 2011 – Symposium on XML Document Interchange
  • 2-5 August 2011 – Balisage: The Markup Conference

Chair: James D. Mason, Y-12 National Security Complex

Balisage 2011: Call for Participation

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Balisage 2011

Pre-conference workshop: 1 August 2011

Conference: 2-5 August 2011

Hotel Europa, Montreal, Canada

Papers proposals due 8 April 2011

Balisage is an annual conference devoted to the theory and practice of descriptive markup and related technologies for structuring and managing information.

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

Paper proposals and nominations for peer reviewers are solicited for Balisage 2011, to be held 2-5 August 2011 in Montreal.

Each year, Balisage gathers together an eclectic mix of participants interested in markup, and puts them together in one of the world’s great cities for three and half days of discussion about points of interest in the use of descriptive markup to build strong, lasting information systems. Practitioners and theorists, vendors and users, tool-users and tool-makers, all provide their perspectives at Balisage.

Nominations for paper proposals and peer reviewers and are solicited.

As always, papers at Balisage can address any aspect of the use of markup and markup languages to represent information and build information systems. Possible topics include but are not limited to:

  • XML and related technologies
  • Non-XML markup languages
  • Implementation experience with XML parsing, XSLT processors, XQuery processors, XProc implementations, Topic Map engines, or any markup-related technology
  • Case studies of markup design and deployment
  • Recent and upcoming milestones in standards development
  • Semantics of markup languages
  • JSON and XML
  • the future of XML (if any)
  • the future of descriptive markup (if any)

Balisage is a peer-reviewed conference. Our electronic proceedings are freely available as part of the Balisage Series on Markup Technologies. Get a taste of Balisage from the proceedings of previous Balisage conferences (http://balisage.net/Proceedings/) or browse the Series Topics List (http://balisage.net/Proceedings/topics.html).

How:

More Information:

Schedule:

  • 11 March 2011 – Peer review applications due
  • 8 April 2011 – Paper submissions due
  • 8 April 2011 – Applications due for student support awards
  • 20 May 2011 – Speakers notified
  • 8 July 2011 – Final papers due
  • 1 August 2011 – Pre-conference Symposium
  • 2-5 August 2011 – Balisage: The Markup Conference

Help make Balisage your favorite XML Conference. See you in Montréal!

American Literatures Initiative Adopts TEI Standard

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Dec. 8, 2010 – Joining the ranks of academics working to implement a sustainable model of scholarly communications in the Internet Age, the American Literatures Initiative announced today that it has adopted Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) as the XML standard for its future publications.

“TEI is perfectly suited to handle the types of books our member presses publish,” said Penny Kaiserlian, director of the University of Virginia Press and current chair of the five-member ALI partnership. “Adopting TEI as our standard will advance our mission to develop a cost-effective workflow to make production of academic monographs economically sustainable and available in a variety of print and digital formats.”

The American Literatures Initiative, funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, is in the third year of a five-year program designed to revive the publication of high-quality monographs by first-time academic
authors in a discipline where getting published is becoming increasingly difficult. In addition to Virginia, ALI members include the Fordham University Press, New York University Press, Rutgers University Press,
and Temple University Press.

The TEI is an international consortium that governs the TEI Guidelines, a standard for encoding texts in an XML (eXtensible Markup Language) format. The TEI Guidelines are one of several such text coding schemes necessary for the successful creation of easily repurposable digital editions of scholarly works. Originally developed for use with academic texts, the TEI Guidelines include bibliographic enhancements useful to scholars, such as the ability to retain page references in reflowed documents.

The TEI Consortium is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (U.S.), the European Union, the Canadian Social Research Council, and others. The TEI Guidelines have been widely used by
libraries and scholars engaged in online research programs such as Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies and the University of Virginia Press’s Rotunda digital collections. The Scholarly Publishing Special Interest Group, which grew out of a need in the university press community, is focused on the use of TEI in original scholarly publication.

The American Literatures Initiative is an innovative, entrepreneurial, cooperative effort to expand the number of books published in literary studies and increase audience reach by using common resources available to the five Presses through a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The program provides a shared, centralized editorial office managing the production of the books and ensuring high-quality
copyediting and design and a collaborative, high-profile, and aggressive marketing program. For more information on The American Literatures Initiative, please visit: http://www.americanliteratures.org

For more information, contact:
Lisa Fortunato
Publicity Manager
Rutgers University Press
lisafort@rutgers.edu
732-445-7762 x 626

ESF Humanities Spring 2011: call for submissions

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The European Science Foundation (ESF) is committed to creating Fora for early career scholars to develop their visions for the European Research Area.

We have developed in particular the format of the “Humanities Spring” workshops, aimed at producing short policy documents authored by the best early career scholars after 2-day debates on identified issues.

 This year the selected theme is: *Humanities Spring 2011: **”**Publication Cultures in the Humanities”***

*Deadline for submission of applications:**17 January 2011, 12:00 (noon) CET*

** You can access the Call text and on-line submission form via the following webpage: http://www.esf.org/humanitiesspring

We are writing with a *request to publish / circulate widely* the linked Call for the ESF-sponsored event, which invites for a Europe-wide selection of young scholars in the Humanities. Please do not hesitate to get back to us directly via with any questions you may have.

Dr. Arianna Ciula

Minutes of the MS SIG annual meeting at Zadar now available

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Dear all,

It is already more than two weeks ago that the MS SIG had their annual
meeting during the TEI conference in Zadar. We had a lively discussion
with about 25 participants expressing their interest in manuscript
related encoding. The results in brief:

1. Review of the SIG’s work of the past year, in particular the new
module on genetic encoding
2. Work plan for 2011
a) Revision of Critical Apparatus
b) Extension of msDesc toward tboDesc
c) MSS ODD
d) Community Building / PR
3. Evaluation and discussion of the SIG’s survey on needs and
requirements of the community

You can find the minutes in our wiki:
http://wiki.tei-c.org/index.php/SIGMS_Minutes_20101112

Please join the ongoing discussions!
All the best,
Malte

—
Dr. Malte Rehbein

Request for Proposals: TEI Conference and Members Meeting, 2011

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The annual TEI Conference and Members’ Meeting takes place every fall, usually late October or early November. We are now seeking bids to host this event in 2011 and, in a separate call, 2012.

In keeping with advice from the membership at the 2010 meeting, preference in 2011 will be given to bids from outside North America (In the 2012 competition, preference will be given to bids from outside of Europe). This is to avoid holding the meeting on the same continent as Digital Humanities in any given year.

The TEI adopted the conference format in 2007. Previous conferences and/or meetings have been:

  • Zadar, Croatia. November 9-15, 2010. Hosted by the University of Zadar.
  • Ann Arbour, Michigan, U.S.A.. November 9-15, 2009. Hosted by University of Michigan Libraries.
  • London, England, November 6-8, 2008. Hosted by King’s
    College London.
  • College Park, Maryland, USA, October 31-November 3, 2007.
    Hosted by the University of Maryland.
  • Victoria, Alberta, Canada, October 27-28, 2006. Hosted by the
    University of Victoria.
  • Sophia, Bulgaria, October 28-29, 2005. Hosted by the
    Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.
  • Baltimore, USA, October 22-23, 2004. Hosted by Johns
    Hopkins University.
  • Nancy, France, November 7-8 2003. Hosted by ATILF.
  • Chicago, USA, October 11-12 2002. Hosted by the Newberry
    Library and Northwestern University.
  • Pisa, Italy, November 16-17 2001. Hosted by the University
    of Pisa.

The form of the conference is constantly evolving and considerable scope exists for local input. In recent years, however, the following has been a typical format:

  • 2 or 3 days of pre-conference workshops
  • 3 days of conference sessions, keynote lectures, poster session, Special Interest Group meetings, and the Annual General Meeting of the TEI membership.
  • A one day post conference Board meeting (often including the evening before).

The three days of the main conference normally take place between the Thursday and Saturday of the week of the conference. The TEI Board meeting (which is closed to the general public) normally begins with an evening session on Saturday and extends through Sunday afternoon. The pre-conference workshops typically include a mix of events varying from a single morning or afternoon to a full two days. The Annual General Meeting of the TEI Membership occurs as a plenary session of the conference and requires approximately two hours.

Attendance at the conference varies depending on location. Since the adoption of the conference format, the attendance has ranged from about 70 (Zadar) to about 200 (London). We recommend budgeting on an attendance of approximately 100-110.

The TEI Consortium guarantees direct costs of the conference and meeting up to a maximum of US$5200 with special provisions for funding attendance in excess of approximately 120 attendees. The conference organising committee is also expected to seek additional funds from local institutions, commercial sponsors, and other organisations (in most years the committee has raised between $3000 and $4000 from sponsors). A conference registration fee (returned to the TEI) is charged to assist in recovering its expenditure and ensure that it is able to underwrite the cost of future conferences. Pre-conference workshops are run on a cost-recovery basis.

Bids for the 2011 conference should be submitted to info@tei-c.org by no later than January 1, 2010, though institutions considering making a proposal are encouraged to contact chair of the TEI (daniel.odonnell@uleth.ca) or any member of the board much earlier in the process in order to discuss their ideas. Bids should include the following information:

  • The name of the institution(s) making the bid
  • The name, address, email, and telephone number of the
    contact person
  • A brief description of the facilities available for the
    event (rooms, equipment, technical support, food)
  • An indication of what financial support, if any, the
    hosting institution is prepared to give (for instance,
    sponsoring one or more receptions or pre-meeting workshops;
    payment of travel expenses for one or more plenary speakers;
    etc., provision of space and equipment)
  • An initial list of proposed members of the local organising team and responsibilities
  • Any other details that may be useful in assessing the bid
    (e.g. the presence of a conference on a related topic at the
    institution around the time of the meeting; the launch of a
    new TEI-related initiative at the institution, etc., ideas
    for a particular theme or focus, ease of access and accommodation).

In submitting bids, local organisers are encouraged to be creative: the TEI is willing to work with hosts to reflect local interests and strengths.

Further information about the requirements for the conference and members meeting may be found in our document on Hosting a Members Meeting and the Board’s own Practices and Procedures document. These should be considered as suggestions rather than normative: the format of the conference changes every year.

All bids will be reviewed by the TEI board, which makes the final decision.

Request for Proposals: TEI Conference and Members Meeting, 2012

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The TEI Conference and Members’ Meeting takes place every year, usually in late October or early November. As far as possible, the venue alternates between Europe and North America. Previous hosts have included the University of Würzburg  Centre for Digital Editing (2011),  the University of Zadar (2010), the University of Michigan Libraries (2009), King’s College London (2008), and the University of Victoria (2006). The  format of the event is not fixed, but generally keeps the following pattern:

  • 2 or 3 days of pre-conference workshops
  • 3 days of conference sessions, keynote lectures, poster sessions, and meetings of TEI Special Interest Groups

The Annual General Meeting for members of the TEI Consortium is also held during the event. Accounts are presented and election results declared at this AGM, which is open to the public.

    The three days of the main conference normally take place between the Thursday and Saturday of the week of the conference.  The pre-conference workshops may vary in length from a single morning or afternoon to a full two days.
    Attendance at the conference has varied between about 70  and  200, to some extent depending on location, but 100 is the usual average attendance. The TEI Consortium will subsidize a share of the direct costs incurred in running the event, up to a maximum of US$5200.  Bids should include a budget indicating the level of additional funding anticipated and its likely source (local institutions, commercial sponsorship etc.)  The TEI normally charges and retains a small attendance fee, in the region of $100 to covers its own overheads to ensure that it is able to underwrite the cost of future conferences.

    Bids for the 2012 conference must be received  no later than 1 September 2011. Institutions considering making a proposal are requested to contact the chair of the TEI Board (martinmueller@northwestern.edu) as soon as possible to discuss their proposal. Completed bids should include the following information:

    • The name of the institution(s) making the bid and a list of proposed members of the local organising team
    • The name, address, email, and telephone number of  a contact person
    • A brief description of the facilities available for the event (rooms, equipment, technical support, food)
    • A preliminary budget
    In submitting bids, local organisers are strongly encouraged to be creative: the TEI meeting is an expression of the TEI community in all its diversity  and should  be seen as an opportunity to showcase local interests and strengths.
    Bids will be reviewed by the TEI board deuring September, and a decision taken in time to announce the venue at the 2011 Meeting in Wurzburg.

    Board and Council election results

    Posted on by theteiadmin

    Hi all,

    At the membership meeting last week, we held elections for Board and Council. We had a very strong slate to choose from in both cases.

    The successful candidates for the Board were

       Lou Burnard and Arianna Ciula.

    The successful candidates for the Council were

       Piotr Banski, James Cummings, Sebastian Rahtz, and Stuart Yeates.

    Board and Council members are elected to two year terms.

    I would like to thank all candidates for agreeing to let their names stand for election. As always, we were blessed with a slate of very high quality candidates. As the representative of a member institution, I know speaking for myself that it was very difficult to choose who to vote for.

    As a result of bylaw changes recommended by the membership and subsequently approved by the Board we will be holding a special election for two additional board members in the course of the next two months. We will be making announcements about nomination procedures and timelines very shortly.

    Thank you again to all candidates!

    -dan

    —
    Daniel Paul O’Donnell
    Professor of English
    University of Lethbridge

    Bylaw changes

    Posted on by theteiadmin

    Hi all,

    The Board recently recommended a series of bylaw changes to the membership for approval at the 2010 members meeting in Zadar, Croatia.

    We had a relatively strong turnout from the membership for this vote but fell just short of an official quorum. The vote in favour was unanimous, however.

    Because the vote did not make quorum, the bylaws did not pass at the membership meeting. On the basis of what it considered the very strong advice of the membership, however, the TEI Board passed most  of the proposed changes at its annual face-to-face meeting immediately following the conference (because the Board is not allowed to change its minimum and maximum number of members without explicit approval from the membership, it was not able to adopt those aspects of the proposed bylaws pertaining to the size of the Board exactly as they were written). The board also noticed and corrected some additional small errors and inconsistencies and made a few additional changes in the division of responsibilities in its officers. The new bylaws should be published in the next few days.

    Thank you to all the members who voted to recommend making these major changes in our administrative and corporate structure.

    -dan

    —
    Daniel Paul O’Donnell
    Professor of English
    University of Lethbridge