TEI Host Activities Report 2002

The following reports summarize activities during 2002 at each of the four host institutions: Bergen, Brown, Oxford, and Virginia.

Bergen University

Staffing and institutional matters

The TEI-C effort at the University of Bergen, based in the Humanities Information Technologies Research Programme at the HIT Centre, comprised:
  • Claus Huitfeldt (CH), the University of Bergen's representative on the TEI-C Board and Honorary Treasurer of the TEI-C.
  • Tone Merete Bruvik (TMB), Executive Director of the TEI-C; 50% of a FTP 1.1.-8.10.2002.
  • Alois Pichler (AP), Acting Executive Director of the TEI-C; 50% of a FTP 9.10.-31.12.2002; this includes assistance by Anne Lindebjerg (AL) and Kristine Breivik (KB), administration.
  • Torill Revheim (TR), Administration and accounting; 5% of a FTP (2/3 of a month).
Major activities in this period have been:
  • General management
  • Grant applications
  • Promotional activities
  • Other
These activities are described in more detail below.

General management

Grant applications

TMB coordinated a grant proposal to the EU for the project ESTATE. The proposal was not selected. In Autumn 2002 AP drafted an application to EU FP6 for a "European Advanced Encoding" (EAE) Research Infrastructure. Work on this application was aborted after signals were received that it would not be successful. AP continued working with EU grant proposals, concentrating efforts on integrating TEI-C FP6 participation with proposals coordinated by other institutions. By the end of 2002, the TEI-C was in contact with three consortia about participation in FP6 proposals and one additional consortium about participation in another EU grant proposal.

Promotional activities

  • CH presented TEI as part of undergraduate courses in humanities informatics.
  • TMB gave a series of three lectures on XML, XSLT and TEI-C at the University of Bergen, Department of Computer Linguistics in February and March
  • TMB has published an article in German about the TEI-C and TEI-C in Sichtungen.
  • AP organized a TEI-C poster session at the Language technology conference in Bergen, October 24-25, 2002.

Membership recruiting

In 2002 one new TEI-C member was recruited by the HIT Centre:
  • Henrik Ibsen´s Writings, Norway

Other

  • TMB participated in the TEI-C Working Group for Character Encoding in Tuebingen July 24th.
  • TMB participated in the ACH/ALLC 2002 Conference in Tuebingen, 24-28 July.

Financial overview

The TEI-C activities at HIT in 2002 was at $54373 (the budget was at $50000). This expense was covered by the in-kind contribution from HIT at $29373 (the budget was $25000), and the net contribution from TEI-C to HIT was $25000 (which was according to budget).

Brown University

Staffing and institutional matters

The TEI effort at Brown University, based in the Scholarly Technology Group and the Women Writers Project, comprises:
  • Julia Flanders (JF), Brown's host representative to the TEI board, approximately 10% time (contributed by Brown)
  • Syd Bauman (SB), North American Editor of the TEI Guidelines, 50% time (paid by the TEI)
Major activities in this period have been:
  • TEI editorial activities
  • TEI-related grant activities
  • Training and promotional activities
  • Membership recruiting
These activities are described in more detail below.

TEI editorial activities

  • Work on the Guidelines: In January 2002 SB was appointed North American Editor of the TEI Guidelines, for a five-year term. In the first three months of 2002 his effort was directed almost entirely towards the completion of P4 and its preparation for publication. Thereafter his work was focused on workgroup activities, work on P5, and work on the NEH-funded SGML-XML migration effort.
  • Members' Meeting: In late summer and fall 2002 SB served on the program committee for the annual TEI members' meeting in Chicago.
  • Participation in TEI Workgroups: SB participated in the activities of the standoff markup workgroup, the character encoding workgroup, the NEH-funded SGML/XML migration workgroup, and the manuscript description workgroup. The activities of these workgroups are described in detail elsewhere and do not need further elaboration here.

TEI-related grant activities

JF worked with the TEI in Libraries task force, headed by Perry Willett, which prepared a grant application to the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to support the revision and expansion of the TEI in Libraries Guidelines (initially funded by the DLF). This proposal was submitted on January 30, 2003 and a response is expected in fall 2003. This task force also discussed developing a proposal to NEH to support dissemination and training, and it was decided that this would be more effective following the IMLS work (if that were funded).

JF submitted a grant proposal on behalf of the Women Writers Project to the National Endowment for the Humanities to produce detailed guidelines for encoding printed books (literary and historical documents) using the TEI, aimed at a scholarly audience and intended as a discipline-specific companion volume to the TEI Guidelines. If funded, this grant would lower the threshold of expertise required to use the TEI effectively and might increase overall use of the TEI by scholars. [The grant was funded in full and work will begin July 1, 2003.]

As part of the TEI's program to assist projects in developing grants to fund TEI-based projects, JF and SB assisted with the development of two grant proposals, one at the University of California, Los Angeles, and one at the University of Queensland, in Australia. In both cases, TEI membership was written into the grant proposal, and a letter of support from the chair of the TEI board was provided for inclusion in the proposal.

Training and promotional activities

JF served with Geoffrey Rockwell, Sebastian Rahtz, and Perry Willett on the TEI Council's subcommittee on training. This group developed boilerplate RFPs for training proposals, and worked with Martin Mueller and Bill Kretzschmar to develop specific RFPs and training proposals for the TEI annual members' meeting and for ACH/ALLC2003.

JF and SB organized a full-day TEI training event as part of the annual members' meeting in Chicago. There were three instructors (JF, SB, and Terry Catapano, then of the New York Public Library; Sebastian Rahtz also kindly agreed to act as a visiting expert) and 16 attendees, who were divided into two smaller groups for discussion. The event used a case study model in which attendees brought sample documents and questions from their own projects (or projects in prospect). The instructors prepared materials and responses in advance, and then conducted discussion on each case. The event was well-attended and considered a success (based on feedback from attendees).

JF attended the Modern Language Association conference in December 2002 and presented a paper on encoding anthologies using TEI, based on her contribution to the volume on digital scholarly editing being published by the MLA's Committee on Scholarly Editions (ed. Unsworth and O'Brien O'Keeffe). JF also represented the WWP and the TEI at a meeting sponsored by the Delmas Foundation investigating issues around collaborative digital publication in early women's writing.

JF represented the TEI on the ADHOC committee investigating possibilities for closer collaboration between the ACH and ALLC, and prepared (with Harold Short) a report on the joint conferences of these organizations; see the ADHO report.

Membership recruiting

JF made recruiting contact with 10 institutions in North America in 2002, including the following:
  • Malaspina College
  • McMaster University
  • OLITA (Ontario Library Association)
  • University of Toronto
  • New York Public Library
  • Yale University
  • STOA
  • Digital Library Federation
  • Princeton
  • University of Chicago
and in addition received inquiries from several others. Of these, 6 have become members of the TEI Consortium:
  • STOA Consortium
  • Stichting Digitale Bibliotheek voor de Nederlandse Letteren
  • Princeton University
  • ATILF (with the kind assistance of Lou Burnard)
  • McMaster University
  • University of Chicago

General Management

  • Host accounting and reporting

Financial overview

The TEI-C activities at Brown in 2002 was at $65202 (the budget was at $57200). This expense was covered by the in-kind contribution from Brown at $37200 (which was according to budget), and the net contribution from TEI-C to Brown was $28002 (the budget was $20000). Overspending in 2002 will be deducted from the 2003 Brown staff payment .

Oxford University

Following a major reorganization of the internal structure at Oxford University Computing Services, the TEI effort at Oxford is now located within a new ‘Research Technologies Services’ component, alongside a new ‘Information Services Section’. Key staff at Oxford include:
  • Lou Burnard (LB), European editor for the TEI
  • Sebastian Rahtz (SR), Oxford representative on the TEI Board
  • Stuart Brown, web site developer and consultant
  • Jenny Newman, administrator (to Aug 30th)
  • Judy McAuliffe, administrator (from Oct 1st)
Major activities in 2002 have been:
  • Finalizing publication of P4
  • Organization of, and participation in, new TEI Workgroups
  • Planning for P5
  • TEI consultancy
  • Teaching TEI and XML in local and international courses
These activities are described in more detail below. They were funded partly as Oxford's ‘in-kind’ contribution to the TEI, and partly by a share of the TEI grant from the NEH.

Editorial activities

Work on conversion of the TEI Guidelines to XML was completed at the start of the year. Some modifications were made in the form of the final publication following feedback gained at last year's members meeting, and from early readers of the pre-release. University of Virginia Press was awarded the contract to market and distribute the printed version, of which 500 copies were produced in March 2002, in time for the TEI Board Meeting held in Prague that month. The print edition is produced from a master PDF file automatically generated from the same source as the HTML version on the web site, using XSLT stylesheets developed at Oxford. Members also have access to the PDF files from the web site.

A small number of errors, mostly typographic, have been identified since publication. Current policy is to apply corrections immediately in the TEI ODD source, regenerating the HTML and XML versions periodically (but not the PDF). All such modifications are listed in an editorial working paper, TEI EDW77, available to members.

A start has been made on the design work needed to enhance the current TEI authoring system, but much remains to be done.

Both editors and SR have dealt with large numbers of enquiries on TEI-L and elsewhere.

The experimental conversion of P4 sources to use Relax NG ( http://www.relaxng.org/ ) schema language was completed in May 2002, and presented at XML Europe. The resulting Relax NG schemas were made available on the TEI web site and have attracted some interest.

Resources and staffing

Oxford assigns approximately 40% of LB's time, and 5% of SR's time, to TEI activities. In addition, some 40% of SR's time is devoted to maintaining and developing the Oxford University Computing Services (OUCS) web ( http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ ), which is a TEI application.

Stuart Brown was employed as full time TEI web site developer and consultany for six months from the start of December until the end of May, at which time he resigned. We are still however using his services as an external consultant. In addition to web site work, further described below, he developed an interesting TEI customization for the popular XMetal XML editor, which is now to be used in a major Sanskrit manuscript cataloguing project funded by the Wellcome Foundation.

TEI Workgroups have become increasingly active over the course of the year, demanding a high level of input from the Editors.

Software Development

The XSLT stylesheet families maintained by SR for converting TEI documents to HTML and XSL FO have been under constant revision, and are in use at a number of sites around the world. The PassiveTeX implementation of XSL FO has also been developed, although much work remains.

The customization of GNU Emacs for use with TEI DTDs has been developed a little further, and has attracted a fair amount of discussion on TEI mailing lists. It remains in an unsatisfactory state, mainly due to problems with UTF8-handling in Emacs.

We have been experimenting with other tools to work with the TEI:
  • SB developed a sophisticated customization of XMetal for inputting manuscript records
  • SR has worked with the Topologi editor ( http://www.topologi.com ) to customize it for the TEI, and we hope that this bundle will be distributed with the product in due course
  • We are experimenting with the eXist XML database system, with the aim of deploying it to provide structured searching of the TEI web site, and to search manuscript collections.
  • Under the aegis of the BNC project, LB has continued work on a new TEI and Unicode aware version of the SARA text retrieval program, designed to work with corpora in any language. A workshop using a preliminary version of the system was given in the summer, at the TALC 2002 conference, and development work continues.
  • As part of work for Oxford University Computing Services, we are looking at methods to convert Open Office XML files to TEI XML, and expect to release these on the TEI web site by the end of the year.

Website activity

The structure of the website has not changed very much this year, with most of the work concentrating on improving the applications pages. Preparation continues for delivering the web pages dynamically from the XML sources, which is currently waiting for a new server at Oxford to come on line.

Teaching and promotional activities

Teaching activities from Oxford fall under three headings:
  • Courses taught at Oxford Universiy
  • Courses taught at other institutions
  • Public presentations which promoted the TEI

SR, LB and Mike Popham taught four 1/2 day sessions about Text Encoding and XML as part of Oxford University Computing Services regular learning programme in February 2002. SR, LB and Matthew Drscoll taught a 3 day intensive summer school for Oxford and other academics in June 2002.

LB, SR and Matthew Driscoll taught a 2 day course at the Wellcome Institute in London about manuscript encoding in January 2002. LB and SR taught a full-day course about TEI and XML as part of the TeX Users Group meeting in Trivandrum, India, in August 2002. LB and Matthew Driscoll taught week-long courses in two summer schools in Bulgaria in September 2002.

SR presented a paper about converting TEI to Schema at XML Europe in Barcelona, May 2002. LB talked to the European Science Foundation about the TEI in Strasbourg, June 2002. LB talked about the wider perspective of the TEI at DRH in Edinburgh, September 2002.

The TEI/XML CD-ROM has been kept up to date; it was produced six times during the year and given away at almost all the teaching sessions listed above, and at the AHC/ALLC meeting in Tubingen in July 2002.

Financial overview

The TEI-C activities at Oxford in 2002 was at $68090 (the budget was at $74000). This expense was covered by the in-kind contribution from Oxford at $30000 (which was according to budget), and the net contribution from TEI-C to Oxford was $38090 (the budget was $44000).

University of Virginia (UVA)

Financial overview

The TEI-C activities at UVA in 2002 was at $10000 (the budget was at $10000). This excense was covered by the in-kind contribution from UVA at $10000 (which was according to budget), and the net contribution from TEI-C to UVA was nil (which was according to budget). The NEH project in not included in the figures.

Last recorded change to this page: 2007-09-12  •  For corrections or updates, contact web@tei-c.org