TEI Members Meeting 2002: Executive Director's Report

First, I would like to express my admiration for the work of the person whom I am to replace at this meeting and in the coming 12 months, Tone-Merete Bruvik, the executive director of the Consortium. Tone Merete has created efficient routines which will help me in doing my work.

I am Alois Pichler, director of the Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen. The Wittgenstein Archives are a cooperation project between the Department of Philosophy at the University of Bergen and the HIT-Centre at the University of Bergen, located to the HIT-Centre. The Wittgenstein Archives have rich experience in text encoding. They were established in 1990 on the initiative of Claus Huitfeldt, with the objective to produce a complete machine-readable version of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophical Nachlass. This Nachlass amounts to about 20000 pages. The objective was achieved in 1999. With the machine-readable version, the Archives provide the secure basis for a complete edition of W's works, be it on paper or in electronic form. Consequently, the machine-readable version was already used to produce a publication on CD-ROM, published by OUP under the title "Wittgenstein's Nachlass. The Bergen Electronic Edition".

The code syntax used for the machine-readable version is MECS, which was developed by Claus Huitfeldt. The encoding language designed especially for the purpose of the transcription of the Wittgenstein Nachlass was called MECS-WIT. Neither is MECS SGML conform, nor does MECS-WIT conform to the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) guidelines. Although SGML had already become an international standard for text mark-up at the time, when the Archives' project was started, it was thought, that SGML imposed restrictions on transcription work which were infavourable for the transcription of the Wittgenstein Nachlass. Therefore, an alternative code system was developed which was more suitable for our project.

MECS and MECS-WIT yielded a machine-readable version which was platform independent, very flexible and of high scholarly profile. However, this does not prevent us from seeing its limitations, but rather encourages us to continued revision and improvement. Naturally, here do the TEI and XML come in.

Since 1990, when the Archives were established, a lot has changed in the context of our text encoding work. With the achievements of XML technology, the TEI has gained extremely. And with the TEI, XML technology wins too. The possibilities, which the combination of XML with TEI offers the user, are impressive. They impressed me at once as soon as I could see them. As a consequence, some of the activities at the Archives which I am most excited about belong to work with translating our machine-readable version from MECS/MECS-WIT to XML/TEI. For the production of the machine-readable version, the Archives have not followed the TEI Guidelines, but we have always had a positive attitude both to the TEI Guidelines and the TEI. Now this positive relationship has received a strong push forward, both with regard to content and with regard to personel.

The TEI was, for more than 10 years, in terms of organization nothing but a collaborative research effort, supported by grant fonds, in particular by the US National Endowment for the Humanities, by the European Union (EU) and by three associations: the Association for Computers and the Humanities; the Association for Computational Linguistics; and the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing. In this period, the TEI did very essential and important work, from which we all benefit today. To safe the fruits of these efforts, on the initiative of the Universities of Virginia and Bergen, in 1999 an institution was created which had the task to give the TEI a stable home: the TEI Consortium (TEI-C). As the TEI was non-profit, also the TEI-C was established as a non-profit organization. Part of the rationale behind the creation of the TEI-C was to provide a firm basis of financial support for the work of the TEI. Thus, with the Consortium the TEI received an institutional basis, which was responsible not only for the maintenance and further development of the TEI standard but also for the continued funding of the TEI. The Consortium was given a structure which included a broad representation and participation of the TEI user-communities. These user-communities would inter alia support the TEI with financial contributions. Today, 2 years after the creation of the Consortium, it manages to cover most of its expenses from sources within the Consortium.

Members of the Consortium - in a broad sense - include subscribers, sponsors, and "members" in a technical sense. When talking of "members", I will in the following refer to this narrow, technical sense. Institutions, organizations, projects and companies can be members of the Consortium in this technical sense. Depending on their size and position in the world economy area, these members contribute with different membership fees. The Consortium has a Board of Directors and a Council, and each member is equally entitled to vote for these Board director and Council positions. Such election will take place tomorrow at the so-called Members-only-meeting. In accordance with the Consortium Bylaws, meetings of the members with Board elections are organized at least once a year. The first such member meeting was held at Pisa in November 2001; thus, this is our second meeting. In addition to members, the Consortium has subscribers who - in distinction from the member class - are individuals: persons. Members meetings are usually followed by Board meetings; thus the Board has had a meeting last year after the members meeting in Pisa in November, and the Board will also meet tomorrow after the Consortium members-only-meeting.

It was decided at the constitution of the Consortium, that the Board should for the first 2 years include 3 representatives from the earlier mentioned associations from which the TEI received original support. This period ends tomorrow. We express our deep thanks to David Chesnutt from the Association for Computers and the Humanities; Jan Hájic from the Association for Computational Linguistics; and Antonio Zampolli from the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing for their work and efforts on the Consortium Board. We hope, that they are able to continue to use their skills and authorities for the TEI, and consider standing for election in the future. Other members of Board are representatives for the 4 hosts: Julia Flanders from Brown University, Scholarly Technology Group; Claus Huitfeldt from Bergen University, Humanities Information Technologies Research Programme; Sebastian Rahtz from Oxford University, Computing Services; John Unsworth from Virginia University, Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities. John is chair of the Board. 2 additional members were elected to the Board in November 2001 in Pisa: Peter Robinson from the Centre for Technology and the Arts, De Montfort University, Leicester; and Harold Short from the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London. It must be mentioned, that Board meetings are also attended by the two Editors of the Guidelines, Lou Burnard from Oxford University and Syd Baumann from Brown University, and by the Executive Director of the Consortium: We serve on the Board, but we do not vote.

The very first meeting of the Consortium Board took place in Norway in a hut by a fjord, in May 2001; the second after the members meeting in Pisa. In 2002, the Board met in May in Prague, and - as I already said - it will again meet tomorrow here in Chicago. The agendas for the 2002 Board meetings are to a large extent - and rightly so - filled with discussion of economy matters. The Board in Prague was in the happy position to have the first copy of the new 2-volume-edition of P4 physically in its hands and to discuss P4 publication. But it also had to face and try to answer the challenges of financial shortage which had become clear by May 2002. The Board meeting in Chicago will have to take up discussion of the financial situation and try to find means to improve it. It was also at the meeting in Prague, where the detailed plan for the Chicago meeting was laid out.

The Council is, together with the Board and the editors, responsible for the maintenance and further development of the TEI Guidelines. It is partly elected by the members, and it organizes inter alia Working groups. Christian, Syd and David have just given us presentations of the excellent work which is done in these groups. In addition to Working groups, the council appoints subcommittees; there exists currently 1 subcommittee for Training activities; the TEI training workshop yesterday was organized on the initiative of this committee, which is chaired by Geoffrey Rockwell. 3 seats on the Board, and 4 seats on the Council will be filled tomorrow in the election.

The greatest event of 2002 was without doubt the publication of the TEI Guidelines, TEI P4, in June 2002. TEI P4 is available both in a 2-volume-print copy and online, or on CDs. The entire P4 can also be downloaded from the Consortium webpages as an HTML version for offline browsing. TEI P5 will be the next full revision of the Guidelines. Work on P5 has already started in the Working groups. Whereas improvement of TEI P4 was restricted to error correction and XML-implementation only, will P5 allow for the possibility of including other changes and revisions. The editors of the P4 guidelines, Michael Sperberg-McQueen, Lou Burnard and Syd Baumann, and those responsible for the XML conversion: Syd Bauman, Lou Burnard, Steven DeRose, and Sebastian Rahtz, deserve our (and not only our) thanks and a great applause.

One issue on today's agenda is the question: What should the TEI do next? It is clear, that we shall continue to improve the TEI Guidelines and that we shall continue to implement positively important technical developments. But there is one thing which has to be first on our agenda: Recruitment. It is not only the executive director's most pressing duty to do exactly this: to recruit as many members, subscribers and sponsors as possible; I encourage every member and subscriber and friend of the TEI to spread its idea and message and to recruit. Actually, the positive force of the TEI is indeed all too little known; it does come as a surprise to many. I think in particular of Europe where we have many highly profiled scholarly environments belonging to our "sphere of interest", but where many of them are unaware of the benefits from studying and using the TEI. Then there are many others, who do use the TEI but seem unaware of the need to support it by membership or subscription.

Recruitment will help with the other most important thing: the finances. In 2003 we have to keep the budget of expenses very strict: We must not spend more than 250000 Dollars, in comparison to 300000 Dollars this year. For reaching the targeted income of 250000 Dollars, we will have to recruit at least 40 new members with an average contribution of 2150 Dollars per year - and we must not lose any existing member. I said "average contribution", because we have membership contributions of different sizes. Not everybody is acquainted with this difference; therefore let me explain:

• Large organizations (with over 25 individuals likely to benefit from the TEI) contribute with the highest input; a US university with more than 25 TEI-users e.g. contributes with 5000 Dollars a year. The contribution size depends on the economic area which the organization belongs too; thus, a corresponding university in Poland would pay 2500 Dollars. Such More-than-25-users-organizations are Division 0 members.
• Division 1 members are organizations with up to 25 TEI-users; if from a high economy area, they contribute with 2500 dollars.
• Division 2 members are medium-sized organizations, with up to 15 TEI-users; if from a high economy area, they contribute with 1500 dollars.
• Division 3 members are small organizations, with 5 or fewer TEI-users. If from a high economy area, they contribute with 500 dollars.
• Subscribers are personal individuals; if from a high economy area, they contribute with 50 Dollars.

Thus we have 4 member classes. However, these classes do all have the same election rights, and we do all share the same idea: We want to support the work of the TEI financially, both as an acknowledgement of the benefits which we have from it and as our contribution to making such benefits possible also in the future, for ourselves and others.

Since the meeting in Pisa in November 2001, 15 new members have joined the Consortium, 5 less than expected and hoped for. In terms of financial contributions, the difference is about 50000 Dollars. Currently we have 62 members: 15 Division 0 members, 6 Division 1 members, 8 Division 2 members and 33 Division 3 members. We have 61 subscribers.

In total, 36 members and 24 subscribers are from North America, 2 are from Australia, 1 is from New Zealand, and 23 members and 32 subscribers are from Europe. Europe needs a push forward: We have 6 members from the UK, 3 from the Czech Republic, 3 from Italy, 3 from Belgium and the Netherlands, 2 from Norway, and 1 member each in France, Slovakia, Hungary, Denmark and Spain. But we have no members from Germany or Austria or any other European country except the ones named (although we do have subscribers; in Germany and Austria we have 8 subscribers). (This is the status of September 2002.)

Post-Pisa-members contributed with a total of more than 18000 Dollars. The Pisa recruitment shows that considerations about where to organize member meetings need to go hand in hand with considerations about recruitment. Many now-Italian members and subscribers applied for membership and subscription in advance of the Pisa event, but clearly in connection with the Pisa event.

Membership recruitment is the "Um und auf" of our organization. And it contributes to fund raising, in more than one way. When looking for large funding from the EU we are aware of the fact, that such funding needs a broad support in the European community. I am convinced that the work of the TEI is fundamentally relevant to the development of a strong European knowledge based society, as is the task of the EU's Sixth Framework programme. The TEI is indeed crucial for implementing the "European Research Area" (ERA) which was defined as a task by the European Commission already some time ago. Therefore I think, that we should concentrate many efforts on producing funding applications to the EU. This includes - on a small scale - funding for the next members meeting, and - on a big scale - funding on a more fundamental basis. I seriously suggest to consider establishing a Work group which works on such EU applications. Application work involves networking, and networking will in turn also lead to recruitment. Tone Merete has already put a considerable amount of work into a TEI application to the EU. Although it in the end has not been successful financially, it has laid much of the basis for continued efforts in this direction, and such efforts are necessary. The Board Meeting in Prague in May 2002 decided to invest in EU funding initiatives; these initiatives have to be intensified.

Let me at this point return to where I started, to the Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen. Last year the Wittgenstein Archives have achieved a great success. We have become a so-called European Research Infrastructure. The status of European Research Infrastructure is given, after application and evaluation procedures, by the European Commission in Brussels, and it is given only for a certain contract period at a time. The status implies that European researchers can come to the Archives for conducting research projects which need the Archives, all this on financial support from the EU, and naturally, after application and selection procedures. The important thing here is: The European Research Infrastructure status is a success not only for the University of Bergen and its Wittgenstein Archives, but for the philosophical community as well, and it is last but not least a great success also for the text encoding community. In the period January-October 2002 7 projects have been conducted at the Archives under this programme; thereof have 3 been directly engaged with text encoding. 1 of the 3 projects was very well acquainted with the TEI before, but the other 2 have learned about the TEI at the Archives in Bergen. It is me a pleasure to tell you, that the leaders of these 2 projects have become very positive about the TEI in Bergen.

It is my great hope, that the European Research Infrastructure Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen can play an essential role in the recruitment of new TEI-C members, and that they can hopefully do so also in the raising of funds in Brussels. In any case, we will have to work for funding from the EU, and therefore we have to target Europe as explicitely and strongly as we can. Thank you.