TEI Host Activity Reports, Jan-Dec 2006.

Contents

The following reports summarize activities during the period from January to October 2006 at each of the four host institutions: Brown, Nancy, Oxford, and Virginia.

Brown University

Staffing and institutional matters

The TEI effort at Brown University, based in the Scholarly Technology Group, the Women Writers Project, and the Center for Digital Initiatives, comprises:
  • Julia Flanders (JF), Brown's host representative to the TEI board, approximately 5% time (contributed by Brown)
  • Syd Bauman (SB), North American Editor of the TEI Guidelines, 50% time (of which two-thirds is contributed by Brown)
  • Patrick Yott, Director of the Center for Digital Initiatives, support and consultation as needed (contributed by Brown).
Major activities in this period have been:
  • Technical and editorial activities
  • Management and organizational activities
  • Training and promotional activities
These activities are described in more detail below.

Technical and editorial activities

With the ongoing development of P5 this year, a significant part of SB's time has been spent on the revision of the Guidelines, on guiding and participating in Council's deliberations and on overseeing and assisting the efforts of work groups, chapter authors, and other contributors. He worked with Andreas Witt on improving the discussions of overlapping hierarchies; implemented Council's decisions on the new class system; re-organized the source files to P5, and also renamed all the P5 source files per Council's directive; incorporated the stand-off markup work-groups paper on XInclude and stand-off markup into the Guidelines; sheparded and implemented various Council decisions, e.g. the removal of <dateStruct> and <timeStruct> ; and affected numerous minor improvements and corrections.

SB contributed to several infrastructural tasks, fixing several bugs and making various improvements to the routines used to build P5 from it sources. He also categorized and prioritized all incoming feature requests from SourceForge. Perhaps most importantly, SB created an infrastructure for the creation of stylesheets to assist in converting P4 instances to P5. These stylesheets are small-task oriented, and maintained on the TEI wiki. The intent is to make it easy for lots of people to contribute pieces to this large task.

SB also played a major role assisting the TEI/DLF joint task force with both the updating of their guidelines for use of TEI for large digitization projects, and in moving the ‘TEI Tight’ project along.

Management and organizational activities

JF served as Vice-Chair of the TEI Board from January through October 2006. During this period JF worked on membership recruiting, and also saw the TEI's trademark application process to successful completion. She also served as Program Chair for the 2006 TEI annual meeting and, with Matthew Zimmerman and SB, negotiated $3450 in sponsorships for the meeting.

Training and promotional activities

Both SB and JF have continued to represent and promote the TEI in various public forums. They also presented a number of TEI training workshops supported in part by the WWP:
  • JF and SB presented TEI training workshops at the following:
    • University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, 2 days, February 2006
    • Academia Sinica, Taipei, 4 days, March 2006
    • University of Victoria Humanities Summer Institute, 5 days, June 2006
    • Brown University, 3 days, August 2006
    In each case the workshop included lecture, hands-on training, consultation, and intensive recruiting activities.
  • SB conceived, organized, and presented a panel session about the power & flexibility afforded to projects via the new TEI ODD system at DH 2006 in Paris.
  • JF participated in a workshop on TEI training in Oxford, October 2006.

2006 Financial Report

Brown's 2006 host contribution was as follows:
  • US$5000
  • US$28600 (Syd Bauman's time, unreimbursed)

Brown was reimbursed $15,000 for Syd Bauman's time.

Nancy (ATILF, LORIA, INIST)

Staffing and institutional matters

The TEI-C effort at Nancy mainly comprised:

  • Susanne Alt, ATILF-CNRS (SA) now at BBAW (Berlin)
  • Bertrand Gaiffe (BG), INRIA
  • Patricia Gautier, INIST-CNRS (PG)
  • Veronika Lux, INIST-CNRS (VL)
  • Etienne Petitjean (EP), ATILF-CNRS
  • Mathieu Quignard (MQ), INRIA
  • Laurent Romary, DIS-CNRS (LR) now at Max-Plank Digital Library (Berlin)

Many other persons who take part in various TEI activities in Nancy are mentioned below. Major changes regarding persons are : Laurent Romary moving to Berlin and Susanne Alt being away from Nancy (guest researcher for 2006-2007), so that the Nancy's team is not entirely located in Nancy anymore ...

Regarding dissemination and training, our priority for 2006 was to train people who could teach TEI (in French), so as to be able to organize TEI training in the future.

As for administration, Nancy has taken up activities for which AKSIS - University of Bergen was responsible from 2000 to 2004, especially the membership management.

Major activities in this period have been :

  • General management
  • Grant application
  • Promotion and training
  • Work on TEI content and work with TEI
  • Link with other standard bodies

These activities are described in more detail below.

General management

  • Membership and subscription management: invoicing, sending reminders, registration of new members/subscribers, correspondence with members/subscribers, etc.
  • Preparations for the members' meeting in Victoria : sending a call for votes, preparing the ballot, etc.
  • Preparing papers for the board meetings: reviewing posters, writing the host report, etc.
  • Working on establishing a recruiting strategy for the TEI consortium ; recruiting members and subscribers

Grant applications

  • VL and SA applied for a grant (CPER) to cover costs of an internship about improving Roma
  • ATILF asked for and got a budget for training TEI teachers

Training and promotional activities

  • LR gave presentations at the TEI workshop in Oxford (Roma and ODD) and at the TEI workshop in Würzburg (TEI-Konzept für Wörterbücher)
  • VL and SA worked on a TEI summer school program with Gautier Poupeau (école des Chartes) and Marie-Luce Demonet (Université de Tours) but its realization was posponed mainly because of difficulties in identifying the target public
  • VL and SA encouraged participation to the TEI workshop in Oxford, the TEI MM, the TEI workshop Würzburg, the TEI wokshop in Dagstuhl, especially by providing financial support to persons interested in these events
  • VL encouraged people responsible for interesting TEI projects to submit posters to the TEI MM, providing financial support when needed
  • Sylvie Grésillaud (INIST) did a presentation about TEI in Fribourg (Semaine du Document Numérique) ; Jean-Luc Benoît (ATILF) teaches TEI at the ENSSIB

Work on TEI content, work with TEI

  • LR is working on a revised version of the chapter "terminology" for TEI P5
  • MQ is working on the use of TEI to encode speech
  • EP, BG and MQ started using Roma and ODD intensively and report bugs and suggestions to Sebastian Rahtz
  • Jean-Luc Benoit (ATILF) and Pierrette Paillassard (INIST) are participating in a working group on TEI translation (directed by P.Y. Duchemin)
  • LR participated to the work on structuring TEI elements in classes
  • SA tests and promotes ODD for formal specification of ISO TC 34/ SC4 standards on Lexikons (LMF), so far two implementations : (1) French Full Form Lexicon, ATILF (Morphalou : http://www.cnrtl.fr/lexiques/morphalou) (2) Lexicon Management Interface and Export, in collaboration with the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen (Lexus : www.mpi.nl/lexus/)
  • SA and BG work in issues related to encoding of parallel corpora (header, text structure, alignment links)
  • BG, LR and a trainee of SA work on P5-ication of XAlign, a TEI conformant alignment tool for parallel corpora
  • BG works on the conversion of old TEI documents (P3) to TEI-P5
  • EP converted the Frantext text collection (4000 works) to TEI P5. In the context of the Centre National de Ressources Textuelles et Lexicales (CNRTL) 500 texts whose copyright allow it are already available for download, in a TEI P5 format.
  • In addition, within the CNRTL lexical portal, Xaira is used to provide examples of word usages in the TEI Frantext collection.
  • EP is working with LR to build up a numerical plateform for linguistic resources, that will be based on TEI.

Link between TEI and other standards bodies

  • LR is working on the new chapter "terminology" for P5 so as to reflect work done at the ISO on TMF
  • SA promotes interoperability between of ISO TC 34/ SC4 Standards on Lexikons (LMF) and TEI

Oxford University

The TEI Consortium at Oxford is located within the Research Technologies Services at Oxford University Computing Services. Staff involved directly in the TEI at Oxford include:
  • Lou Burnard (LB), European editor for the TEI
  • Sebastian Rahtz (SR), Oxford representative on the TEI Board
  • Judy McAuliffe, administrator
  • James Cummings (JC), member of TEI Council
In addition, there are several projects actively using the TEI at Oxford, including the Bodleian Library, the Oxford Text Archive, and the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature.
Oxford staff were involved in 2006 in:
  • Participation in TEI Workgroups
  • Editing the TEI Guidelines
  • Development of the infrastructure for TEI P5
  • TEI-related software development
  • Maintenance of the TEI wiki
  • Teaching for the Consortium, as well as local training and consultancy.

Resources and staffing

Oxford assigns approximately 30% of LB's time, and 10% of SR's time, to TEI activities. Most of LB's work is funded by the Consortium as TEI Editor, while SR's time is Oxford's main extra contribution as a host. In addition, SR's main role at Oxford University Computing Services (OUCS) as Information Manager involves maintaining their web site ( http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ ) as a TEI application. JC's work on the TEI takes place in the context of the Oxford Text Archive and the AHDS Literature, Languages and Linguistics centre at Oxford.

Administrative support is provided by Judy McAuliffe (approx 5% FTE over the year).

Editorial activities and P5 development

2006 has largely been spent by LB on continued cleaning work on the TEI P5 source, as directed by the TEi Council meeting in May 2006 at which prerequisites for a 1.0 release of TEI P5 were agreed. There were 0.3 and 0.4 releases of P5 in February and June 2006, managed by SR.

All three Oxford staff helped organize, and took part in, a meeting in Oxford in March 2006 to discuss handling of prosopography. This resulted in a draft chapter which was presented by Matthew Driscoll to the TEI Council in May 2006, and subsequently merged into the namesdates module.

Internationalization activities

SR has continue to act as leader on internationalization of the Guidelines, although work on translation was somewhat stalled while awaiting funding (now provided by a generous grant from the ALLC). The Roma web service was overhauled in preparation to handle translated TEI descriptions, and material for translation was provided for Chinese and Japanese.

The Roma interface to the ODD language went through a second phase of internationalization, also in preparation for translated descriptions.

SR's work on the W3C's Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) as invited expert resulted in the standard being written in the TEI's ODD language. It is due to complete the W3C's process by the end of 2006.

Software Development

The Roma program, and the underlying XSLT stylesheets to process ODD files, have undergone many revisions, largely fixing bugs found by the increasing number of users of Roma. Laurent Romary in particular has pioneered use of Roma as a TEI teaching tool, and changes have been put in to support this.

The remastered TEI Knoppix Linux distribution of 2004 and 2005 has been replaced by a customized Live CD based on Ubuntu, which was successfully used in teaching by SR, LB and JC, and was distributed at the ACH meeting in Paris in July 2006.

LB has continued work on Xaira as part of the work leading up to a new release of the British National Corpus. A substantial amount of effort has been put into defining a TEI customization to validate the new XML release of the BNC, which will shortly be available as an example customization on the TEI website. The latest version of Xaira uses an enhanced TEI header to control its indexer.

Teaching and promotional activities

Following a successful bid for funding to the UK's AHRC Methods Network, Oxford staff ran a major three day workshop on ‘Advanced Text Encoding Techniques Using TEI P5’ in September 2006. This attracted 25 participants from the UK, Europe and the USA, who went through a gruelling tour of the TEI and associated technologies, and enjoyed talks by Laurent Romary, Julia Flanders and Melissa Terras. Most importantly, however, they formed groups to develop structures and material for TEI courses in a wiki. This material is now being made ready for wider distribution.

SR, JC and LB also taught a 2 day course about Text Encoding and XML as part of Oxford University Computing Services regular learning programme in February 2006.

In November 2005 LB presented a paper on the TEI architecture (in French) at a workshop in Paris, subsequently revised for a workshop in Besancon in April 2006.

At the end of March, LB taught a four day workshop on corpus encoding with the TEI at the Scuola Superiore di Lingue per Interpreti é Traduttore in Forlí.

In June, LB and Matthew Driscoll gave a one day TEI workshop at the annual ELPUB Conference. In July LB gave a brief presentation on TEI P5 at the Digital Humanities Conference at the Sorbonne, and in August taught a one day TEI course as part of the Atonet summer school in Montreal, Quebec. In October he co-chaired with Serge Heiden of the ENS-MSH at Lyon a two day workshop on historical corpora of Old French.

SR taught on a 2 day workshop on TEI at the University of Würzburg in October 2006.

University of Virginia

Staffing and institutional matters

Hosting duties at the University of Virginia are shared by the Library and the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH).

The following individuals have contributed effort to the Consortium in 2006:
  • Dotun Akinola (DA), System Administrator, UVa Press Electronic Imprint
  • Shayne Brandon (SB), IATH
  • Greg Murray (GM), Digital Library Production Services
  • Daniel Pitti (DP), IATH
  • Christine Ruotolo (CR), University of Virginia Library
  • David Sewell (DS), Editorial and Technical Manager, UVa Press Electronic Imprint
  • Cindy Filer Speer (CS), Digital Research and Instructional Services (DRIS)

CR served as Virginia's respresentative to the Board, and as TEI Secretary. DP served as Honorary Treasurer.

The University of Virginia Consortium budget is $17,500. Of this amount, $12,500 is reimbursed for performing the duties of the Treasurer and $5000 is in-kind contribution.

Major activities in this period have been:
  • Management of the budget
  • Technical and web support
  • Training and promotional activities
These activities are described in more detail below.

Management of the budget

Management of the budget involves processing memberships and subscription payments, processing travel reimbursements, payment of invoices for work or services performed for the Consortium, preparing accounting statements and various related for filing of U.S. federal income taxes, monitoring and balancing the Consortium bank account, reconciling account with projected in current year, preparing projected budget for coming year, and various other related activities. All such activities and current and up to date.

Technical and web support

  • Virginia continued to work on the new TEI website. CR completed the basic design, and began generating new content for the site, with assistance from DS and Julia Flanders. SB set up a test server for the new site and will work with Amit Kumar to configure the OpenCMS backend by the end of the year.
  • CR served as the TEI web keeper, adding and revising documents on the current TEI web site.
  • DA is setting up a dedicated server as a backup for Oxford's tei.oucs.ox.ac.uk.
  • SB continued to administer the Sun server on which the main TEI web site resides.
  • DP continued to monitor and administer the Council and Board mailing lists.

Training and promotional support

  • DS gave a presentation at the annual meeting of the Association for Documentary Editing, in which he discussed the use of TEI encoding in the preparation of The Papers of George Washington Digital Edition, scheduled for completion in December 2006.
  • DRIS is providing technical support and hosting for the Society of Scriptural Reasoning as they are converting three of their web journals, now coded in HTML, to TEI:
    • The Journal of Scriptural Reasoning
    • The Journal of Textual Reasoning
    • The Student Journal of Scriptural Reasoning
  • CS promoted the TEI in a talk on "Electronic Editing" at the Wisconsin Historical Society's annual Institute for the Editing of Historical Documents.
  • GM completed and disseminated thorough documentation of DLPS's TEI Markup Practices.
  • GM has applied for local grant funds to study the impact of P5 on Virginia's digital library activities, which could result in an eventual model for large library migrations.