TEI-C Elections 2012

Lou Burnard

Background: Since taking early retirement from Oxford University Computing Services in October 2010, I have continued to work closely with the French infrastructural project (TGE) ADONIS, and also as a private consultant offering TEI expertise.

I have worked in the application of IT to literary and linguistic research since the seventies. I have been a key player in numerous initiatives and projects, including the Oxford Text Archive, the UK's Arts and Humanities Data Service, the British National Corpus, and, of course, the Text Encoding Initiative. I was appointed European Editor of the original TEI project in 1989, was a prime mover in the establishment of the TEI Consortium in 2000, and have played a major role in the production of every edition of the Guidelines since P2. For the last two years, I have continued to be an active member of the TEI Council as one of the two Board representatives.

I have published widely, on "digital humanities", on database systems, and on corpus linguistics, as well as producing a range of teaching materials for numerous courses and workshops about the TEI, both introductory and advanced, in English and in French. These include the annual TEI Summer Schools at Oxford, and (in collaboration with others) a number of similar training events in France and elsewhere in Europe. I have also worked closely with several projects aiming to provide new material for the Guidelines. For the last two years I have been mandated by the TGE Adonis to provide publicity and training services about the TEI in France, as a part of the French contribution to the DARIAH initiative.

Candidate Statement: The TEI has evolved from being a rather esoteric research project to being a part of the everyday intellectual environment. If it is to avoid becoming stale dogma, it is of major importance that the TEI's inherent flexibility and adaptability continue to be put to the test and that the TEI continue to evolve. In standing for the Board, therefore, I hope to promote greater openness to new ideas within the TEI community, a responsiveness to community needs and priorities, and a willingness to co-operate with other players in the digital arena. At the same time, I think there is a need to consolidate the body of experience now available in the TEI community, thus ensuring that it continues to be regarded as a major component of the Digital Humanities field.

Arianna Ciula

Background: Arianna Ciula graduated with BA (Hons) in Communication sciences (computational linguistics) at the University of Siena in 2001. She received an MA in Applied Computing in the Humanities from King's College London in 2004 and was awarded her PhD in Manuscript and Book Studies from the University of Siena in 2005. As Research Associate at Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London, from 2003 to 2009, she worked on various digital humanities research projects, many of which involved the use of the TEI guidelines.

From 2009 to 2012, she worked as Science Officer at the European Science Foundation (Humanities) where her primary responsibilities included the supervision of instruments to fund collaborative research in the humanities and the coordination of strategic activities related to the works of the Standing Committee for the Humanities. She recently relocated to Singapore where she still works as free lance consultant for the ESF on research evaluation missions.

Her personal research interests focus on the modelling of scholarly digital resources related to primary sources. She lectured and published on humanities computing, in particular on digital palaeography and digital philology; she has organised conferences and workshops in digital humanities, and is an active member of its international community. She served as elected member in the TEI council from 2007 to 2009 contributing to the delivery of TEI P5 and already served one term as elected member of the TEI board (2011-2012).

Candidate Statement: After having served one term as member of the TEI board - during which I witnessed some of the weaknesses of the workflow within the board itself but also promoted the visibility and uptake of TEI in various research communities as well as within strategic initiatives on research infrastructures policy at the European level - I think I could do more to contribute to the TEI Consortium strategic vision and actions. To be responsive to ongoing changes within academic institutions and cultural heritage sector and to play a role in steering their relationship with publishing industry and commercial partners in the digital environment, the TEI has to continue strengthening its community of users but also restore and vitalise a solid connection to its members. While financial resources might be scarce, the TEI community is particularly rich in human expertise. Dispersion, fragmentation and lack of communication strategies are still an hindrance to make such expertise operate in a network system beyond institutional and linguistic barriers. The diversity of membership has to be recognised and worked upon; historically, membership itself has provided very valuable expertise to the TEI. This should be encouraged in the future with appropriate policy i.e. facilitating in kind contribution. On the other hand, new members could be attracted by effective sharing of expertise and knowledge. An active network of expertise would not only benefit membership but potentially also external bodies possibly creating additional revenues e.g. through research bidding and education services, setting of pool of experts to act as peer reviewers and evaluators.

A reinvigorated TEI Consortium with a diverse and thriving membership should also engage in collaborative efforts – even through funding proposals - so as to improve its research and publishing infrastructure.

Serge Heiden

Background: I am a research engineer at French 'Grande Ecole' Ecole Normale Superieure de Lyon since 1996, co-head of the third research team of the ICAR CNRS laboratory devoted to the study of written language. I am elected member of ENS de Lyon scientific council, and member of the French national research infrastructure 'Written Corpora' consortium steering committee.

I hold a degree from the Paris 6 University (Ph.D. Comp. Sci. 1996).

My research interests include quantitative and computer-assisted text analysis methods (we call 'textometry') and designing tools to implement them for social sciences or humanities (SSH) disciplines empirical studies.

I have used TEI to represent SSH textual data since the 90's for all the research projects I have been involved in. I have taught how to encode texts with it and how to analyze texts encoded with it. Our research team proudly publishes online the BFM Old French Corpus TEI encoding guide which has been used as a basis by major French research projects for their own TEI encoding principles.

Building tools to effectively analyze TEI encoded data is hard work. Since 2008, I head the development team of the TEI compatible open-source text analysis platform TXM.

Candidate Statement: It is my belief that the TEI consortium open spirit is to textual data encoding, access and sharing what open-source software development principles are to tools building and sharing. As a member of the Board I will best be able to bring together those communities to move closer TEI texts and analysis tools.

TEI communication and documentation deeply relies on the English language at present. Although it is a very good tool to ciment its international community, it should be better associated with local Languages for international newcomers. As a member of the Board I will best be able to make this a reality.

Trevor Muñoz

Background: Trevor Munoz is Assistant Dean for Digital Humanities Research at the University of Maryland University Libraries and an Associate Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH). In his current position, Trevor works on a number of TEI projects. As the Managing Editor for Text Encoding for the Shelley-Godwin Archive, Trevor developed the project's TEI customization and oversees encoding activities and quality control. In addition, Trevor is Principal Investigator for the ANGLES project, a one-year National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Humanities Start-up grant to develop a lightweight, online XML editor tailored to the needs of the text encoding community. Trevor also has experience teaching the TEI, most recently as a guest instructor for the “Customization: Developing Custom Schemas with TEI” workshop in the Taking TEI Further series offered by the Women Writers Project at Brown University.

Trevor's current research interests include strategies for flexibly representing and publishing complex textual structures such as those found in autograph manuscripts as well as applications of the TEI customization mechanism for improving the curation and preservation of TEI data

Trevor completed an MA in Digital Humanities at King's College London and an MS in Library and Information Science with a specialization in data curation at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS), at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Candidate Statement: I am very pleased to be nominated for election to the TEI Board of Directors. If elected, I would devote myself to working on partnerships and outreach with the goal of promoting the value that the TEI and text encoding scholarship could contribute to urgent challenges facing the broader digital humanities and scholarly communities such as data curation, the construction of new platforms for digital publishing, and attendant issues of recognition and reward for scholars creating digital work. The development and maintenance of the TEI standard will remain central work but I also believe that the Consortium's value and therefore its capacity for this central work can be improved by expanding interactions and possibly direct integration between the TEI and new projects (some within the TEI community, some external) that have emerged to serve the publishing, tool support, and curation needs of scholars working with TEI.

John Walsh

Background: I am an Assistant Professor of Information Science and Adjunct Assistant Professor of English at Indiana University. I have been involved with the TEI and digital humanities since 1996 and have worked as a technologist/developer, librarian, and professor. I've enjoyed all these different roles, and I believe my experience in each gives me valuable insight into the various communities served by the TEI.

I served on the TEI Technical Council for two consecutive terms, from 2005-2008, which includes the crucial years leading up to the release of P5 in late 2007. I began a two-year term on the Board in January 2011, and for the past year I have served as Secretary and Vice-Chair.

Candidate Statement: My highest priority as a Board member is ensuring that the TEI Consortium is in a position to support the ongoing work of the Technical Council, the able and admirable stewards of the TEI Guidelines and related technical infrastructure. As a member of the Board I am currently working with other Board members to improve communication among the Board, the Council, the TEI Consortium membership, and the wider TEI community. Should I be elected to continue as a member of the Board, I will maintain focus on improving communications, support outreach efforts such as the annual conference and the Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative , and support and encourage tool building within and for the TEI community. I am personally engaged in tool building and recently led the development of TEI Boilerplate, a simple TEI publication system. Other TEI-related projects in which I am involved include The Algernon Charles Swinburne Project, The Chymistry of Isaac Newton, and Comic Book Markup Language (CBML).

Joe Wicentowski

Background: Joe Wicentowski (born 1976) is a historian in the U.S. Department of State's Office of the Historian, based in Washington, DC. He holds an A.M. in East Asian Studies (2001) and Ph.D. in History (2007) from Harvard University, in the field of modern Chinese history.

At his office, he works in the Division of Declassification and Publishing, leading the project to digitize the Foreign Relations of the United States series -- the 150 year-old official documentary edition of U.S. foreign relations -- and serves as the primary developer of the Office of the Historian's website, http://history.state.gov/. He was responsible for the selection of TEI as the digital format for the Foreign Relations series and other Office of the Historian publications, and the selection of eXist-db as the database and search engine powering the Office of the Historian's website. He has presented the fruits of the Office of the Historian's TEI-based endeavors at meetings of the Americal Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, the National Council of Public History, and the Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and the Computer Sciences. The latter presentation was published in J-DHCS (vol 1, no 3). He has led seminars on creating TEI-based websites with XML databases at Oxford University's Digital Humanities Summer School (DHSS 2011). He is an occasional contributor to the TEI-L mailing list, an active member of the eXist-db mailing lists, and the co-creator of the fairly sleepy eXist-TEI mailing list (which grew out of the DHSS 2011 seminar).

Candidate Statement: I am very honored to be considered for election to the TEI Board. I have benefited greatly from the TEI community since my first encounter with the Initiative in 2007, when the TEI Conference was serendipitously held nearby at the University of Maryland, and since then through the mailing list and other meetings. The TEI was my gateway drug into the world of the digital humanities. The Guidelines and the community have given me, in my capacity as a public historian, a intellectual and technical framework for accomplishing my professional goal of digitizing historical sources and crafting research tools around them. I stand in awe of all that the TEI has accomplished in the past 20 years, and I feel that there is more work to do in bringing TEI to people and organizations who could benefit from the discipline, rigor, and power that the TEI community has to offer.

In joining the board, I would be driven to stimulate and support efforts to make the TEI universe more accessible to people and organizations who need the TEI -- even those who may not know it yet. Education, outreach, and the development and encouragement of tools and resources to support these ends are where my passion lies.

Glen Worthey

Background: I have been the Digital Humanities Librarian (under a variety of titles) in the Stanford University Libraries since 1997. I'm responsible for a small but robust program for creating, acquiring, and providing access to humanities full-text resources, including many encoded in TEI. In addition to my own "boutique" full-text operation, I also consult on TEI encoding for mass digitization projects undertaken by the Stanford Libraries.

My service to the TEI and Digital Humanities communities have been an important of my professional life for over 15 years. I have served on the joint TEI in Libraries SIG / Digital Library Federation TEI Task Force working toward the creation of the important document released in 2011, "TEI in Libraries: Guidelines for Best Practices." In the Digital Humanities community, I am a member of the Executive Board of the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH), as well as undersecretary to the Steering Committee of the Association of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO). In 2011 I was one of the local hosts of the annual ADHO conference "Digital Humanities 2011," held at Stanford.

My pre-library academic background is in Russian literature, in which I have almost earned a Ph.D. (ABD) from the University of California, Berkeley. I've done a fair bit of TEI work in Russian, beginning with a deeply-encoded edition of a longer Pushkin poem as a graduate student during a 1995 CETH workshop at Princeton. While presenting that edition to the workshop, my first blush of real TEI pride was stoked when a senior member of the TEI community commended my use of the @met attribute (indicating masculine or feminine rhyme) as revelatory even to him, as he called out from the audience, “I just knew we put that attribute in the Guidelines for something!” I've been deeply and fully committed to wonderfully supportive, non-hierarchical, open-minded, and open-hearted TEI community, and indeed to what I perceive as an actual TEI ethos, ever since that day.

Candidate Statement: If I were elected to the TEI Board, I would bring a strong voice in support of the central importance of libraries -- both as an essential venue for the sustainability of a membership organization like the TEI Consortium, and as a place of intense TEI practice and preservation. While individual scholars, academic departments, and professional organizations have all been intensely engaged and important to the creation, care, and keeping of TEI standards and practices (primarily embodied in the Guidelines themselves and their application), it is the library more than any other academic entity that is tasked with the understanding and application of metadata standards such as the TEI, and with the preservation of those rare and precious cultural objects that have the great advantage of being encoded in (or described by) those standards. In some important ways, it is these cultural objects that have the best chances of surviving what may end up being -- even more than the Information Age -- an Age of Digital Ephemera.

Brian Pytlk Zillig

Background: I am Professor and Digital Initiatives Librarian at the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities (CDRH) at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. I have been involved in digital humanities for more than a decade, working on numerous projects, including the Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition Online and the Walt Whitman Archive, and am the creator of TokenX and co-creator of Abbot. I have received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

For the Metadata Offer New Knowledge (MONK) Project, Stephen Ramsay, Martin Mueller, and I created a command-line file conversion application, Abbot, which transforms variant TEI/XML texts into a common interoperable format called TEI-Analytics. As principal investigator for the current Mellon-funded Abbot (2.0) Project, I provide project management and XSLT programming experience, as well as the skills and perspective of a professional academic librarian. My professional activities involve programming, prototype development, Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), data animation, algorithmic XSLT code generation, and XML transformation.

Candidate Statement: I am the creator of TokenX (http://cdrh.unl.edu/projects/pages/tokenx.php) a licensed open-source application for text analysis. TokenX is designed to provide an easy-to-use interface for text analysis, visualization, deformation, and creative exploration.

I served as co-manager of the Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition Online (funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities), and developed the first XML search and the XSLT stylesheets for that project. I created the XSLT stylesheets for various Walt Whitman Archive projects, including the American editions of Leaves of Grass, Horace Traubel’s With Walt Whitman in Camden, and the Whitman periodicals project. Moreover, I developed the XSLT stylesheet that dynamically generates, from several-hundred component files, the Integrated Guide to Walt Whitman’s Poetry Manuscripts.

My most recent work has been to build a moviemaker application that creates movies of text analysis findings drawn from TEI text corpora. Individual frames from this work were printed onto fabric for the 2012 UNL Biennial Runway show, “The Power of Fashion.” Twenty “text analysis” garments were created and featured before a sold-out audience. The runway show also featured my six-minute video “Attired in Beauty,” which was created with my software. That video sought to explore and present new ways—using color, motion, and opacity—to represent n-gram sequences drawn from the TEI files provided by the Willa Cather Archive and the Walt Whitman Archive. I currently have an invited animation piece, “Containment,” appearing in a show at the Tugboat Gallery in Lincoln, along with works by four other artists.

In hindsight, my journey from library science to markup to fashion design and data movies is not all that far, and not as strange as it seemed at the start.

Piotr Bański

Background: I currently hold two positions: I am a senior researcher and a coordinator of the corpus-linguistics-oriented project at the Institut für Deutsche Sprache in Mannheim, and an assistant professor at the Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw, where I have taught theoretical linguistics (concentrating nowadays mostly on linguistic morphology and syntax, but having also taught e.g. phonology and corpus linguistics), history of the English language, lexicography, and information technology.

Since 2001, I have been involved in corpus architecture and annotation. The most notable projects that I am proud to have been involved in are the IPI PAN Corpus of Polish and the National Corpus of Polish (using the TEI P5 for the annotation of an impressive number and variety of information layers; http://nkjp.pl/). I have also been involved in lexicographic projects using the TEI: FreeDict, an open source and open content repository of bilingual dictionaries (https://sourceforge.net/projects/freedict/), and a project sponsored by the Polish Ministry of Higher Education, aiming at creating a Swahili-Polish-Swahili electronic dictionary.

My service for the TEI community includes the development and co-administration of the TEI Wiki (since 2007), being a member of the Programme Committee of the Zadar meeting, and boldly reviewing the abstracts for the TEI-MM’s since then. I am also a co-founder and co-convener of the TEI Special Interest Group (SIG) for Language Resources (do see http://wiki.tei-c.org/index.php/TEI_for_linguists). Recently, I have been mercilessly trying the thankfully bottomless patience of the Editors of jTEI, by being a co-editor of a special volume on pulling the TEI (back) closer to linguistics-related annotation efforts. Within the TEI Council, I have been active mostly in linguistics-, language-resource- an and lexicography-oriented areas. I am also proud to have been entrusted the function of the Release Technician for the upcoming pre-conference release of the Guidelines.

My interests in markup languages and their application for language modelling have led me to participate in the efforts of the ISO TC 37 SC 4, first in the role of an external expert, bringing in my experience in language modeling and markup technology, and currently as a representative of the Polish branch of SC4. Some of my Council-related work addressed issues common to the efforts of the TEI and the ISO TC 37 SC 4, to make sure that the work on linguistic annotation performed within the two communities is coordinated rather than unnecessarily doubled.

Candidate Statement: If re-elected as a Council member, I would like to continue to contribute as the “resident linguist” among our group, and to push the Lingustics SIG issues even more strongly, now that many of the fundamental linguistics-related SourceForge tickets have been (or are being) addressed.

Syd Bauman

Background: Syd came to the TEI through an interest in markup and markup languages. He became interested in SGML just prior to its publication in 1986, but did not start engaging with a real markup language until late 1990. At that time he was already working at the Brown University Women Writers Project, where his first major task was to convert WWP legacy data to be in line with the newly published TEI P1. He still works at the WWP as a Senior Programmer/Analyst and ever since that first challenge, he's been thinking of ways to improve the TEI.

From 2001 to 2007 Syd served the TEI as the North American Editor, and is thus familiar with the workings of the Council. He has been very active in the TEI community as a frequent presenter on TEI topics at conferences; by consulting closely with nearly ½ dozen TEI projects, and providing occasional assistance to another dozen or so; as a member of the TEI Pointer working group, of the ODD task force, and of several SIGs; and of course, through teaching numerous TEI workshops and seminars.

Syd has an AB from Brown University in political science, and has worked as a systems programmer and a freelance computer typesetter. He frequently teaches TEI workshops and seminars, and consults for a variety of humanities computing projects. He has been an Emergency Medical Technician since 1983.

Hugh Cayless

Background: Hugh Cayless has been working with TEI for over a decade. Most recently he has been the lead developer for papyri.info, which publishes over 50,000 ancient documents, all encoded in TEI P5. Hugh is one of the founding members of the EpiDoc community, which publishes guidelines for marking up inscriptions and other ancient documents using the TEI. He is currently developing a draft revision of the TEI XPointer schemes (section 16.2.4 of the TEI Guidelines). He has published papers on various subjects relevant to the TEI, including the future of epigraphical research and publishing, linking texts to images, using TEI documents in a Linked Data environment, and implementing TEI Pointer schemes. Hugh is an experienced software developer with a doctorate in Classics and an MS in Information Science, both from UNC Chapel Hill.

Candidate Statement: I would bring to the Council my deep technical experience with XML and related technologies along with a thorough grounding in the TEI itself. My work these days is particularly focused on environments for editing and interacting with TEI online. TEI still presents a formidable learning curve to the inexperienced. Much good work has been done on improving the “on-boarding” experience by projects like TEI By Example. But I think that online tools, like the form-based and alternative syntax TEI editors we use in papyri.info are the next frontier in expanding TEI’s reach. I think that with the right toolsets, TEI will be attractive and accessible to a much larger audience than it currently has, and if elected to the Council, I will work hard to bring this about.

Tanya Clement

Background: I am an Assistant Professor in the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin. I have a PhD in English Literature and Language from the University of Maryland, College Park and an MFA in fiction from the University of Virginia. My primary area of research is the role of scholarly information infrastructure as it impacts academic research libraries and digital collections, research tools and resources in the context of future applications, humanities informatics, and humanities data curation. My research and publications have been informed by theories of knowledge representation, information theory, mark-up theory, social text theory, and theories of information visualization. I have published pieces on digital humanities and digital literacies in several books and on digital scholarly editing, text mining, the TEI, and modernist literature in Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative, Literary and Linguistic Computing, and Texas Studies in Literature and Language. I have pieces forthcoming in Digital Humanities Quarterly and DS-CN on analyzing and visualizing prosodic textual elements. I am the co-director of the Modernist Versions Project, the Associate Editor of the Versioning Machine (http://v-machine.org), and the editor of “In Transition: Selected Poems by the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven” (http://www.lib.umd.edu/digital/transition/), which has been vetted by NINES (2011), and the co-editor of “The Firstling/Erstling/He Complex by Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven,” which was published in Scholarly Editing: The Annual of the Association for Documentary Editing (2012). Both of these editions were encoded using TEI parallel segmentation and visualized using the Versioning Machine.

Aspects of infrastructure development in the humanities that I have been considering in my research that are of greatest impact to the TEI community are those needed for supporting community building and peer review in the humanities. This year, I was appointed as the Associate Director of ARC, the over-arching organization that supports NINES (http://www.nines.org) at the University of Virginia, 18thConnect (http://www.18thconnect.org) at Texas A&M University, MESA (in beta at http://mesa.performantsoftware.com) at North Carolina State University, REKn (beta launch set for January 2013) at the Universities of Victoria and Saskatchewan, and ModNets (beta launch set for June 2013) at Loyola University. These “nodes” are online finding aids, peer-reviewing organizations, and communities that educate faculty in specific literary cultural- historical fields: 19th-century studies (NINES), 18th-century studies (18thConnect), Medieval Studies (MESA), early modern studies (REKn), and Modernism (ModNets) about digital infrastructure. ARC brings the communities together to make decisions about the functioning and vision of all the groups together, ensuring that we share resources and code, legal work and outreach media, a metadata server, contracts with data proprietors, etc. On September 21, 2012, Texas A&M was awarded a large Mellon grant to build up the data and presence for these nodes as part of a larger OCR project. This work with ARC dovetails well with my newly appointed role as the Tools and Projects Reviews Editor for the Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative since the systems for evaluating digital scholarly projects (including those that incorporate TEI) for promotion and tenure are nascent. In each of my roles and as part of my research, I am considering how these different communities, which represent multiple disciplinary perspectives, work to create best practices for evaluating digital scholarly work. In particular, I am concerned with the extent to which encoding practices play a role in how we value projects as scholarship.

Candidate Statement: I have long been involved in the TEI community since working at UVA’s E-Text Center in the late nineties; on the job at Apex Covantage where I worked for two years helping to implement the encoding practices for projects such as EEBO and Proquest’s Historical Newspapers project; to helping Susan Schreibman run the TEI Conference in 2007; to developing and theorizing my own projects; to teaching TEI both in workshops and in my classes with undergraduate and graduate students; to my current role as the Reviews Editor on the TEI Journal. I see my role on the Council as one in which I can help consult on the future of the TEI in terms of all of these aspects of the TEI: building the TEI community, the design and implementation of the TEI, and teaching the TEI. In particular, I wish to work with the TEI Council to help the Council articulate how all of these aspects of the TEI impact current and future best practices for evaluating TEI projects as scholarship.

Amy Earhart

Background: I am an assistant professor of English at Texas A&M University and director of the NEH funded 19th-century Concord Digital Archive. My work focuses on the history of digital humanities, and I am completing a book titled Traces of the Old, Uses of the New: The Emergence of Digital Literary Studies which articulates the digital humanities’ theoretical relationship to literary studies. A central area of investigation in the volume is the history and use of TEI. I also believe that TEI should be incorporated into the undergraduate and graduate curriculum and have developed collaborative projects to add TEI training in both levels of education. A core component of TEI work in the curriculum has been the development of publishable digital textual projects. For example, my undergraduate and graduate students have just completed an edition of selected Alex Haley’s Malcolm X texts. This project will be published in Scholarly Editing. In addition, I have a particular interest in the conversion and preservation of small scale, early digital projects and am at the start of a project that considers how to build an infrastructure to support those small projects near extinction. Initial test sites for the project are the Emerson Society and American Transcendentalist sites, both of which we have been converting from unusable and unsustainable html. I would be interested in working with the TEI in outreach and education with a particular attention to pedagogical issues.

Christiane Fritze

Background: Since December 2009, I am a senior researcher at the Research and Development Department of the Göttingen State and University Library. Currently I am working as the scientific coordinator of the German chapter of the European Infrastructure Initiative DARIAH (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities) and consult various research projects in their application of TEI.

Before that, I worked as a research associate at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities in several Digital Humanities projects such as the TELOTA Initiative and the German Text Archive. My first contact with TEI (P4) was at the Digital Dictionary of the German Language (DWDS) in 2001. Since then, I have been working on TEI encoding, data transformation into TEI, and TEI data modelling and representation.

In addition to these activities, I regularly teach XML technologies (including e.g. XSLT, XSL-FO), TEI and digital edition-related matters on a regular bases in IDE-schools (Institute for Documentology and Scholarly Edition, IDE) as well as in university courses.

Candidate Statement: I am very honoured to be nominated for TEI Council. After participating in TEI-related projects for more than a decade, I have experienced first-hand its effects on project dynamics in interaction with the broader community. Numerous discussions showed me the importance of supporting local projects in their work and, through this, building a strong basis for the overall TEI community. One idea for further supporting TEI activities is to strengthen the role of specific genres (e.g. letters, charters, incunabula, encyclopaedia). Application profiles offer an effective way to normalise the encoding of genres and at the same time enable smooth take-up for genre-specific activities. This is one of the approaches through which, if elected, I would like to lower the threshold for TEI beginners, foster the creation of tools for analysis and publication, and raise the consistency of text encoding.

Alexei Lavrentev

Background: I am a research engineer at ICAR Research Laboratory (CNRS and Lyon University, France). I am member of Digital Medievalist executive board (since 2012), and the French CAHIER Consortium steering committee.

My PhD thesis in French Linguistics (École normale supérieure de Lyon, France, 2009) was dedicated to the study of medieval French punctuation and was based on a corpus of multi-layer TEI-XML transcriptions of manuscripts and incunabula.

I was involved in the Princeton Charrette Project (2002-2006) and in the Saint-Petersburg Hagiography Corpus (2004). Since 2004 I have been working on the BFM Old French Corpus and on various related research and publication projects. I am responsible for the TEI encoding of the BFM texts, for their linguistic annotation and for providing user access to them. I manage the BFM public website and the new web portal for text query and analysis. I am also a co-editor (with Christiane Marchello-Nizia) of the Queste del Saint Graal online edition.

I have taught TEI at a number of summer schools and university courses in Russia since 2006, and I am currently working (with Tatiana Timchenko) on the Russian translation of the TEI element specification.

As a researcher, I am particularly interested in combining rich TEI philological markup with linguistic annotation and indexing, both "manual" and using NLP tools. This work is closely related to my involvement in the development of the TXM open source corpus search and analysis platform which uses (extended) TEI as its "native" format for corpus encoding.

My institution is likely to support my travel expenses for assisting TEI Council meetings in case I am elected.

Elli Mylonas

Background: I am currently the Senior Digital Humanities Librarian in the Brown University Library, and part of the Center for Digital Scholarship, a library group which works on digital projects with members of the Brown community, participates in activities to increase the knowledge and adoption of digital methods and develops infrastructure to support these goals. I manage and participate in a variety of projects, but my main expertise lies in working with textual materials - identifying appropriate metadata structures, encoding text and transforming it into appropriate output formats using TEI and other data structures. My academic background is in Classics, in which I almost completed a dissertation on Latin Literature.

I have been involved with text encoding from the pre-historic days of SGML and have been involved with TEI since its inception, as a member of several of the original working groups. My involvement with text encoding and the TEI is ongoing. I am currently the technical manager of two corpora of ancient inscriptions - US Epigraphy , encoded in the Epidoc schema and Inscriptions of Israel/Palestine which will be ported to Epidoc later this year. As part of my work on US Epigraphy, I've contributed to the development of the Epidoc customization of TEI for encoding inscriptions and other inscribed ancient texts. In addition to the two epigraphic projects, which are heavily invested in the TEI, my work consists of simultaneous, smaller DH projects. The challenge inherent in these projects is to produce high quality content and engagement with the methodology together with quick, visible results that provide useful feedbak to the participants. This not uncommon situation has taught me the importance of rapid if incomplete and imperfect outcomes for furthering a project. This is espeically true when working with under-resourced projects and with new users of technologies such as TEI.

Candidate Statement: Although I haven't worked on the TEI in an editorial capacity before, I understand how the guidelines are assembled and have a general idea of how council performs its duties. I follow TEI-L carefully, and remain current on the issues that are raised on the list. I have practical experience with the TEI and especially TEI metadata - I belong to the class of users who are committed to text encoding using the TEI and who value the rules and semantics it provides. However, I am also aware that successful projects are those in which a diverse group of contributors can easily participate, and which can be stored, retrieved and manipulated in multi-purpose repositories, constraints which must often be layered onto the TEI guidelines. I am especially interested in being part of the ongoing effort to make the Guidelines more accessible, and of figuring out how to promote the use of TEI within broader projects that are not primarily about text encoding. In practical terms, I can contribute to the prose of the guidelines, to workgroups that are involved with metadata (both in the header and contained within a text) and with the dissemination of the guidelines, to decisions about the features in the guidelines and eventually to the maintenance of the guidelines.

Sebastian Rahtz

Background: My name is Sebastian Rahtz. I work in IT Services at the University of Oxford, where I am co- Director of Academic IT Services, with responsibility for our work on research support, data management, information architecture and open data. One of the areas we work in is text encoding, and I have specialized in TEI XML for over 10 years now, since the TEI Consortium was founded in 2000. I've been around humanities IT since the early 1980s in various ways, since studying Classics and Modern Greek at university in the 1970s.

Candidate Statement: I have served on the TEI Technical Council since its inception, and contributed to many areas of its work, notably in development of the ODD markup, the workflow, tools and XSL stylesheets for making the TEI Guidelines at each new release, and services like Roma and OxGarage. Lately I have been spending much time on conversions to ePub, and to/from Word's docx format. I believe I have much more to contribute to TEI tools, trying to help the community. If elected, I will use this mandate to continue to support and evangelize TEI at Oxford, and to share whatever we do here with everyone else.

I believe that the TEI's future is primarily as a community-driven body of standards and tools, and that is what I shall strive to create.

Henriette Roued-Cunliffe

Starting in November, Henriette will be working as a Programmer and Digital Humanist with the Gāndhārī project at the Institute for Indian and Tibetan Studies, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, München, where she will be responsible for the technical maintenance and development of the TEI-conformant Dictionary of Gāndhārī database.

Background: Henriette has recently passed the examination of her DPhil thesis in Ancient History at University of Oxford where she has been associated with the Oxford e-Research Centre and UCL Centre for Digital Humanities as a part of the e-Science and Ancient Documents project. The thesis title was: “A Decision Support System for the Reading of Ancient Documents”. This involved a discussion about IT tools for Humanities in general and for the reading of ancient documents in particular.

Furthermore, Henriette’s DPhil research involved the development of a DSS prototype and a REST based Web Service that extracted data from a series of EpiDoc/TEI documents and returned the result as TEI lists.

She has been involved in the Vindolanda Tablets Online II web publishing of the Vindolanda Documents for which she has applied APPELLO in order to create an AJAX based index searcher.

As a part of the Vindolanda Tablets Online II project she has futhermore developed scripts for automated XML encoding from text editions.

Candidate Statement: I am very honoured to have been nominated as a potential candidate for the TEI council.

My research to date has focused on differentiating between the areas in which IT can aid Humanities research and the areas in which they cannot. I feel very strongly that TEI lies within one of the areas where IT tools are very useful for aiding Humanities research.

I have used the TEI schema and guidelines for my DPhil research and have developed a REST based Web Service (APPELLO) for trawling TEI encoded documents for linguistic attributes and outputting the result as TEI lists.

If I am elected for the TEI council I would like to work with developing more IT tools for the users, such as Web Services and automated mark-up aids.

Peter Stadler

Background: I am a research assistant with the Carl-Maria-von-Weber-Gesamtausgabe since 2009 where my main focus is on our digital edition of Weber's letters, diaries and writings. Hence my daily work is full of angle brackets and a lot of X-Technologies around it. I am concerned with a broad spectrum of tasks: text analysis and concepts of text encoding, creation and documentation of appropriate XML schemata with ODD, and presentation of our TEI files on the web (based on eXist and XQuery).

I am involved with the TEI since 2008 as convener of the SIG Correspondence which involves consulting for several scholarly projects dealing with correspondence material. Furthermore I have been regularly teaching TEI courses during our annual Summer School at the University of Paderborn, Germany.

Having received an MA in Musicology and Computational Linguistics from the University of Heidelberg, Germany, I see myself as a ‘Digital Humanist’ with a great interest in the whole range of texts and methods applied to texts. Additionally my department runs several other projects through which I am in close connection with the development of the MEI standard as well as DARIAH and TextGrid where I keep in touch with large scale infrastructure projects.

Candidate Statement: I believe that the current Council is doing a great job in maintaining and developing the technical infrastructure of the TEI guidelines. Since I am already familiar with organizational things like the TEI@sourceforge version control system as well as the technical infrastructure from ODD to TEI I hope to mesh with other Council members well. My main concern would be to not to fall behind the current status quo and to enhance ODD and Roma.

Raffaele Viglianti

Background: I have been working since 2007 in the Department of Digital Humanities (DDH) at King's College London (KCL) where I have been involved in the technical development of many TEI-based projects, spanning several disciplines and dealing with different kinds of documents and texts. A notable example is the Jane Austen Fiction Manuscripts project, for which I developed a rendering system for a dense TEI diplomatic encoding. I then shared the key XSLT techniques used in the project on the TEI wiki. More recently I have been working on data-extraction from corpora of epigraphic material encoded with the TEI customization EpiDoc.

I have been actively involved in the TEI since 2008 as the convenor of the Music SIG, which was funded by the TEI-C in 2010 to work on the intersection of text and music encoding. I also have taught TEI in several occasions as part of postgraduate courses, workshops and summer schools (for example Medieval Manuscripts in the Digital Age).

Currently, I am undertaking a PhD in Digital Humanities at KCL, focusing on digital scholarly editions of music in common western notation. As a result of this research, I have established strong ties with the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) community, which applies TEI-like practices to the encoding of music notation. Within this community, I have promoted and established the use of ODD for MEI's specification and guidelines, also with the intention of moving first steps towards closing the gap between TEI and MEI. The forthcoming new release of MEI is, as a result, ODD-powered.

Candidate Statement: I am very honoured to have been nominated to run for the TEI council. If elected, I would be excited to contribute to the council's activities. More specifically, I would pursue an agenda that favours the dissemination of good practice in using TEI through ODD, which is often underused by the wider TEI community. Redesigning Roma and promoting it as the gateway to TEI would be the first step to achieve this. I would also push for a cleaner, more geek-friendly TEI source repository that encourages forking and collaboration from independent developers. I would bring to the council my personal interest and expertise in using TEI in combination with other formats and standards and support the extension of TEI towards multimedia applications to reflect an up-to-date concept of ‘text’.

Some financial backing from my home institution (DDH) is to be provided if elected.