TEI-C Elections 2014

Marjorie Burghart

Biographical Statement: Marjorie Burghart is a research officer at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) based in Lyon, France. She holds a dual degree: she received her MA (1998) and M.Res (2002) in Medieval History, her M.Sc in Computer Sciences (2000), and a PhD in Medieval History from the University of Lyon, in the field of sermon studies (2013).

In my research centre, a large unit dedicated to Medieval Studies, I am the head of a cross-disciplinary Digital Humanities program. In this position, I coordinate the computing aspects of several projects involving the electronic editing of medieval documents in TEI format (for instance Sermones.net with the structural and thematic analysis of latin sermons, or the Interactive Album of Mediaeval Palaeography offering TEI-encoded paleography exercises). I am also the developer of the TEI Critical Apparatus Toolbox, (still in beta-testing and restricted access at the time of writing - password available on demand, but soon to be released).

I have lectured on Digital Humanities for medievalists at the university of Freiburg since 2010 and initiated a seminar in Lyon on “Digital Edition and Medieval Sources”. With more than ten years of TEI experience, I have been involved in the Manuscript Material TEI SIG, resulting in a paper published with Malte Rehbein in the Journal of the TEI, and have convened a working group for the revision of the Critical Apparatus module and chapter. I have promoted the principle of TEI "cheatsheets".

Candidate Statement: I have served a first term on the Board (2012-2013), and I am very honoured to have been considered once more for election. If I am given the opportunity to serve our community on the Board for a new term, I would like to try and lead the TEI further on two points: the promotion and fostering of TEI-capable tools (which has progressed but can still be improved significantly), and outreach. For the latter, I would advocate bringing the TEI to the world of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), which would give a real opportunity to learn the TEI for people all around the world, not only in very localized workshops, but anywhere.

Michelle Dalmau

Biographical Statement: I am currently the Acting Head of Digital Collections Services for the Indiana University Libraries, which serves as a bridge connecting various units and individuals across the IU Libraries, the Bloomington campus, other IU campuses, and the state of Indiana, bringing together collection owners, technologists, metadata experts, and scholars to provide consultation and services ranging from project management to digitization workflows for the propagation of digital special collections and digital research projects. As the unit title suggests, I manage several digital library services and initiatives including but not limited to: digital project consultations, digitization services, and electronic text services, and I engage in a great deal of outreach, teaching and training in these areas.

Prior to assuming this position in May of 2013, I was the Digital Projects and Usability Librarian for the Indiana University Digital Library Program (DLP), where I was responsible for coordinating and managing digital library projects with a particular focus on electronic text projects as well as coordinating and leading user studies for the DLP and the greater Indiana University Bloomington Libraries. I have been professionally active in digital libraries and digital humanities initiatives, including the TEI, since 2002 when I joined the DLP. My undergraduate background is in English and Art History, and I hold a Master of Library Science and a Master of Information Science from Indiana University.

I am an active participant in the Text Encoding Initiative Consortium (TEI-C), of which the IU Libraries is a member, serving as an official IU representative. I served as the Co-Chair for the Special Interest Group (SIG) on Libraries, which I resurrected in 2007 through 2013. Libraries, including ours, are champions of the TEI and use it as _the_ descriptive metadata standard for texts. As Co-Chair for the SIG, I advocated for the needs of academic libraries by encouraging discussions and lobbying for improvements to the TEI in support of text encoding practices in libraries. Most notably, I led the revamping of the Best Practices for TEI in Libraries, a set of guidelines and accompanying schemas that support text encoding and quality control in the context of academic libraries.

Candidate Statement: If elected to the TEI Board, I intend to represent all TEI users with a particular emphasis on library constituents, who are significant users of the TEI Guidelines and important institutional supporters of the TEI-C. I am eager to shape outreach endeavors to increase support and adoption of the TEI across all users, especially users situated in libraries. Ways in which I can help with this endeavor is to advocate and articulate consortium benefits based on actual needs such as:

• highlighting and increasing access to existing training opportunities available in the TEI community, and fostering the development of new training programs for a diverse set of users and use cases
• improving relationships with creators of TEI-aware publishing systems to minimize the barriers to outputting and sharing TEI-based scholarship
• increasing the accessibility of the TEI Guidelines, especially for novice adopters, with additional representation of use cases often encountered in libraries

These are just a few ways in which I promote the TEI locally at Indiana University, and I look forward to extend my experience to the broader community of TEI users.

Elena González-Blanco

Biographical Statement: I’m a faculty member at the Spanish Literature Department at Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (Open University) of Spain in Madrid. My main research and teaching areas are Comparative Medieval Literature, Metrics and Poetry, and Digital Humanities. I am the Academic Director of the recently created Digital Humanities Lab at UNED: LINHD (Laboratorio de Innovación en Humanidades Digitales), and I am also coordinating the institutional linked data project UNEDATA. I have a philological background with a PhD in Spanish Literature (2008), a MA in Classics (2005), and a Masters in Digital Libraries and Information Science (2014).

I am the Principal Investigator of the project ReMetCa (Digital Repertoire on Medieval Castilian Metrics), which uses a combined system of MySQL database and TEI annotation. The project works in coordination with the European project Megarep, part of the research group on databases of the Cost Action Medioevo Europeo.

As a member of the Digital Humanities community, since 2013 I have been a member of the Executive Committee of EADH, a member of the Executive Committee of the ADHO SIG GO::DH, and the Secretary of the Spanish Association for Digital Humanities: HDH (Humanidades Digitales Hispánicas, Sociedad Internacional), and I am in charge of the organization of its next meeting in Madrid in 2015. I’ve also recently joined the editorial board of Dirt.

Candidate Statement: Being a member of TEI Board sounds exciting, especially because I feel that my presence as a member of the Spanish community is important to enrich the perspectives of the TEI Community, by translating guidelines, organizing training programs and courses and trying to spread the standard in our country. As Spain –and also the Spanish speaking world- is experiencing an important growth in the last years in DH fields, it is important for the TEI Consortium to be able to help these countries and to contribute to their common development in terms of DH structures and TEI knowledge. Being a member of the TEI community will also be also enriching for myself, as I will have more opportunities to discuss with people, exchange ideas and learn new things about this fascinating XML world. Now that I have the opportunity of being an active member of this group I promise to do my best to keep things working as well as they are working now. I am really enthusiastic of belonging to the Board and I hope to be able to collaborate with energy and new ideas.

More information about me can be found in my institutional website: www.uned.es/personal/elenagonzalezblanco

Publications (full-text): https://uned.academia.edu/ElenaGonzálezBlancoGarcía

Personal blog: http://filindig.hypotheses.org

Martin Mueller

Biographical Statement: I was trained as a classicist but have always made my living in English departments. I taught at Brandeis for two years and  for  a decade at the University of Toronto, where I started the Comparative Literature Program. From 1976 until my retirement in 2012 I taught at Northwestern University, where at different times I chaired the Comparative Literature and Humanities programs as well as the Department of English.

My work has moved between straight Classics (a book on the Iliad) and the Nachleben of ancient epic and tragedy, which I pursued in various articles and  Children Oedipus and other essays on the imitation of ancient tragedy, 1550-1800. A good summary of my interest in or experience with things digital is found in the Hilda Hulme Memorial  Lecture on collaborative curation and exploration of Early Modern Drama, which I gave last year at the English Institute of the University of London, and which you can read at http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/8/3/000183/000183.html.

Candidate Statement: I served briefly as TEI chair in 2011 and for a two-year period on the TEI Board. In my candidate statement of 2011 I wrote that the TEI "needs a leaner and nimbler organization." We have made some progress in that direction. In my view the TEI remains financially too dependent on a few major contributors. For financial and intellectual reasons it would be good to have more institutional members who pay fees in the $500 range. An energetic membership drive with that goal may be in order. Perhaps the most important goal will be to lower acess barriers for working with TEI by removing real or (just as importantly) perceived obstacles.  I hope that the TEI Simple project, designed by Sebastian Rahtz, Brian Pytlik Zillig, and myself will take us a few steps in that direction.  

Kiyonori Nagasaki

Biographical Statement: I graduated in 1995 from University of Tsukuba and studied the graduate school of philosophy and thought in the field of Buddhist studies. During graduate school, I worked in several local internet service providers as a network administrator and engaged in building and administration of the campus network in the university. In 2000 I finished at the University and become a fellow in the Institute of Language and Culture in Asia and Africa as a network administrator and a developer of applications for language and culture in Asia and Africa. In 2001, I was employed as a lecturer in the Faculty of Intercultural Studies in Yamaguchi Prefectural University in order to teach information science and ethics to students of humanities and promoted to an associate professor in 2005. In 2009, I helped to establish an International Institute for Digital Humanities and became a senior fellow and its general manager. I was awarded a doctor of cultural interaction in 2014. Now I am a senior fellow of the institute and a project associate professor of the digital humanities program at the University of Tokyo.

I’ve been addressing localization of usage of the TEI Guidelines and investigating necessity of improvement of the guidelines for Eastern materials including Sanskrit, Tibetan, Chinese, and Japanese with my colleagues. I’ve been engaging in the project of translation of the guidelines led by Professor Kazushi Ohya. I have organized a TEI workshop every year since 2009 inviting TEI experts and lectured on the TEI by myself in my class at the University of Tokyo and other workshops which I have held in several universities. I’ve been addressing to develop and improve a Web-based stand-off markup system for philological description of Buddhist materials since 2005 by the help of my colleagues, especially, Professor Masahiro Shimoda. Moreover, I developed a crowd-sourcing Web site for transcription of Japanese materials which can generate TEI files compliant with the Best Practices for TEI in Libraries in 2014 under the auspices of Japanese Association for Digital Humanities, National Diet Library in Japan, and National Institute of Informatics. I’ve introduced the TEI to researchers of information science and humanities in my papers and speeches in Japanese, especially, when I treated contexts of digital humanities. I’ve participated in the members’ meeting every year since 2007 except 2009.

Candidate Statement: I'm honored to be nominated as a candidate to the Board of the TEI which I deeply respect for the huge accumulation of consideration of what humanities constitute. If elected the Board, I will support to bridge between the TEI community and those who are addressing to encode Eastern materials apart from the community. As practical matters, I will commit to the following:

1. Disseminating the TEI among people who treat digital Eastern materials.
2. Validating existent TEI tools in the case of use of Eastern materials, reporting the results, and considering solutions if needed.
3. Establishing a framework for validating the TEI guidelines for Eastern materials not only in technical methods but also in communication flow.

I believe that involvement of diversity of Eastern materials must make the TEI more fruitful in order to ensure the general guidelines for the humanities.

Glen Worthey

Biographical Statement: I work in the Stanford University Libraries as Digital Humanities Librarian, where I've been employed since 1997. My work at Stanford puts me in close contact with a wide variety of faculty and student researchers, fellow librarians, and a vibrant and growing group of Stanford digital humanities workers. I'm head of a small program charged with 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, serve as a sort of embedded librarian for the Stanford Literary Lab, and have recently been named to lead Stanford's new Center for Interdiscplinary Digital Research.

I have been active in humanities computing / digital humanities since being introduced to the practice in about 1995, while I was pursuing graduate work in Russian literature and simultaneously working as a library cataloger. My alt-ac-style library career in the digital humanities since that time has been steadily and quietly fulfilling in ways that I could not have imagined when I began it. I'm perpetually close (but never quite close enough) to completing my Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, and continue to participate in the library, DH, and Russian literature communities.

My service to the TEI and to digital humanities has been an overwhelmingly important part of my professional life for over 17 years. I am currently completing my first term as a member of the TEI Consortium Board, and have served on the joint TEI in Libraries SIG / Digital Library Federation TEI Task Force, on which I contributed to the creation of the important document released in 2011, "TEI in Libraries: Guidelines for Best Practices." In the extra-TEI 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.

Candidate Statement: As I reflect on my current (and first) two-year term on the Board, I'm humbled by the amount of work we have to do and by the challenges we face; this work, and these challenges, fall on us both collectively -- on the Consortium and its leadership -- and individually, as we all balance our professional, personal, and organizational responsibilities. I am honored to have been nominated to run for a second term on the Board, and I take very seriously the challenges such a nomination implies; after much reflection, I am pleased to commit my time and energy to the community for a second term, should I be elected.

More programmatically, if I were to serve again, I would continue to raise a strong voice in support of the central importance of libraries both in the TEI Consortium (as constituent members) and as actors in the broader TEI world: libraries are the place where both standards and digital collections are developed and maintained for the long term; they are the locus of both great activity and thoughtful activism, a solid base on which to build a digital future in a technology-centric world that is too often under the sway of faddishness, short-sightedness, and historical and cultural ignorance. (I say this having spent my entire career in Silicon Valley.)

As one of the earliest and most successful of contemporary digital humanities efforts, the TEI has an immensely important role to play in representing the seriousness and longevity of the entire DH project. After decades of shared people and activities, this past year has seen increased collaboration between the TEI Consortium and ADHO on an organizational level, which I see as a most welcome development. If I were to continue serving on the Board, I would seek to promote those ties even further, while still retaining the TEI-C's unique history and nature. We all have a lot to learn from each other, and nothing to lose from closer collaboration.

Thank you for your continuing support of the TEI Board, on which I would be honored to serve another term.

Pip Willcox

Biographical Statement: As the first Curator of Digital Special Collections at the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, my work falls into three broad categories of collaboration and knowledge exchange: working with a team of editors to create digital content from the Bodleian Libraries’ and partner institutions' collections; engaging the public with the Libraries’ digital collections and the stories behind them; and working with academics to facilitate and enable digital research.

Joining the Bodleian Libraries to work as a digital editor on Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership in 2006, my role developed to include outreach activities, for example organizing the EEBO-TCP conferences “Revolutionizing Early Modern Research”? and Digital Methods and Methodologies. 

I work with the Oxford e-Research Centre and Academic IT Services to further digital research in the humanities, and facilitate the local TEI editors’ community. I manage projects that use TEI, training colleagues in its use, and quality assuring their work. A current project is developing a social edition using TEI as part of the EPSRC-funded Sociam project.

Recent TEI-based projects include:

• ElEPHãT: Early English Print in the HathiTrust
• Bodleian First Folio
• Stationers’ Register Online
• Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership

Collaborating with colleagues around the world in the digital humanities, I am currently working with the HathiTrust Research Center and the University of Western Australia. Project boards and steering committees I serve on include: 

• Digital Renaissance Editions
• Cultures of Knowledge 
• TEI Simple

I am the Bodleian Libraries representative on the Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School organizing committee. In addition to contributing individual workshops over a number of years, I have convened two week-long workshop strands: 

• Cultural Connections: exchanging knowledge and widening participation in the Humanities (2013)
• Introduction to Digital Humanities (2014)

I have used TEI to work with manuscript and print since 2001. I have a passion for text, and particular interests in digitally representing the materiality of the physical, and in widening knowledge of and participation in the TEI. I am committed to opening up working methods and content to new audiences, within and beyond academia.

Candidate Statement: If elected to the TEI Board, I would bring a user’s practical insight into the TEI, distinctively responsive to researchers’ needs through working with the rich set of digital humanities projects and communities across the University of Oxford and their collaborators. This comes with 14 years’ experience of working with the TEI and my enthusiasm for promoting understanding of scholarly digital editing. 

Syd Bauman

Biographical Statement: 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 since 2013 on the Technical Council; thus he is 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 ODD task force, and of several SIGs; and of course, through teaching numerous TEI workshops and seminars.

Candidate Statement: Syd would like to see progress in several areas.

• ‘user-oriented’ efforts, e.g., creating customized documentation, recommendations, and customizations for particular constituencies or user groups; improving the look-and-feel (and flexibility) of custom documentation; and creating or commissioning reference implementations
• expanding the scope of the Guidelines, e.g. to include a module on correspondence and greater support for legal documents
• technical improvements to the Guidelines, e.g., improvements to ODD, changes in TEI pointers to better align TEI with the existing W3C XPointer framework, and further automated constraint checking, and improvements to the automated deprecation system.

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.

Lou Burnard

Biographical Statement: Since taking early retirement from Oxford University Computing Services in October 2010, I have been working as a private consultant offering TEI expertise and training, chiefly though not exclusively in France.

I have worked in the application of IT to literary and linguistic research for nearly forty years. I was a key player in such initiatives and projects as 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. I have been an active member of the TEI Council ever since it was formed, and am glad to be now standing for election to it rather than having been simply appointed.

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, now Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School, as well as other 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. I recently published an introductory tutorial called "What is the TEI?", freely available at http://books.openedition.org/oep/426.

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 response to changing community needs and priorities. At the same time, I think there is much of value in the body of experience now accumulated within  the TEI community, which needs to be passed on to the succeeding generations of Digital Humanities enthusiasts.

Hugh Cayless

Biographical Statement: Hugh Cayless has been working with TEI for over a decade. Most recently he has been the lead DH research developer at the Duke Collaboratory for Classics Computing (DC3). 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. His revision of the TEI XPointer schemes (section 16.2.4 of the TEI Guidelines) was part of the recent 2.7.0 release. 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 hope to continue to bring a technically and philologically grounded perspective to the Council. With the change in the maintenance structure of the TEI Stylesheets, I think it is very important that there be a core of XSLT “power users” on Council to manage the transition, and I will pledge to spend a percentage of my work time on handling bugs and feature requests for the stylesheets. In the past year, I have completed a revision of the TEI Pointers section of the Guidelines, and if re-elected, I will build upon this work to develop strategies for employing Linked Data in and around TEI. I believe that the TEI is entering a period of transition. On the one hand, there are more TEI projects and documents than ever; on the other, there is a widespread feeling that the technology TEI’s technical structure is based on is growing increasingly stale. The Council will have to take the lead in steering the TEI through this transition, and I believe I am well-qualified to help it do so.

Stefan Dumont

Biographical Statement: I studied history, politics and public law in Mainz (Germany) and Dijon (France). During my studies, I worked as a web programmer and designer for several research institutes. Since 2011, I am a research assistant at the TELOTA initiative at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BBAW). In my job I am developing for and consulting different research projects of the BBAW, especially projects concerning digital critical editions of different text types (letters, diaries, lectures etc.). The key technologies for my daily work are right now TEI-XML, XQuery, XSLT, and eXist-db. Furthermore, I use PHP, TYPO3, JQuery and HTML/CSS for web programming. Together with a colleague I developed - besides the TEI based schemata themselves - a working and publishing environment for TEI encoded digital scholarly editions called 'ediarum' which we presented at the TEI Members Meeting 2013 in Rome. ediarum is based on Oxygen XML Author (and customized frameworks), exist-db and ConTeXt. Recently, I also created the web service 'correspSearch' in cooperation with other members of the TEI Correspondence SIG. correspSearch is a web service with website and API which is based on the drafted correspDesc module (proposed by the TEI SIG Correspondence) and which offers the possibility to connect and search multiple scholarly letter editions at once. Besides, together with a colleague, I teach an XML, TEI, and XSLT course for students of editorial studies at the Freie Universität Berlin. I am also an editor of the DH web magazine digiversity.

Candidate Statement: I would like to support the TEI and its community in the council from the perspective of "applied TEI", i.e. I am especially interested in questions of applicability, usability, and processability of TEI encoding.

Bertrand Gaiffe

Biographical Statement: I am a research ingeneer in a lab called ATILF in France. My background is in computer science but I now work in a linguistic environment. In the lab, I am in charge of helping at producing resources in normalized formats.
Among others, there is one project I am particulary proud of, and this is the edition of the "city of God" in its first french translation (circa 1380) ; in this project, a team of 7 scholars encoded the edition in TEI, and I was in charge of producing the camera ready version (http://www.slatkine.com/fr/honore-champion-et-diffusions/25949-book-07532737-9782745327376.html).

Candidate Statement: I trust the very abstract good properties of the TEI such as enabling the sharing of data between researchers, having very well described resources, etc. However, I think we cannot convince new users without :

• proving that TEI also enables you to do what you did without it (e.g. paper editions)
• proving that simple things can be done in a simple TEI conformant way.

If elected, I expect to learn a lot and I hope I will be usefull. My institution (ATILF) approves my participation in the council (if elected of course).

Stefan Majewski

Biographical Statement: I'm currently project manager of the mass digitization project Austrian Books Online at Austrian National Library which is a collaborative digitization project between the Library and Google (i.e. a Google Books Library Project). In previous periods I worked as a developer for the TEI based textgrid project at Göttingen State and University Library, as researcher at Austrian Academy of Sciences and at the Vienna University based Vienna Oxford International Corpus of ELF (VOICE) where I was responsible for designing the TEI based encoding of the linguistic annotation developed by the research team. I have studied English linguistics, computer science and sociology and graduated in English Linguistics with a strong focus on humanities computing. During my studies, I started developing tools for corpus linguistics. Alongside of these tools these are some small tools for born digital text production as the Zotero TEI export plugin which I am currently maintaining.

My research and implementation work so far includes devising and monitoring encoding practices for linguistic research corpora, specifying TEI customizations in ODD and building XQuery based web-applications for humanities research. I worked as external advisor for various encoding projects and published on corpus building, lexicographic encoding with TEI and TEI for bibliographies.

Candidate Statement: I'm honoured to be nominated as a candidate for the TEI council which is from my perspective one of the driving forces in the TEI. Having a Digital Humanities background and working in the library context now, I want to put this to use and bring in the perspective of a library that recognises DH researchers as key stakeholders. Furthermore, I'd like to link in my current work in mass-digitisation so that material produced in the context of these large-scale projects -- such as the Google Books library projects -- might one day be used as a TEI encoded foundation for humanities research. I hope that the wide range of projects I worked on, from raw to very detailed encoding approaches, helps to make this a useful endeavour. Using TEI for actual everyday born-digital text editing is of particular interest to me.

I am certainly a standardisation, schema and data validation fan who loves to dig deep into the intricacies of standards and strives to find the best and most appealing solution for particular challenges or find possible ways for improvement. Nevertheless, I try to maintain a pragmatic perspective and to base my decisions also on what is actually possible to accomplish. I hope that I may contribute to the further development of ODD with this.

I also have substantial experience in related technologies, so I think from this side I can contribute to the council work as well as from the humanities research background. I am fluent in many XML related standards and technologies as schema languages like RelaxNG, Schematron, XSD or processing and query tools as XPath/XQuery, XProc or XML databases. My experience ranges from indexing large collections of TEI based material to rich annotation, both stand-off and in-line.

I will have some institutional support in the provision of time and partial funding for activities such as meetings.

Brian L. Pytlik Zillig

Biographical Statement: 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. I have received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. For the MONK Project, Stephen Ramsay, Martin Mueller, and I created a command-line file conversion application, Abbot, which transformed variant TEI/XML texts into a common interoperable format called TEI-Analytics. As principal investigator for the subsequent Mellon-funded Abbot (2.0) Project, I provided 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. 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 and Horace Traubel’s With Walt Whitman in Camden. 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 Indigo, a prototype, XSLT-based, 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 University of Nebraska-Lincoln 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 showed an invited animation piece, “Containment,” appearing in a show at the Tugboat Gallery in Lincoln, along with works by four other artists.

With Brett Barney, I have created two TEI- and Indigo-based data animation videos, “America” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHNQ0c5oiKM) and “Perfect Motion” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDbrKhgpBds). The former was shown at the TEI Conference in Rome in 2013, and the latter at the Digital Humanities 2014 Conference in Switzerland.

Candidate Statement: With Martin Mueller and Sebastian Rahtz I recently received a Mellon grant for the TEI Simple project. I am acutely interested in finding new ways of using TEI.

Raffaele Viglianti

Biographical Statement: I am a Research Programmer at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland. I work on research and development of TEI and Linked Open Data projects, including the Shelley Godwin Archive, one of the first projects to use the TEI’s new vocabulary for the transcription of primary sources. Before MITH, I was a Research Assistant at the Department of Digital Humanities (DDH) at King’s College London for 6 years, where I have been involved in the technical development of TEI-based projects, spanning several disciplines and dealing with different kinds of documents and texts. A notable example is the Jane Austen 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.

I am nearing completion of a PhD on scholarly digital editions of music, with a focus on romantic opera. 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 taking steps towards closing the gap between TEI and MEI. As a result, the latest and forthcoming releases of MEI are ODD-powered.

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. This resulted in the introduction of the notatedMusic element to the standard and a number of customizations to encode TEI with music notation. I regularly teach TEI and ODD as part of postgraduate courses, workshops, and summer schools.

Candidate Statement: I am very honoured to have been nominated to run for the TEI Technical Council. I would be excited to contribute to the council’s greatly successful activities. If elected, I would pursue an agenda that would promote the role of ODD as an essential component of good practice in TEI projects. I would push for the improvement of Roma and its promotion as the gateway to TEI.

I would bring to the council my personal experience 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”.

MITH, my home institution, is a strong supporter of the TEI. I will be able to attend council meetings and commit regular time to council work.

Jeffrey Witt

Biographical Statement: I am currently an assistant professor of philosophy at Loyola University Maryland. I completed my Ph.D. in philosophy at Boston College in 2012. My primary research is in the field of late-medieval philosophy and theology, an area where the lack of access to texts and editions remains a primary obstacle to progress.

I began working with TEI in 2010 as part of my effort to create an edition of a commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard by a medieval thinker named Peter Plaoul. That project, visible at http://petrusplaoul.org, continues to expand, and I am now managing over 1,200,000 TEI encoded Latin words and 16,000 linked coordinate images. As part of my work on the edition, I use and experiment heavily with the Critical Apparatus module. One of the ultimate goals of this edition is to produce a digital and print version of the text that can co-exist, having been produced from a single TEI source document. Accordingly, I continue to develop XSLT stylesheets that transform TEI texts into both HTML and LaTeX formats.

After attending a TEI Customization workshop in May 2013, I began developing a TEI customization schema, called the LombardPress schema. While still in a provisional form, the long-term aim is to support TEI editions of all medieval Sentences commentary editions (see http://lombardpress.org; http://bibucket.org/lombardpress). The Peter Plaoul text is just one of approximately 1,200 known Sentences commentaries. This schema is now at working governing other Sentences commentary editions, such as the Adam Wodeham edition (http://adamwodeham.org). My ultimate hope is that TEI transcriptions of this genre of medieval text will become the norm and standard. I am also experimenting with harvesting RDF metadata from these TEI documents to create a robust metadata archive about the entire Sentences commentary tradition.

Candidate Statement: I would love to bring to the council my experience of working with Latin medieval manuscripts, of using the Critical Apparatus module, and of developing stylesheets aimed at innovative digital and print presentations of a critical text.

If elected, I would especially like to support the work of the Critical Apparatus SIG. I would like to continue developing the module in ways that allow editors the flexibility to continue marking variants in traditional ways and to respond to new ideas about what a critical edition is or could be.

Secondly, as LinkedData continues to become a more powerful part of the web, I would like to be thinking about ways to facilitate data extraction from TEI documents that would allow us to publish RDF metadata about our encoded documents in useful and innovative ways.

Finally, I would like to contribute to the development and documentation of best practices with respect to moving TEI documents to print, especially in those cases that require a critical apparatus. I believe that print editions have an important future, and I would like to think about ways that TEI documents can seamlessly remain the single source document behind both print and digital editions.