In 2021, TEI Members will hold an election to fill 6 open positions on the TEI Technical Council (4 for 3-year terms, 2 for a 1-year term) and 2 positions on the TEI Board of Directors (3-year terms).
Voting will be conducted via the OpaVote website, which uses the open-source balloting software OpenSTV for tabulation. OpenSTV is a widely used open-source Single Transferable Vote program.
TEI Member voters, identified by email address, will receive a URL at which to cast their ballots. Upon closing of the election, all voters who cast a vote will be sent an email with a link to the results of the election, from which it is also possible to download the actual final ballots for verification. Individual members may vote in the TEI Technical Council elections. The nominated representative of institutions with membership may vote for both the TEI Board and TEI Technical Council.
Voting will open in a few days.
Voting closes on October 22, 2021 at 23:59 Hawaii-Aleutian Standard Time (HAST) as it offers the latest global midnight.
I would like to join the TEI Technical Council to help make the TEI more accessible to newcomers. I am strongly interested in the field of computer science education and pedagogy and I have taught XML, TEI, XPath, XQuery and related tools and technologies for many years in both formal and informal settings. In an era where XML-based standards seem to be losing relevance, I hope to find ways to make the TEI Guidelines speak more directly to the needs of new generations of students and scholars. In practical terms, this means showcasing the unique strengths of the TEI while emphasizing its interoperablibility with other standards and toolsets in the fields of librarianship, publishing, and the digital humanities.
I am the Associate University Librarian for Research and Digital Strategy at the Vanderbilt University Library, where I also hold a secondary appointment as Professor of Religious Studies in the College of Arts & Science. From 2018 to 2020, I was also an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in the Vanderbilt University School of Engineering.
I have worked on TEI-centered projects for more than twenty years, ranging from the Digital Karl Barth Library at Princeton Theological Seminary to Srophe-based apps at Vanderbilt University. In 2014, I served as the project director of the NEH-supported XQuery Summer Institute. In 2020, I co-authored XQuery for Humanists with Joe Wicentowski.
If I am re-elected to the TEI Technical Council, I hope to continue work on the Guidelines to serve diverse communities and path-breaking textual scholarship. I am dedicated to seeing good ideas from the worldwide TEI community find their way into the Guidelines, and I am particularly proud of my ongoing work negotiating between Council and community members to introduce new elements to the Header and Core chapters. Serving on Council requires deliberate thought and care as we introduce changes mindful of the need to support a stable and reliable infrastructure for our community. I am eager to continue this important work as a maturing voice and mentor to new Council members.
My experience with the XML stack (including Relax NG, XSLT, XQuery, Schematron) shapes my teaching and engagement with the TEI on Council. I look for opportunities in Digital Humanities venues to teach XPath as a vital “on ramp” for learning to process and develop projects with the TEI. This experience also helps me to contribute to the XSLT Stylesheets working group on the TEI Council. Though the working group is entirely voluntary, we need every one of us together at the meetings to help us decipher and rewrite an old and obscure codebase that increasingly requires our attention to repair. The delicate archaeology of this work is a great challenge, to try to decipher a codebase written in the early years of XSLT, and to help each other to identify what needs to persist and what needs to change.
Council work thrives on lively debate, and as a Council member I am rarely quiet. I strive to keep our conversations lively and productive, to help connect related issues, to educate and encourage new Council members, and to raise questions when things don’t add up. I am dedicated to the work of the TEI that invites new users to navigate, learn from, and intelligently adapt the many options that the TEI Guidelines offer, and I am eager as ever to lend my voice to Council discussion and documentation in the ongoing evolution of our Guidelines. You will find me on the TEI listserv, on Github tickets, and in person, engaged in conversation to continue the important work we need to do together.
My positions at Penn State University and the University of Pittsburgh have provided me strong institutional support for my work with TEI to educate students and colleagues, and to conduct collaborative research. Since July 2020, I am now Professor of Digital Humanities and Program Chair of Digital Media, Arts, and Technology at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College where I teach markup languages, digital scholarly editing, text analysis, and web project development. Through spring 2020, I taught “coding courses” and literature surveys at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg as Associate Professor of English and director of a Center for Digital Studies.
My experience with TEI runs broad and deep, grounded in 18th- and 19th-century literary research. I have experimented with TEI to locate 18th-century records of longitude and latitude in Pacific voyage publications, to distinguish references to mappable and mythical places across verse stanzas and paratext notes of epic poems, and (with help from Stacey Triplette and Helena Bermúdez Sabel) to capture how much a 19th-century English translation condensed and altered a sixteenth-century Spanish text. I founded the Digital Mitford project to edit in TEI the 19th-century manuscript letters of Mary Russell Mitford together with her published poetry, drama, and prose fiction, and to develop an extensive prosopography from these documents to explore as a network. The Digital Mitford project engages researchers and students from multiple universities, and supports coding camps and workshops to orient new scholarly editors and project designers to work with the TEI. I lead collation work on a Variorum edition of Frankenstein in collaboration with Raffaele Viglianti and the Shelley-Godwin Archive, and I am assisting technologically with Paul Schacht’s Digital Thoreau project. My development site at https://newtfire.org shares my teaching materials, projects, and ongoing adventures with markup technologies.
The collective knowledge and expertise represented by the TEI community has been – and continues to be – very important for my work as a digital editor and textual scholar. During my years in training I have resorted numerous times to the Guidelines and to the abundance of educational material on text encoding provided by the TEI (in fact, I still do). The fact that these resources are freely available is no small thing and speaks for the devotion and enthusiasm of the community members. Incidentally, I truly enjoy reading (old) reports of the working groups and the discussions on the TEI List: these documents offer valuable insight into the scholarly discussions and decision-making process around text encoding. They illustrate that the TEI is made by and for scholars, research software engineers, and markup enthusiasts at large.
It would be a great honour and pleasure to be able to contribute to the community. If elected to the TEI Technical Council, I will devote myself to doing the work necessary to maintain them as well as to keep them up-to-date with current developments. I would be happy to collaborate with the other Council members, to be able to work in an international team, and to learn from each other’s backgrounds and expertise. Considering my background in digital scholarly editing of modern manuscripts, and my experience with the development of a new, experimental graph data model for complex documents (the Text-as-Graph hypergraph model), I would like to examine the possibilities of setting up a working group or a special interest group related to graph technologies for text encoding. Furthermore, I would like to assist with the development of educational material, for I consider the TEI’s work on education as one of its most important tasks. I would also like to reevaluate the encoding guidelines for manuscript description from a genetic point of view (cf. the Encoding Model for Genetic Editions by Lou Burnard et al., 2010), and potentially update them where needed. And finally, I would simply be happy to learn to work on “the other side” of the TEI.
Currently, I work as a researcher at the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands, part of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. I specialise in digital scholarly editing and computational textual scholarship, with a focus on modern manuscripts and genetic criticism. I completed my doctoral research at the Centre for Manuscript Genetics (2017), during which I studied the role of the scholarly editor in the digital environment. During this period, I was fortunate enough to be an Early Career Research Fellow in the Marie Sklodowska-Curie funded network DiXiT (2013–2017). Within this network, I received advanced training in manuscript studies, text modeling, and XML technologies for text analysis, publishing, and processing. Finally, the DiXiT network introduced me to leading scholars within the TEI, such as Martina Scholger, Elena Pierazzo, Magdalena Turska, and James Cummings among many others, who showed me the great value of this community.
I believe one of the greatest strengths of the TEI Technical Council is the diversity of viewpoints brought together to weigh in on changes and additions to the Guidelines. During the past two years, my goal in serving on the council has been to aim for clarity and accessibility in language used in the Guidelines. I am deeply interested in making the Guidelines approachable for users with a wide range of technical abilities, and recognize that the Guidelines are often the first introduction to descriptive encoding for many humanists. If reelected, I hope to pursue further work on encodings useful to the module addressing social media, continue my war on behalf of correct comma usage, argue for diverse and clear examples, and learn more about the processing side of TEI.
Meaghan J. Brown is the Managing Editor of Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America. She holds a PhD in the History of Text Technologies from Florida State University and an MSIS from the University of Texas at Austin. She has worked with TEI for over a decade, beginning as an encoder on the Cambridge Ben Jonson in graduate school. She served as project manager for the TEI-encoded A Digital Anthology of Early Modern English Drama and as Digital Production Editor at the Folger Shakespeare Library. She is currently a program officer in the Research Division of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
I am honoured to have been nominated by a current member of the TEI-C.
I run the Quill Project at the University of Oxford, which produces digital editions of negotiated texts and the discussions that produce them. This category of text includes many written constitutions, pieces legislation, and international treaties. As part of this work we make extensive use of Operational Transformation (OT) algorithms for collaborative editing. I have active research interests in the implementation of algorithms for XML/TEI documents that would make them compatible with OT systems, and which (if they can be made to work) would have broad application. These are currently described in theory by several academic papers over the last 20 years, but never seem to have been implemented in practice, meaning that for the moment robust (but necessarily limited and frustrating) intermediate formats are required.
I am interested in the creation of workflows that speed documentary editing processes and in the automatic conversion of TEI to and from other formats for the purpose of editing and analysis. I am interested in extending the TEI specification to capture the features of the specific kinds of material that we encounter during our work on negotiations and legislative histories.
I believe strongly in active efforts to build inclusive communities and create opportunities for wider communities to become involved both as consumers and creators of digital scholarship. The project that I run has now involved dozens of first-generation students in detailed archival and documentary editing work -- work that has been cited in courts in the United States and used in education.
At a technical level, I will work for the maintenance of a robust infrastructure for the TEI as well as careful review of the evolution of the (now extremely mature) standard to meet new needs. Since serving a one-year term on the Technical Council in 2020, I have remained actively involved in an informal group developing the Stylesheets part of the guidelines, and have served as the release manager for one major and one minor release.
I am a Senior Research Fellow at Pembroke College, and the director of the Quill Project (www.quill.pmb.ox.ac.uk). I studied Ancient and Modern History at University College, where I stayed to read for an MPhil in Greek and Roman history and then a doctorate (with Miriam Griffin) on the use of the Classics by Thomas Jefferson's generation of American Politicians. I continue to have strong research interests in the reception of classical history and texts in the modern world, and in the development of modern political thought.
More recently, I have been most interested in developing digital tools to support the work of scholarship in the humanities. These days I am as likely to spend time programming computers as I am to be writing prose. I am also keen to encourage undergraduates to become involved in historical research projects, and am interested in the way that scholarship in the humanities can learn from the collaborative, often multi-institutional, models that are more common in the sciences. Our current research projects would be impossible without the contribution of many undergraduates, both from within the University of Oxford and those studying in institutions thousands of miles away, including open-enrolment institutions.
I am an active contributor to outreach schemes that encourage students from non-traditional backgrounds to apply to highly selective universities at both undergraduate and graduate level.
As an active TEI user, I would like to dedicate my time and energy to three main issues: 1. further development of TEI Guidelines for digital text editions (critical and diplomatic), encoding of text reuse and convergencies, as well as reflection on the methodology of text editions in the digital era and their impact on research; 2. as a native Russian speaker I would also like to contribute to the internationalization and dissemination of TEI projects in other languages; 3. as a partner of the project ENCODE I would be interested in exploring the opportunities and development of TEI training modules, the required and related digital competencies in the domain of TEI projects.
I am a postdoctoral researcher at Universität Hamburg, Germany, currently working on two projects Beta meṣāḥǝft (digital research environment for the written culture of Ethiopia and Eritrea, a long-term project funded within the framework of the Academies' Programme (coordinated by the Union of the German Academies of Sciences and Humanities)) and ENCODE (Bridging the
The TEI has been central to my work since the early stages of my doctoral dissertation. Having dealt with many other standards in different contexts, the TEI stands out for the robustness, vigour and openness of the community behind it. For that reason, I think the focus of development should be on improving and facilitating the access, use and outreach for its community. As a member of the Technical Council, I would be most interested in supporting and expanding open software and initiatives that make editing, sharing and publishing easier and more accessible.
I also think the current efforts for internationalisation should continue to be encouraged and expanded. The translation of the guidelines and related materials would facilitate the adoption and use of the TEI in new regions. At the same time, projects that deal with currently under-represented languages should be promoted. I hope my experiences of learning, teaching and using the TEI guidelines in many different institutions and contexts will offer a valuable perspective to the Technical Council.
I am a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Heidelberg (Germany). My background is in medieval studies and textual criticism. I teach an introductory course on digital editing at the University of Heidelberg and a course on data visualization at UCES (Argentina). My current projects focus on the analysis of pre-modern texts and artefacts. I am using the TEI guidelines to encode medieval texts as well as diagrams of textual traditions. Areas of particular interest to me are the role of the TEI in the context of OCR and HTR technologies, the interplay between TEI and RDF, as well as visualization and publication of texts with complex encoding.
For years we have been working on the extraction of raw text from scans of books or manuscripts, which has lead me to the conclusion that we now need to address the question of the automatic annotation of documents into TEI. With the efficiency of tools like GROBID (https://github.com/MedKhem/grobid-dictionaries) or powerful HTR engines offering layout analysis like Kraken (https://github.com/mittagessen/kraken) we can predict that, in a very near future, one of the main need of both researchers and GLAMs will be the automatic structuring digitised documents -- a need that we have to anticipate.
Such a work will involve the design of technical recommendations for relevant TEI encodings, their interoperability with controlled vocabularies describing the layout such as segmOnto (https://github.com/SegmOnto/examples) or the Vocabulaire international de la codicologie - SKOS (http://gams.uni-graz.at/archive/objects/o:voccod/methods/sdef:SKOS/get), but also the distribution of TEI encoded texts, for instance with DTS (https://distributed-text-services.github.io) or RDF. The collaboration between academics on the one hand, and libraries or museums on the other hand, triggers important problems regarding the interoperability of data produced data locally and their distribution within larger portals or digital collections offered by national or university libraries.
Appart from this, I would like too work on pedagogy and TEI, especially about good practices. Too many projects see the TEI as simple labels: modelling and documenting the encoding is still not the norm, which shows a lack of understanding of the guidelines, and a misunderstanding of the TEI.
Finally, I would like to expand the work on encoding entry-based documents such as dictionaries, but also phone directories, exhibition or sale catalogues, for which the TEI still do not offer relevant solutions.
I am a medievalist by training, who received is PhD at the university of Amsterdam in latin philology. After a post-doc in Neuchâtel (Switzerland), I now work at the university of Geneva as a Maître assistant in humanités numériques (digital humanities). There, I focus on digital editions, especially those of 17th c. French texts, for which I develop tools for extracting, processing and publishing textual and visual information. TEI is a central part of my research for two of my projects: E-ditiones, about modern sources (https://github.com/e-ditiones, https://e-ditiones.huma-num.fr/), and Katabase about history of manuscripts (https://github.com/katabase/, https://katabase.huma-num.fr/). I regularly participate to the TEI annual conference (Tokyo, Graz…). I have been teaching TEI for several years in various countries (Switzerland, France, Italy), during academic semesters and intensive classes, for beginners and advanced researchers.
I am honored to have been nominated as a candidate for the TEI Technical Council. I am standing for election because I wish to contribute to the development of a standard that frames my daily work and shapes my scholarly thinking.
The topics that I am most interested in and that I will be able to provide expertise on are modern and experimental literature, manuscripts and archives of contemporary writers, and literary text genesis. When working on the continuous improvement of the Guidelines, I will make sure that these areas are considered. I wish to contribute to the optimization of the Guidelines for application to these fields.
In addition, I can contribute to two meta-aspects that I believe to be of great importance: the encoding of gender, long-term data sustainability, and legal and licensing issues. As a member of the Technical Council, I will make sure that these aspects are properly acknowledged and tended to.
If elected, I will put particular focus on community building and user involvement activities. I understand the workload that service on the Technical Council means and I am prepared to take this on. I believe my current employment as a postdoc researcher in a digital edition project is a good position for this commitment. I hope to receive the possibility to give back to this amazing community some of the inspiration and orientation that it has given me.
I am a postdoc researcher at the German Literature Archive Marbach, where I work on a digital edition of the notebooks of the Austrian Nobel laureate Peter Handke. I hold a PhD in German literature from the University of Vienna, which I completed with a thesis on multilingualism in Handke’s works for the stage.
Before joining my current edition project, I worked as a researcher for the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage (ACDH-CH) in Vienna for several years. After co-organizing the 2016 TEI conference in Vienna as a member of this institute, I became deeply involved in the ACDH-CH’s work with the TEI. In this context, I developed numerous smaller TEI projects and contributed to the development of the TEI data models of larger ones. I am happy about my continuing cooperation and exchange with the ACDH-CH and its members.
In addition to my work with the TEI, I contributed to the development of the national (Austrian) and international manifestations of the research infrastructures CLARIN and DARIAH. I serve as co-chair in DARIAH’s working group ELDAH (Ethics and Legality in Digital Arts and Humanities) and as vice-chair of the CLARIN Legal and Ethical Issues Committee (CLIC). My teaching at the University of Vienna also focuses on legal aspects of digital humanities research as well as on research data management.
The TEI – both its guidelines and community – has proven its value for digital editions, digital lexicography and related fields. The University and State Library Darmstadt (ULB) has chosen to use the TEI as its basic data model for all digital texts – which includes transforming existing open source material to TEI and supporting the use of the TEI for new journals.
This means approaching new user communities which have up to now not had any contact with the TEI – or even semantic text markup in general – and also new types of contents. I want to contribute our experiences with this development as I hope these can help to widen the scope for the TEI as a universal standard for all kinds of texts.
Over the past 10 years, I have written numerous scripts to convert sources to TEI and from TEI to other formats, as well as various tools for digital editions. I would like to support the ongoing work on the TEI’s existing tools and hope that my experience may prove helpful.
One major line of work I have been following is producing TEI files as the result of OCR processes. I believe that (semi)automatic production of texts is of major importance for preserving the text-based cultural heritage.
Both through various scholarly edition projects and introducing students and researchers to the TEI, I have encountered questions on how to interpret and mak use of the guidelines. I want to bring these experiences into the council in the hope that we can use these to improve the guidelines and their translation into other languages.
By bringing my experience from both teaching and working on more than 15 projects, I want to contribute the ideas and problems of different “user roles” to the discussion. I believe that attention to detail, different points of view and sometimes challenging existing notions (such as my question, “What is a paragraph, really?”) helps to reach solid conclusions in a discussion and improve the wording for a description in the guidelines.
Of course, I will contribute time to the day-to-day work, such as the github issues and other necessary tasks. The library supports me in this as I can do this as part of my job there.
I am head of the recently established Centre for Digital Editions (ZEiD) at the State and University Library in Darmstadt (ULB). Not only focused on digital editions in the strictest sense, the centre’s job is the transformation of analogue texts into the digital world. Projects include the “Darmstädter Tagblatt”, a local newspaper from 1738–1986, the edition of European religious peace treaties (EuReD), and a project aiming at upporting print-based publishers to move towards open access based workflows while making 700 titles available as TEI.
The library will support my work in the Council, if elected, and considers it part of its task to provide researchers, students and the general public with free and easy access toi information.
I also work at the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage (ACDH-CH) at the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW). Among others, I have been involved in the “Digitarium” project OCR’ing the Wiener Zeitung from its first issue in 1704.
Previous jobs include several editions at the Duke Augustus Library (HAB) in Wolfenbüttel.
As a researcher of modern and comparative literature, with a strong background in IT, I've focused on using TEI for modeling, capturing, and analyzing semantic and pragmatic information in literary texts. Far more than structural features, semantics and cultural information are of great interest to literary scholars. Computational semantic analysis of literary writing challenges us to digitally model and process relations of cultural meaning that often appear ambiguous and highly entangled. In order to capture multilevel non-hierarchical semantic relations in literary texts, for the last at least ten years my attention has been concentrated on the following:
I intend to use the knowledge gained over the years for the benefit of the community by contributing either to resolve markup ambiguity where necessary and to support multi-hierarchical XML solutions (internal and external standoff) or to provide expertise (samples, documentation) for parsing TEI/XML with Python 3.7/9, as well as creative ideas on developing and designing the absent literary-focused ontology by utilizing the available TEI tagset.
Understanding how intensive the work of the members can be, Technical council elections is the perfect opportunity for me to get actively, creatively, and collaboratively involved in the community while allowing me to contribute my technical knowledge by sharing it and further improving it.
I am a Ph.D. candidate working also as a researcher in two projects, as a research team coordinator, as well as as a teaching assistant.
As a Ph.D. candidate of 19th century Greek Literature I combine NLP methods to examine the literary consistency of a prose fiction corpus, as well as to identify the narrative patterns and the themes that prevail within it.
As a researcher, I work as an encoding designer and researcher team manager in the research and entrepreneurial project "ECARLE" (Exploitation of Cultural Assets with computer-assisted Recognition, Labeling, and meta-data Enrichment) which aims at the development of a SaaS tool that produces and processes TEI/XML files automatically. At the same time, I work as a research fellow on a project focused on the computational semantic analysis of literary corpus aiming to map how the reading interests and the national sentiment are mirrored in 19th-century Greek Literature.
Since 2015 I coordinate the DigiNes research group focused on Digital Literary Studies, Digital Scholarly Publishing, and Literary Text Mining (the new webpage is under construction). My teaching portfolio is centered on TEI related to scholarly publishing and literary analysis, as well as on computational literary analysis and Digital Humanities in Libraries. I also hold a BA in Modern Greek Literature and a MA in General and Comparative Literature, while I have certified knowledge of data analysis and Python programming.
I have served three consecutive terms on the TEI Technical Council, and had the honor of acting as its Chair since 2018. In addition to that, I have been part of the Infrastructure Group and the TEI Working Group on Internationalization. I would be delighted to continue my work for the Council for another term.
My main interests are:
I am a senior scientist at the Centre for Information Modelling – Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities at the University of Graz. I completed my PhD in Digital Humanities in 2018. My research field is digital scholarly editing and the application of digital methods and semantic technologies to humanities’ source material, and the application of Distant Reading methods to multilingual historical literary corpora encoded in TEI.
In addition to teaching text encoding with XML/TEI, processing XML data and digital scholarly editing for humanities students, I have been teaching at pertinent summer schools and workshops (e.g. DH Oxford Summer School, ADHO DH 2018 in Mexico City, IDE Schools) and co-organized schools on scholarly editing, TEI, and sentiment analysis.
Over the past years, I have contributed to the conceptual design, development and implementation of numerous cooperative research projects in the field of digital humanities, employing TEI and X-Technologies (see: http://gams.uni-graz.at). Since 2014, I have been a member of the Institute for Documentology and Scholarly Editing (IDE), and since 2015, I have had the honor to serve on the TEI Technical Council with the full support of my department.
If elected, I would like to bring my expertise to enhance the TEI Guidelines where there are still gaps and open questions to help ensure their long-term sustainability as well as adaptability to newly emerging fields of research. The encoding of correspondence material and the linking and interchange between correspondence projects will not be my only focus as I am interested in all sorts of texts, manuscripts and documents, primary sources and their materiality, their encoding and digital representation. Questions of open access, community orientation and collaboration are basic to my work.
As I am always eager to learn (and I know that there will be a lot to learn), I will be happy to devote time and energy to contribute to the further development and dissemination of the TEI, to improve the documentation, to deal with feature requests and reported issues and to keep the discussions and the communication within the community lively. I have the full support of my home institution as I stand for election and would feel honoured to be able to participate in the TEI Technical Council’s work and learn from experienced colleagues.
I have been involved with the TEI since 2011 and have been co-convener of the Correspondence SIG since 2014. My interest in digital editions of correspondence material led me to working on a proposal for encoding correspondence metadata with Peter Stadler and Marcel Illetschko. The resulting model and elements ( My main affiliation is the Theodor Fontane Archive at Potsdam University Germany where I work as a research associate on managing and publishing cultural heritage data and digital/archival collections. I contributed to the development of the digital edition “Letters and texts. Intellectual Berlin around 1800” for which I also transcribed, encoded and edited manuscripts and correspondence material. After finishing my studies in German Literature and English Literature in Berlin, I received my PhD from Humboldt University Berlin with a study on the history of philology in the 19th century.
To me, the TEI standard is already quite mature, so a great deal of work (of the TEI Council) lies in maintaining this standard through continuous work on improving the documentation, fixing bugs in the specification, and dissemination. Of course, a scholarly standard such as the TEI is never 'done', and a lot of tools and stylesheets surrounding this standard are in the need of updates and new features. I believe I have the relevant skills (philological pedantry, command-line-savvy, TEI and XSLT fluency, tamer of version control systems) for playing an active role in the TEI Council. In the last years, I already pushed the development of the TEI infrastructure, hosting several TEI related services such as Roma and Oxgarage at Paderborn University.
I would like to continue this work on the TEI Stylesheets as well as the TEI infrastructure (including documentation!) and try to mentor new Council members to make their own path in the TEI ecosystem.
I am involved with the TEI since 2008 and have initiated and convened the Correspondence SIG until 2016. Since then I advised and worked on several scholarly projects dealing with correspondence material. Furthermore, I have been regularly teaching TEI courses at Paderborn University (Germany), during our annual Edirom Summer School, and at the Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School. Since 2014 I've been an elected member of the TEI Council.
My daily work at the Carl-Maria-von-Weber-Gesamtausgabe focuses on the digital edition of Weber's letters, diaries and writings. This covers the whole range from text encoding and ODD schema development to development and deployment of web applications for publishing this digital edition.
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 and music. Additionally, my department runs several other projects through which I am in close connection with the development of the MEI standard.
I am honoured to stand for election to the TEI Technical Council. I have been a user of the TEI for the better part of the last decade and I have benefited immeasurably not only from the tools, skills, and methods that comprise the TEI ecosystem, but also from the expertise and generosity of the scholars that comprise the community. In standing for election to the TEI Technical Council, I hope to formalize my commitment to the TEI and continue in the tradition of openness and collaboration that has shaped my academic and professional career. Alongside my technical expertise and training in XML technologies and front-end web development, I aim to contribute to the Council my experience as a researcher of racialized, diasporic, and Indigenous literatures to the continued development of the guidelines. I am committed to encouraging the complex and difficult questions that arise from engaging multiple communities regarding the nature of text, text encoding, and preservation and I possess the technical skills to assist in providing robust and sustainable approaches that reflect the array of users, researchers, and texts that make up the TEI community.
As an “emerging” scholar, I am attentive to the significant scholarly benefits that arise from the close and careful commitment to the particulars of text fostered by the TEI Guidelines as well as the potential barriers—technical, infrastructural, and methodological—that can make it difficult for communities to see how the TEI can be used in their own projects. If elected, I aim to work on improving the overall accessibility of the TEI Guidelines to make finding and searching for information easier and more intuitive. I also aim to make visible the many methods available for contributing to the development of the TEI and encourage potential contributors to bring their expertise to bear on the Guidelines regardless of technical expertise, academic position, or institutional affiliation. In particular, the areas of improvement that I would like to address in order to further these goals are:
I am currently the User Interface Developer for the Digital Humanities Innovation Lab at Simon Fraser University. In this role, I specialize in front-end web development, user interface design, and client-side technologies as well as textual encoding and TEI training and development; most recently, I have been working on creating TEI workflows within GitHub, leveraging its various integrations to create build processes—validation, transformation, and deployment—for developing static project websites from TEI collections.
In many ways, TEI was a gateway technology: I was hired as a research assistant for The Map of Early Modern London in 2014 and though I had no programming experience, I was given the opportunity to learn XPath, XSLT, and TEI project development under the mentorship of Martin Holmes and Janelle Jenstad and was promoted to Junior Programmer in 2015. Following this opportunity, I voraciously took to all things DH and I have since worked as a developer, both as an independent contractor and within academic labs, for numerous small, medium, and large-scale TEI projects, including Linked Early Modern Drama Online, Landscapes of Injustice, and The Winnifred Eaton Archive. Through these projects, I gained expertise in the suite of technologies required to develop a project across its entire lifecycle, from developing customized schemata in ODD and processing ODDs into RelaxNG and Schematron, creating encoding frameworks for use in oXygen XML editor, writing various build scripts in Ant and Bash, and building project front-ends in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Stemming from my work as part of the Endings project, I co-authored two software packages: a Diagnostics toolkit for ensuring referential integrity across TEI collections and staticSearch, a serverless search engine for any XHTML document collection. I have also been fortunate to co-author multiple presentations for TEI conferences and articles that discuss TEI project development. I regularly give workshops and guest lectures on text encoding, TEI, digital editions, and minimal computing and I currently serve on the TEI By Example’s International Advisory Board.
I hold an MA in English Literature from the University of British Columbia and a BA Honours in English Literature and Gender Studies from the University of Victoria. My research focused primarily on diasporic and Indigenous literatures, particularly Asian American and Asian Canadian literature across the twentieth century, and considered texts with respect to a variety of theoretical paradigms (textual theory, posthumanism, affect theory, and queer theory).
My main interest lies in workflows and best practices for encoding and publishing scholarly editions of historical sources. After incorporation of the TEI Processing Model into the TEI Guidelines I have been following up on its principles of empowerment of the editors, sustainability and interoperability in the development on the TEI Publisher - an open source platform for publishing TEI and other XML corpora, now working on version 8. Recently my work concentrates on investigating efficient and future proof, TEI-based models for large, heterogeneous TEI corpora, scaling up from a single edition to entire “networks” of projects. The goal is to seamlessly combine various research perspectives of individual projects within the broader institutional environment for ease of access, effective maintenance, long-term availability and sustainability without compromises regarding the scholarly content. I feel with my experience as a technical editor for a number of diverse editorial projects, at the University of Warsaw, University of Oxford, École Pratique des Hautes Études and elsewhere, privileged to work with many of the best scholars and TEI practitioners around the world, and with thorough background in both relational and XML databases, I am in a good position to have a critical overview of the TEI and contribute to its development.
I have studied Computer Science at the University of Mining and Metallurgy in Cracow, Poland and for many years worked as a freelance software developer and IT consultant. I was always interested in how IT can aid humanities research and assisted with various projects at the University of Warsaw until finally coming into TEI fold with the online edition of a vast 16th-century collection of Ioannes Dantiscus’ correspondence. In 2014 I have become a Marie Curie fellow of Digital Scholarly Editions ITN (DiXiT) at the University of Oxford IT Services, working primarily on the TEI Simple project, in particular the TEI Processing Model - an abstract layer to transform XML files into a number of output formats. After my fellowship has ended I moved to eXist Solutions / JinnTec where majority of my work is dedicated to the development of the TEI Publisher and creation of sustainable digital editions based on TEI-encoded sources as well as development of the eXist-db, native XML database underlying numerous DH projects.
Since 2015 I am a member of the TEI Technical Council and TAPAS Advisory Board. I also play an important role in the e-editiones society, supporting other members of the community, organising popular online events and coordinating work on community best practice guidelines. I am an active member of the wider TEI community, taking part in the ongoing discussion through usual communication channels (TEI-L, TEI Publisher and e-editiones Slack channels), extensively engaging in teaching and outreach events across Europe and regularly serving as a reviewer and program committee member for TEI Members Meetings.
I would like to serve the TEI as a "bridge", not only between traditions and/or languages of the East and the West, but also between different communities that work toward the digitalization of the knowledge. As both of an East Asian student and a Unicode contributor, I have a sense that those aspects are somewhat intertwined; a technical solution always stems from the complex reality each community faces, and is interdependent with multiple layers it inherently embraces. In order to thrive in an ecosystem of technologies, one needs to communicate and exchange wisdom and insight with adjacent niches. In this way, I am interested to expand TEI's possibility by importing useful mechanisms into the Guidelines, and tackle incompatibility if any.
I would commit myself to the advancement of support of scripts, languages, and disciplines from East Asian, Indic, and other regional academic spheres in the TEI Guidelines. I would find the way through discussion and coordination with the Initiative's working groups, SIGs, as well as other experts and communities, local or technical, for picking up and fulfilling each own basic requirements in the Guidelines. The Guidelines are already a vast accumulation of the common assets by past and current great contributors. I am ready to help, as a member familiar with the standard drafting process, to enrich it to be even more universal by incorporating and harmonizing with previously unaccounted fields.
Currently a Junior Fellow at the International Institute for Digital Humanities, as well as a PhD student in Library and Information Sciences at the University of Tokyo, with a master's degree in Linguistics. My research interests are around written languages, informatics of scripts, and writing system studies, recently focusing on medieval Han variant characters (practiced in China, Korea, and Japan). Involved for more than five years in the SAT project (SAT Daizōkyō Text Database Committee), mainly working on: digitalization of the Taisho Tripitaka (compilation of Chinese Buddhist scriptures); research of medieval character dictionaries; and participation and contribution as a working member to the expansion of character set of ISO/IEC 10646 (Universal coded character set) and the Unicode Standard. Previously worked as a Technical Assistant in the Itelmen dictionary project at Chiba University. Also a freelance translator and a localization engineer mainly in the field of video games.
Recent academic activities:
"Design of Document Repository Management System Based on Graph Database" (2018; http://id.nii.ac.jp/1001/00187424/; awarded IPSJ SIG Computers and the Humanities Student Award), "What Are We Calling 'Latin Script'? Name and Reality in the Grammatological Terminology" (2019; https://doi.org/10.36824/2018-graf-wang), "慧琳撰『一切経音義』の符号化をめぐって [On the Encoding of Huilin's Yiqiejing Yinyi]" (2019; http://repository.bungaku-report.com/htdocs/?action=repository_uri&item_id=55)
Recent standardization activities:
To ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 2/WG 2/IRG: "Proposal for IRG Working Set 2017 from SAT" (2017; drafted for SAT; in https://appsrv.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/~irg/irg/irg49/IRG49.htm), "Suggestion to improve the workflow of IRG" (2021; drafted for SAT; https://appsrv.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/~irg/irg/irg56/IRGN2467SATSuggestionWorkflow.pdf), "SAT submission to IRG Working Collection 2021" (2021; drafted for SAT; in https://appsrv.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/~irg/irg/irg56/IRG56.htm)
To Unicode Technical Committee: "On Encoding Policy of Gongche Notations and Upcoming Para-ideographs" (2019; https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2019/19346-gongche-policy.pdf), "Proposal to Encode 20 Additional Kanbun Marks" (2021; https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2021/21082-kanbun-add.pdf)
Thank you for the opportunity to stand for election. I welcome the possibility of playing a larger role in this open and welcoming community. I have an interest in working with Special Interest Groups such as the Correspondence and Periodicals SIGS. I also am interested in ensuring that the Guidelines are user-friendly and inclusive in languages, materials, and people. I come in with no preconceived ideas of specific tasks I would like to take on, only with a general enthusiasm for TEI and a willingness to help out where necessary.
I am the Metadata Encoding Specialist in the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. I have been encoding documents according to the Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines since beginning work on the Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition (https://lewisandclarkjournals.unl.edu/) in 2003. Other notable TEI projects that I have contributed to include O Say Can You See: Early Washington, D.C., Law & Family (https://earlywashingtondc.org/); Cartas a la familia: De la migración de Jesusita a Jane (https://familyletters.unl.edu/); The William F. Cody Archive (https://codyarchive.org/); and the newly relaunched Charles W. Chesnutt Archive (https://chesnuttarchive.org/). In addition to TEI, I have worked extensively with Dublin Core, VRA Core, and METS/ALTO.
I am very happy to stand for re-election to the TEI Consortium’s Board. I have continuously been involved with the TEI as both a user and volunteer for over twenty years. I’ve served as an elected member of the TEI Technical Council from 2005, including a period as its chair, and was elected to the TEI-C Board in 2019. My decision to move from the Council to the Board was prompted by a desire to make space for more diverse voices at the cutting edge of TEI work. I do still continue, as any member of the community may, to contribute to TEI development via the GitHub site. My previous post at the University of Oxford meant I worked on many TEI projects, providing a range of advice, support, and managing teams of developers working on research projects. Some of these projects were able to contribute back to the TEI Consortium itself. After my move to Newcastle University in 2017, I have continued to be involved with teaching, digital outreach, and pedagogy as part of the TEI community. I want to stand for the TEI-C Board again and as a member will encourage more training by and for the community. I believe that having a TEI-C Board member with a long history of experience on the TEI-C Technical Council will help as the organisation develops and evolves in the the face of new digital technologies. I think I have a lot to offer the TEI-C Board, and am supported by my institution which believes in the work of the TEI-C. Indeed, I am the local organiser for the @TEI2022 conference which will be held, hopefully in person, at Newcastle University in September 2022. This conference will not only enable the TEI community to get together in person after a long absence, but also having learned from the pandemic we will strive at very least to make as many of the presentations available online afterwards as possible.
In 2017 I moved from a research support role at the University of Oxford to Newcastle University, where I am a tenured Senior Lecturer in Late Medieval English Literature and Digital Humanities. In this post I engage in research in the areas of digital scholarly editing and late medieval drama. My decades of TEI experience remain a crucial part of my own research and also projects under the umbrella of the Animating Text Newcastle University (ATNU) project which initially funded my post. We have hosted a wide range of Digital Humanities speakers as part of the ATNU Virtual Visiting Speakers Series, recordings of which are available from our website https://research.ncl.ac.uk/atnu/. My PhD (Leeds, 2001) was on “Contextual studies of the dramatic records in the area around The Wash, c. 1350-1550” and involved a significant amount of archival transcription of Late Middle English and Latin documents. I’ve always had an interest in medieval manuscripts and their descriptions and while at Oxford I was also responsible for the initial TEI customisation and recent conversions to TEI P5 for many of the Bodleian’s manuscript catalogues. I created, and continue to be the main instigator for, the grassroots openly-nominated and openly-voted annual DH Awards (http://dhawards.org). I founded and directed the Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School from 2010 (when it grew out of a long-running TEI Summer School) up until my departure in 2017. I was an elected member of Digital Medievalist (2004-2012; Director, 2009-2012). I continue to both teach and conduct research on digital text and editions and indeed have just introduced a new course for the 2021/22 academic year ‘Dissertation by Digital Edition’, enabling our undergraduate students to create TEI editions as their capstone projects to their degrees.
I'm a free and open source software developer for more than 20 years, when I started the eXist XML database project. A sociologist by education, my vision was to create a system which would help to easily share, connect and preserve the textual resources which are the basis of scholarly work. Back in 2001, this was still a long way to go, so we had to start with the basics. Fast forward to 2021, the 2nd major project I contribute to, TEI Publisher, makes me feel much closer to my dream of an interconnected, sustainable publication ecosystem. But the work continues.
All this would not have been possible without the constant exchange of ideas within the community, which right from the start was mainly driven by TEI practitioners. Sustainable software cannot be created in isolation. It needs a broader perspective, extending way beyond the funding periods most projects have. Much too often, academic software development tries to reinvent the wheel and compete with others rather than join forces to achieve something bigger, going beyond the single edition project. This is why a number of institutions created the e-editiones.org non-profit society back in 2020, of which I am a founding member.
It is also a common misconception, that most contributors to free software are either backed by project funding, their institution or a company. Just like TEI, open source software is still mostly based on volunteer engagement and people spending their own time hacking code. Those are exactly the people I would like to represent on the board, bringing in their perspective, which might sometimes differ from those of academic professionals.
I also see the need to better coordinate the various, often visionary software projects in the TEI world, to foster information exchange and communication between developers and users as well as between different edition projects. As academics we all value an individualistic approach. But with respect to software and tools, the humanities just don't have the resources to afford developing the same solutions over and over again. In this I would also like to connect initiatives like e-editiones.org with the TEI.
After graduating in Sociology from Frankfurt University, I started my professional life in the late 90s at the TU Darmstadt, where we tried to build an information network for sociologists. Back then we already had to deal with tons of XML, but lacked the proper tools to process them. Leaving for a holiday in the mountains, I thus printed out some articles about efficient indexing of XML and decided to implement some of the ideas I read about. Few months later I released the very first version of eXist in early 2001. It did not take long until the first TEI project, a dictionary of Anglo-Norman, knocked on my door. It was never my intention to become a professional developer, but after a while, there was no escape.
In 2010, I became director of eXistSolutions, a company founded by me and three other core developers of eXist to better coordinate projects and funding. The company is fully dedicated to Open Source, investing all its profits back into the various free software projects we maintain.
In 2015 we were approached by Sebastian Rahtz, investigating if we would be willing to implement a new idea they were working on: the TEI Processing Model. While I was skeptical at first, this idea turned out to be a real game changer, so I continued development and eventually released the first version of what is now known as TEI Publisher.
I'm a board member of e-editiones.org, a non-profit society trying to promote the use of open standards and open source software for digital editions. e-editiones.org also owns and coordinates the further development of TEI Publisher and related software projects.
Since 2005 I'm also a research assistant at the Heidelberg Academy of Science, where I help a small team of researchers to publish a series of award winning books on Chinese cultural heritage, all fully automated and based on TEI.
My colleague Gimena Rio Del Grande has being instrumental in fencing my nomination for election to the TEI Board. I am grateful to her support and encouragement. Even though I am not a TEI expert, I am well acquainted with its Guidelines and the activities of its Consortium via TEI-Listserv.
On the 27 of September 2016, I posted a message over TEI mail list whereby, I inquired if "there already exists any encoding scheme for tones (as meaningful prosodic units associated with segmental phonemes) in the TEI standards". I had envisaged to use the TEI markup scheme as a framework to represent and encode tones in Bantu languages.
Since tone is a meaningful unit of information in Bantu languages, my aim was to provide semantic markup of tones using XML. Graphical representation of tones using diacritics does not allow for accurate parsing of tonal information by the machine. Melodic registers of tones, which are anchored in their graphical shapes as "high", "low", "rising" and "falling" etc., are not consistent with the complex range of meanings which individual tone registers convey: e.g. a "high" tone may signal lexical constrast between two words (the other word having a "low" register); it may also mark near futur tense as well relations of some type between syntactic constituents.
Apart from Laurent Romary's kind advice to read Thomas Schmidt's seminal article on "A TEI-based approach to Standardizing Spoken Language Transcription", the issue I raised in my email received little attention from the TEI community. It therefore appeared to me that, Bantuist linguists and scholars working on low-resources languages need to bring their share in the expansion of the TEI markup framework for more inclusiveness.
As I write this statement, I am taking part in the European Summer University in Digital Humanities organized by the University of Leipzig, where I read a course in Corpus Linguistics, with focus on TEI. I had attended a similar training event at Charles University in Prague in 2017 with Alex Bia as instructor.
Even though TEI Board members are not in charge of the technical aspects of the Consortium, sitting in the Board with long-standing leaders and experts of the TEI community would enable me to have an immersive experience, through discussions during business meetings, conferences and training events. When I have gained sufficient mastery of the internal workflow within the TEI organization , I can expect to have a productive conversation with the members of the TEI Technical Council and perhaps to join them.
Most significantly, membership with the TEI Board would empower me to raise awareness and to spur on support from Africa-based institutions of higher education and research with which I am affiliated, with a view of opening up the communities of those institutions to the benefits of the TEI standards. In this regard, the running of the first edition of the Institute of Digital Humanities - French Africa (https://inhunumaf.hypotheses.org/) in March of 2022 in Yaoundé (Cameroon), for which I am the local partner, comes quite timely.
I am currently involved in several Digital Humanities organizations and projects: Humanistica the Francophone association of Digital Humanities, the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing (IJHAC), the Editorial Board of the Journal of Digital History, the Endangered Languages Project (ELP), and the Comprenhensive and Interactive Platform project of the African Academy of Languages (ACALAN).
My main professional affiliation is with the Higher Teacher Training College at the University of Yaoundé 1, where I am Associate Professor of African Languages and Cultures. Since September 2018, I have been on secondment as Department Head at the Higher Teacher College of Bertoua (Cameroon).
Since 2014, I have been Managing the Archive of Languages and Oral Resources of Africa, hosted by the International Center for Research and Documentation on Africa's Traditions and Languages (CERDOTOLA). The archive is being relocated into a different hosting space and for that reason, it is currently downtime. As a digital archive manager, I am responsible for the curation of collections of language and oral resources, most of which are available only in analog formats and need to be digitized.
I am also curating a corpus of audio visual and written resources for Bati language and oral traditions, which are deposited at the Endangered Languages Archive (https://www.elararchive.org/dk0421).
I have been introduced to TEI during my first academic job, to encode pre-modern Chinese epigraphy in Singapore. Since then, I have witnessed amazing technical transformations from XML to various data formats. I have also conducted Digital Humanity research involving TEI, Programming, Network Analysis, and Philology. As mentioned by some other members, TEI is the finest encoding framework for texts. I would like to contribute to the broader implementation of TEI standard in text-editing related projects.
I am currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Humanities, Nanyang Technological University. I received my PhD in Chinese Linguistics and Philology from NTU, SoH, Chinese Programme, Singapore, in 2018. I have joined the National University of Singapore, after graduation, as a Research Fellow, and there I have received intensive training in TEI. My research interests include Chinese Linguistics and Philology, Grammatology, Oral Tradition, Digital Humanities, Ethnography, and Traditional Chinese Medicine. I am fluent in HTML and Python, too.