Author: theteiadmin

The 2.0.1 release of TEI P5 is a minor release fixing a number of bugs pointed out with the 2.0.0 release. The 2.0.0 release of TEI P5 was a major new release of the TEI P5 Guidelines, which introduces some significant new material as well as implementing an unusually large set of other changes and error corrections. Since the last release in March 2011, members of the TEI community have proposed over 60 feature requests and reported about the same number of errors; dealing with these has kept the TEI Council busy, and most of these tickets have now been closed. See further the release notes http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/readme-2.0.1.html.

This is a major new release of the P5 Guidelines, which introduces some significant new material as well as implementing an unusually large set of other changes and error corrections. Since the last release in March 2011, members of the TEI community have proposed over 60 feature requests and reported about the same number of errors; dealing with these has kept the TEI Council busy, and most of these tickets have now been closed. See further the release notes at http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/readme-2.0.html

All,

The TEI Projects page at http://www.tei-c.org/Activities/Projects/index.xml has
been gathering entries for quite a few years, and not surprisingly some of the
information in the entries is obsolete or out of date. TEI Council has discussed
migrating the information here to a more user-friendly database-like interface,
but that may not happen for a while.

In the meantime, I have just gone through the existing entries and fixed broken
links. I am sure that other information (contact email, etc.) needs updating as
well. If you are responsible for a project listed on that page and want to make
any changes, could you please email the details to me?

Also, you can submit new projects here: http://www.tei-c.org/Activities/Projects/newform.html

Four projects on the list seem to be entirely missing from the Web. If anyone
can provide me with working links to them, I will update; otherwise I will
remove them from this list in a week or so:

The Anglo-Saxon Poetry Project
http://www.tei-c.org/Activities/Projects/an01.xml

The Cursus Project
http://www.tei-c.org/Activities/Projects/cu01.xml

Project Lorelei
http://www.tei-c.org/Activities/Projects/lo01.xml

The Sternberg Project
http://www.tei-c.org/Activities/Projects/st01.xml

Thanks for assistance,

David Sewell, dsewell@virginia.edu
TEI webmaster

TEI Community Initiative Grants
Proposals Due 15 December 2011
Total Call: $4,000

The TEI Board is delighted to announce a call for Community Initiative
Grants. Proposed projects proposed should support and promote the goals
of the TEI and should be carried out within one year of the date of the
award.

Applications will be adjudicated according to the following criteria:

* excellence of the proposal;

* contribution of the activity to the promotion and development of the TEI;

* track record of individuals or group proposing the activity;

* deliverables which are realistic and can be accomplished within the
budget and time period proposed.

Although there is no upper amount for any individual proposal,
applicants should bear in mind that the total amount for this grant call
is $4,000.

Proposals should be no longer than three pages (ca. 750 words) and
should contain the following information:

1. Name and contact details of proposer
2. Name of organization (if the proposal is being submitted on behalf of
a TEI SIG or other organistion)
3. Narrative addressing the criteria above.
4. Amount requested. Please indicate if it would be possible to carry
out the activity with less funding, and if so, how that would change the
nature of the proposal.
5. Date for final report

Please send submissions to Susan Schreibman by 15 December 2011

--
Susan Schreibman, PhD
Long Room Hub Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities
School of English
Trinity College Dublin
Dublin 2, Ireland

email: susan.schreibman@tcd.ie
phone: +353 1 896 3694
fax:  +353 1 671 7114

check out the new MPhil in Digital Humanities at TCD
http://www.tcd.ie/English/postgraduate/digital-humanities/

Results of the survey on TEI P4 usage and support are now available on James Cummings’s blog at http://blogs.oucs.ox.ac.uk/jamesc/2011/10/27/tei_p4_support/.

[original source, TEI-L:
http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind1110&L=TEI-L&T=0&F=&S=&P=12010]

Dear TEI-L,

I am writing, as Chair of the 2011 Nominations Committee, to announce
the results of the recent TEI elections for Board and Technical
Council.

New Board members (serving two-year terms, January 2012 through December 2013):

- Marjorie Burghart
- Laura Mandell
- Martin Mueller
- Elena Pierazzo

New Technical Council members (serving two-year terms, January 2012
through December 2013):

- Brett Barney
- Gabriel Bodard
- Kevin Hawkins
- Martin Holmes
- Paul Schaffner
- Rebecca Welzenbach

Please join me in welcoming our new Board and Technical Council
members and in thanking all those who participated in the elections.

I'd also like to thank my fellow committee members: Marin Dacos, Kevin
Hawkins, and Dan O'Donnell.

Sincerely,

John Walsh
Chair, 2011 Nominations Committee
-- 
| John A. Walsh
| Assistant Professor, School of Library and Information Science
| Indiana University, 1320 East Tenth Street, Bloomington, IN 47405
| www: <http://www.slis.indiana.edu/faculty/jawalsh/>

| Voice:812-856-0707 Fax:812-856-2062 <mailto:jawalsh@indiana.edu>

Subject: TEI elections open
From: Unsworth, John M
Date: Sun, 2 Oct 2011 16:50:29 +0000

Folks,

Email has been sent to designated electors from TEI member institutions, inviting them to vote in the elections for Board and Council. Candidates’ statements on a variety of questions having to do with the future of the TEI can be found at: http://www.tei-c.org/Membership/Meetings/2011/mm54.xml

TEI member institutions eligible to vote are listed at http://www.tei-c.org/Membership/current.xml. If you are at one of those institutions and want to know who your institutional elector is, or if your institution is not listed and you believe it should be, contact membership@tei-c.org.

Many thanks to all the candidates and electors for participating in the election, and to all of you for helping me put together the questions candidates have addressed in their statements.

John Unsworth
[Interim chair, TEI Board]

Dear TEI-L

When the TEI Consortium released TEI P5 in November 2007 it
promised 5 years of ongoing support for TEI P4. Support for TEI
P4 will continue until November 2012. As this is just over a
year away the TEI Technical Council thought it should gradually
phase out support for TEI P4 over this period.

As a first step in this direction it has been suggested that we
de-emphasize TEI P4 on the website (e.g. by stopping search
engines indexing it). Before proceeding with this we want to
gauge how many ongoing/active projects there might be out there
still using TEI P4 and so have set up the following survey:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/2N95CY5

This collects some information we will use to assess how much TEI
P4 is still being used and what steps we should take in phasing
out its support. It also collects some additional information
potentially of use to the TEI Technical Council. TEI P4 has,
since the publication of TEI P5, been considered deprecated and
since then we have encouraged use of TEI P5 by new projects. Even
if you have never used TEI P4, only TEI P5, we would appreciate
you filling in the survey so we can capture that (negative
results are indeed results in this case).

Many thanks,

-James

From: Malte Rehbein, malte.rehbein@uni-wuerzburg.de

This is a reminder that the registration for the TEI conference is now  open and that the early registration discount is available only until 31  August. Please check out the conference website (http://www.zde.uni-wuerzburg.de/tei_mm_2011/ ) for the programme (now final!) including keynotes, papers, micropapers and posters as well as pre-conference workshops and tutorials and excursions. Information about travelling and lodging is also available.

From: John Unsworth
To: The TEI Community
Date: August 18, 2011

On August 11, Martin Mueller resigned as Chair of the Board of the Text Encoding Initiative Consortium, following a vote of no confidence from the TEI’s Board of Directors.  Since then, there has been a great deal of speculation on the TEI-L email list, on Twitter, and elsewhere, about how this came to pass and what it means.  The purpose of this statement is to replace speculation with an account of events that has the endorsement of both Martin Mueller and the Board of Directors.

On August 17th, the Board appointed and unanimously elected me to serve as interim Chair for the remainder of Martin’s original term.  At the end of that term, I will not stand for election or seek a new appointment as Chair.  As many of you know, I helped to establish the TEI as a non-profit membership organization in 2000, and served as the first Chair of its Board and later of its Council. My goal in serving as interim Chair for the next year and a half will be to address operational needs, to restore equanimity, and to ensure that there is a full and open discussion of strategic priorities.

Contrary to speculation, the change in leadership at the TEI was not a result of Martin’s thoughtful August 4th, 2011 letter to the Board (see http://bit.ly/nG0Ga2). The issues that he raises in that letter are important and should be taken up by the community.  As Chair, Martin focused his attention on finding a new Treasurer, finding ways to bring down costs, bringing in new members, and finding ways to stabilize and improve TEI’s place in the landscape of digital humanities.  All of these were and are critical problems and useful strategic activities for the Chair.

The core issues leading up to Martin’s resignation were differences of opinion about the nature and purpose of the Board itself, and about day-to-day priorities in the business of the TEI (partly having to do with the sequencing of elections and appointments), the relationship between Board and Council, spending priorities (with respect to SIGs, professional services, and meetings), and the role of the Chair, a position described in the TEI Bylaws as one that “shall, subject to the direction of the Board of Directors, generally supervise and manage the affairs of the TEI-C.”  Disagreements over these issues developed within the Board, and between some Board members and their Chair.  Some Board members felt important tasks were going unattended to, and differed with the Chair on strategic priorities. Others, including the Chair, felt that the Board was not efficient in its deliberations, and was excessively concerned with procedure.

In the end, these disagreements about priorities and leadership style hardened into irreconcilable differences.  On August 11,  the Chair called a meeting to discuss budget matters, and four of six voting members, a quorum of the Board, attended.  A vote of confidence was called but failed to pass, and Martin resigned.  A brief account of that meeting was published on August 15 on TEI-L, and it is available at http://bit.ly/pqyGsJ.

The purpose of the foregoing is to explain how we arrived where we are; it is not meant to decide who got us here.  I am certain that everyone involved felt they were doing the best thing for the TEI, but the situation needs to be de-polarized.  We’re a community of people with significant shared interests and values, but we are also a minority in some important larger communities, so it’s in our interest to focus on what we share, and to design and pursue a collective strategy with respect to those larger communities.  In order to plan that strategy, and attend to its implementation, the community needs to speak on issues both conceptual and operational, and the Board and Council need to listen.  In fact, I am sure they would welcome mandates from the community.

Some procedural issues have been raised, on Twitter and on TEI-L, that also need to be addressed.  There has been much speculation regarding the Board’s structure and its decision-making process in the case at hand. The Board consists (as it has always consisted) of voting and non-voting members.  All of its voting members are elected by TEI member institutions.  Officers of the Board are elected (and if necessary, appointed) by the rest of the Board.  The question has also been raised whether the Board exceeded its authority by calling a vote of no confidence.  The bylaws do not provide explicit advice on the proper procedure for removing a Chair, but logically there must be one, and if the Chair is elected by the Board, the Board must be able to vote to replace him or her.  There has also been speculation about whether recently approved changes to the TEI Bylaws were in some way a backdrop for these events.  Both the old and the new bylaws stipulate the same procedures for appointing a Chair and for repopulating the Board.  Both old and new bylaws say that a Chair may be either an elected Board member or an appointed one: Martin was appointed by the Board, so his departure as Chair entails his departure from the Board, but it does not create the sort of vacancy that necessitates a special election by member institutions.

Finally, on behalf of the Board, I invite discussion of the TEI’s future strategy and operations, with the hashtag #teifuture on Twitter, and the subject line “Future of the TEI” on TEI-L.