Candidate Statements: TEI Technical Council
Helena Bermúdez Sabel (University of Neuchâtel)
Statement of purpose:
I have just served a term on the TEI Technical Council and I would love to continue the work carried out during these enriching two years. I have acquired experience in core TEI-C tasks such as managing Guidelines releases and contributing to issue resolution concerning the enhancement of the Guidelines (besides bug fixing, I had the opportunity to work on the creation of new elements, like the ongoing work regarding a <gender> element). I have contributed to the maintenance of the TEI-C Stylesheets, and I have recently taken over the chair of the Stylesheets Group, a responsibility I will like to keep assuming, if elected.
One of my interests lies in further employing the TEI to model less common applications, such as graph-based annotations of complex linguistic features like syntactic analysis and semantic ambiguity. With this goal in mind, I am currently involved in the development of automatic converters from the most common formats used by natural language processing tools to TEI, and from TEI to RDF serialization formats. I believe that these activities can promote fruitful dialogue between different research communities.
Biography:
I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Université de Neuchâtel (Switzerland) working for the SNF-funded project “A world of possibilities. Modal pathways over an extra-long period of time: the diachrony of modality in the Latin language” (https://woposs.unine.ch). In this project, I am responsible for the technical aspects of the annotation workflow, including the automation of corpus pre- and post-processing. The pipeline makes ample use of XML technologies and it includes a search interface of TEI-encoded documents that contain multiple layers of linguistic annotation.
I hold a PhD in Medieval Studies from the Universidade de Santiago de Compostela (2019). My doctoral research involved the development of a digital edition model in TEI that enables the quantitative study of linguistic variation through the automatic comparison of witnesses. An implementation of the model was illustrated with a Galician-Portuguese secular poetry corpus (http://www.gl-pt.obdurodon.org). I am particularly interested in the development of multifunctional palaeographic editions (e.g.: https://helenasabel.github.io/DIGA/).
I also have solid experience in Digital Humanities teaching. Besides the specialized workshops in digital philology I have taught in different institutions, I am a regular instructor of the Master in Digital Humanities at Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED, Spain) in which, among other subjects, I teach a course focused on XSLT.
I am proficient in XML technologies and linked data. I am interested in data modeling and the formalization of annotation schemes, thus I am very keen on continuing to have an active role in the TEI community.
Elli Bleeker (Huygens Institute for History and Culture of the Netherlands)
Statement of purpose:
After years of being a user of the TEI Guidelines for text encoding and digital edition projects, it has been a truly great and very informative experience to get to know “the other side” of the TEI and to collaborate with the brilliant and devoted people of the Technical Council on developing, maintaining, and improving the Guidelines and the Stylesheets. My first 8 months on Council have flown by and I’m eager to continue to play a part the important international project that is the TEI.
I would therefore be honoured and very happy to be re-elected and to be able to go on with my work. In addition to the valuable everyday efforts of keeping the Guidelines and Stylesheets up-to-date, I will endeavour to reevaluate the encoding recommendations for manuscripts from a genetic point of view (see “An Encoding Model for Genetic Editions” by Lou Burnard et al., 2010). Using my experience with encoding modern manuscripts and creating digital genetic editions, I will examine potential areas for development or improvement of these recommentations, such as the encoding of nonlinear text and the sequentiality of textual revisions. And last but definitely not least, I will devote considerable time to the educational aspect of the TEI by contributing to documentation and tutorials that lower the threshold for new TEI users. This includes – but is not limited to – designing editorial workflows for the creation of straightforward digital editions of modern manuscripts. Accordingly, I hope to be able to give back to the lively, intellectual, and welcoming scholarly community of the TEI.
Biography:
I am a researcher at the Huygens Institute for the History and Culture of the Netherlands, an institute that specialises in the scholarly editing of literary and historical documents. My field of studies are digital scholarly editing and computational textual scholarship, with a focus on the genetic editing of modern manuscripts. In my doctoral research at the Centre for Manuscript Genetics in Antwerp (BE) I studied the role of the scholarly editor in the digital environment. During this period, I was fortunate 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.
Currently, I am PI of the COLLaiTE project, which examines how TEI markup can be leveraged to improve the automated collation; initiator of the “Companion for Digital Editing Methods” project, which develops an online platform for knowledge exchange on digital editing; and supervisor of the eDITem project, which sets out to develop TEI templates for digital editions. Each of these projects inform to a large extent my work on Council and, in return, are shaped by my experience as a Council member.
Nicholas Cole (Pembroke College, University of Oxford)
Statement of purpose:
I wish to serve on the council to improve the tooling and infrastructure that supports the TEI, as well as to contribute to the evolution of the standard. I have a particular interest in the ATOP project being undertaken by the stylesheets team.
I have a good knowledge of the TEI repositories and the technical skills necessary to contribute to the incremental fixing of bugs and the implementation of enhancements required by the TEI community. I also have the technical skills and experience necessary to enhance the underlying infrastructure of the TEI.
More generally, I am keen to see the TEI be at the forefront of efforts for inclusivity in scholarship — especially those whose needs include screen-readers or other adaptions for the disabled.
I currently work with text-focused projects that span multiple languages and involve working with more than 24 students at any one time based at 5 different institutions, including open-enrolment institutions and students from non-traditional backgrounds. I believe that the right technical standards and tooling are the key to building an inclusive research community.
In my broader academic work, 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.
If elected I will serve on the council with energy and commitment.
Biography:
I am currently a Senior Research Fellow at Pembroke College Oxford, where I am the PI of the Quill Project, which studies the creation and evolution of constitutional law in America and elsewhere through processes of negotiation. Details of the project can be found at www.quill.pmb.ox.ac.uk.
Though I began my academic career in more traditional fields, with a background in ancient and modern political thought, my interests over the last 8 years have been focused on advancing DH techniques as a way to drive a more thorough understanding of constitutional history and democratic institutions. This research includes working with the whole of the data life-cycle from paper archive to dissemination, and of course accurate and useful digital editions of text.
I have previously served a one-year term on the Technical Council and would be honoured to serve again. I believe strongly in the mission of the TEI and in the strength of its community.
Nick Laiacona (Performant Software Solutions)
Statement of purpose:
In the process of writing FairCopy, I developed an ODD parser that interprets the TEI Guidelines programmatically into a set of rules that drive the logic of a word processor. FairCopy supports 90% of the elements in TEI and so I became very familiar with the TEI’s internal structure. The TEI is a remarkable piece of intellectual work and it would be my pleasure to aid in its continued maintenance and development.
If elected to the TEI Technical Council, I will bring my technical skills and experience to the challenges and opportunities facing the TEI today. I am specifically interested in ongoing localization efforts, and providing uniform translation coverage to the entire element and attribute set. As an active member of the IIIF community, I would like to help develop best practices of using TEI with IIIF. I am also a fan of static site generation and minimal computing. These are areas that TEI can really see more widespread use and adoption. I recognize the technical challenges of working with a 30+ year old code base and would like to help modernize systems where possible.
Biography:
In 2006, I founded Performant Software Solutions, a software development firm specializing in the Digital Humanities. Since then, we have grown to a team of 10 developers, designers and DH software project experts working with dozens of clients at universities throughout North America and Europe. We work on open source software projects funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Science Foundation. Performant routinely makes use of standards such as TEI, IIIF, and RDF in our projects.
Some of the software I have developed include: Juxta, Digital Mappa, TextLab, and most recently: FairCopy. I participated in the “Open Scholarly Communities on the Web” and “Interedition” COST Actions and I speak regularly at conferences such as the Digital Humanities conference, IIIF Conference, the Modern Language Association, and others.
David Maus (State and University Library Hamburg)
Statement of purpose:
I feel honored to have been nominated as a candidate for the TEI Technical Council. If elected I will focus on maintaining and future-proofing the TEI infrastructure. I see this challenge as a technical and a social issue: It means using as well as discussing and teaching modern markup technologies and agile development practices with and to fellow angle bracket wranglers.
I’m happy to contribute my time and experience with markup technologies as well as with organizing (academic) software development projects.
Biography:
I’m head of research of development at the State and University Library Hamburg. As part of my work I act as liaison to digital humanities research at the University of Hamburg and other higher education institutions. I am currently deeply involved as information architect and XML programmer in Dehmel Digital, a digital scholarly edition that uses machine-learning technologies to provide access to the correspondence of Richard and Ida Dehmel, a famous artist couple from around 1900. I’m the author of SchXslt, a modern implementation of the Schematron validation language for structured documents and serve on the program committee of the MarkupUK conference.
Patricia O Connor (University of Oxford/University of Newcastle)
Statement of purpose:
I have been the TEI Communications Officer since 2021 and during this time I have endeavoured to share multilingual social media posts on behalf of the TEI. This online dissemination is only possible thanks to the hard work of the TEI Working Group on Internationalisation and I would welcome the opportunity to continue highlighting the internationalisation of the TEI Guidelines and specifications as a member of the Technical Council.
With a background in literary studies, the TEI Guidelines were (and still are) an important resource for informing my research on the representation of primary sources and I am committed to ensuring that the TEI introductory materials remain accessible for users that are encountering the TEI for the first time. My TEI experience encompasses medieval and modern manuscripts, and I am especially interested in discussing the encoding and digital representation of marginalia-bearing manuscripts. My research equally highlights the importance of Linked Open Data and advocates for the development of interoperable and sustainable resources, and I am enthusiastic about working with more experienced TEI Council mentors to acquire a practical understanding of these principles in relation to the TEI.
From 2019 to 2021 I was technical writer and beta-tester, during which time I gained valuable experience in revising and updating documentation, responding to ticket requests, testing new or existing features, as well as reporting and resolving issues. I believe this experience equips me to fulfil the duties of this position and I would be delighted to have the opportunity to actively contribute to the development of the TEI by serving on the TEI Technical Council.
Biography:
Currently, I am a research assistant for the ERC-funded project “A Consolidated Library of Anglo-Saxon Poetry” (CLASP) at the Faculty of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford. From October 2022, I will be working as a research assistant as part of the “Transatlantic Intellectual Networks” project at Newcastle University for which I will be transcribing, editing, and encoding 19th century correspondence material in TEI-XML.
I completed a PhD in Digital Humanities at University College Cork in 2020. My doctoral research involved encoding the Old English and Latin marginalia of an early-eleventh-century manuscript in TEI-XML and focused on the representation of textual additions in digital scholarly editions.
I am committed to developing my knowledge of TEI, I have completed introductory courses on Linked Open Data and XSLT at the XML Summer School at Oxford University (2018) and I have received in-depth training in text encoding and manuscript studies at the Medieval and Modern Manuscript Studies in the Digital Age Summer School at Cambridge University Library (CUL) and King’s College London (2016). Since 2021, I have had the honour of promoting the development of the TEI standard online as the Communications Officer for the TEI Consortium.
Joey Takeda (Digital Humanities Innovation Lab, Simon Fraser University)
Statement of purpose:
In standing for election, I hope to formalize my commitment to the TEI and continue to contribute to the development of the TEI ecosystem. I have worked closely with the TEI Guidelines and Stylesheets both in my own research and as a technical developer for numerous projects and I understand the complexity of the TEI’s technical infrastructure. While the TEI Guidelines have and continue to be essential for digital textual scholarship, there are 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.
Alongside my technical expertise and training in XML technologies and front-end web development, I hope to contribute to the Council my experience as a researcher of racialized, diasporic, and Indigenous literatures. 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. I would be honoured to have the opportunity to contribute meaningfully to the continued development of the TEI and to assist in providing robust and sustainable approaches that reflect and respond to the array of users, researchers, and texts that make up the TEI community.
Biography:
I am currently a Developer at the Digital Humanities Innovation Lab at Simon Fraser University, specializing in text encoding and digital editions. I also serve as a Technical Director for the Winnifred Eaton Archive, a member of the TEI by Example’s International Advisory Board, and the co-developer (with Martin Holmes) of staticSearch (https://github.com/projectEndings/staticSearch). 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 digital humanities, textual encoding, and Indigenous and diasporic literatures, particularly Asian American and Asian Canadian literature across the twentieth century.
I have worked as an encoder, developer, and designer for multiple TEI projects, including The Map of Early Modern London, Linked Early Modern Drama Online, and Landscapes of Injustice. At SFU, I regularly give workshops and guest lectures on text encoding, TEI, digital editions, and minimal computing. My most recent work has been with the the Lyon in Mourning project and the development of workflows and mechanisms for aligning TEI encoded editions with the XML produced by HTR software as well as with the IIIF standard.
