TEI-C Elections 2019

Introduction
In 2019, TEI Members will hold an election to fill 6 open positions on the TEI Technical Council and 2 on the TEI Board of Directors; each newly elected member will serve a two-year term, 2018 and 2019. We are also electing 1 new member to the TAPAS advisory board. The following persons have been nominated to the TEI Nominating committee and have agreed to stand as candidates for election to the TEI Technical Council, the TEI Board, and the TAPAS advisory Board. They have all supplied a statement covering two aspects:

1. a candidate statement in which they discuss their reasons for wishing to serve on the Board, TAPAS or Technical Council and what their particular goals would be.

2. a biographical description focusing on their education, training, research, etc., relevant to the TEI.

A Note on Voting
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 closes on September 17, 2019 at 23:59 Hawaii-Aleutian Standard Time (HAST) as it offers the latest global midnight.

Elisa Beshero-Bondar
Statement of purpose

As I conclude a second term on the TEI Technical Council, I find we are increasingly tasked with transitional challenges as we seek to sustain our first principles. We rely on each other in Council meetings and while apart to listen, to respond, to question, and to document, and that effort together in collaboration is crucial to the long-standing sustainability and future adaptability of our Guidelines. As a Council member, not only must I try to respond to issues from the community as they arise, but I also seek opportunities to teach and cultivate our exploration of new directions for the TEI at our annual conferences. I am eager to continue on the Technical Council as a maturing voice, and I hope to mentor new members of Council learning their way even as I continue to benefit from the wisdom and experience of longstanding Council members.

My experience with the full XML stack (XSLT, XQuery, Schematron) shapes my teaching and engagement with the TEI on Council. I have helped organize and run TEI workshops with a strong emphasis on XPath as a vital “on ramp” for learning to process and develop projects with TEI. This experience has helped me to contribute to the the XSLT Stylesheets working subgroup. Though the working subgroup is entirely voluntary, it is clear that we need every one of us together at the meetings to help us decipher and update the codebase we maintain for transforming and publishing from TEI. I write this statement while preparing to be the lead release technician for the July 2019 release of Guidelines, in the midst of rewriting dated documentation to support the oXygen TEI plugin—comprehending vividly that I am serving Council in transitional times.

Council work thrives on lively debate, and as a Council member I am not usually quiet. I strive to keep our conversations lively and productive, to help connect related issues, 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.

Biography

I am a teaching professor and textual scholar in the Humanities Division of The University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg, where I enjoy strong institutional support of my work with TEI for educating students, training colleagues, and conducting collaborative research. My experience with TEI runs broad and deep. Working with the TEI has stimulated my research in 19th-century studies and textual scholarship, and I have launched and direct several ongoing projects, including a Variorum edition of Frankenstein in collaboration with Raffaele Viglianti and the Shelley-Godwin Archive. My projects apply TEI to explore prosopography networks, computer-assisted collation, and analysis of translations. My most technically ambitious projects investigate complex texts such as epics, plays, and multi-volume voyage logs, and deploy the TEI to articulate relationships across distinctly structured units— plotting alterations to early modern Spanish texts in 19th-century English translations, and locating references to mappable and mythical places across verse stanzas and paratext notes of epic poems. The Digital Mitford is the largest of my projects, now engaging researchers and students from three universities in editing the writings of Mary Russell Mitford, including about 2,000 manuscript letters together with poetry, drama, prose fiction and extensive prosopography development. From this project, we run an annual four-day Digital Mitford coding school to orient new scholarly editors and project designers to work with TEI as well as to begin planning schemas and processing data with the XML family of languages.

Each semester I teach undergraduate students and sometimes eager colleagues to code with XML and TEI, schema development with Relax NG, ODDs and Schematron, project management with git and GitHub, and transformations with XSLT and XQuery to develop digital editions and research projects. At my home institution I co-authored and now help direct our interdisciplinary undergraduate certificate program in Digital Studies in which a core requirement is that students design projects that involve XML and data analysis. Our busy research hive of ongoing projects and course materials is located at http://newtfire.org.

Meaghan J. Brown
Statement of purpose

I am interested in in the ways user behavior (and our understanding of it) influences the development of the TEI guidelines and the work of the technical council. I'm particularly interested in TEI use in libraries and educational institutions, and thinking through the ways TEI documentation and the guidelines themselves can contribute to distributed workflows for encoding. If elected, I would like to think about how the guidelines influence and are used in tutorials, documentation, and teaching -- and how these methods of understanding the TEI guidelines shape user behavior towards them. In other words, I'm interested in the TEI encoding community and how the guidelines can support it.

My personal experience with the TEI comes from on-the-ground encoding work, primarily documentary editions of early modern English drama and other early modern texts which were / are encoded as part of a small team. I'm also deeply interested in the ways TEI support digital bibliographical work.

Biography

I am currently the Digital Production Editor at the Folger Shakespeare Library, where I have worked on a variety of TEI encoding projects, including Early Modern Manuscripts Online, A Digital Anthology of Early Modern English Drama, and The Dering Manuscript. I have a PhD in the History of Text Technologies from Florida State University and an MSIS from the University of Texas at Austin. I have taught introductions to TEI and XML to both students (while an instructor at Florida State University) and professionals (primarily postdocs). I am on the advisory board of ReKN and the Shakespeare Census, and am currently the managing editor of Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America. My personal research ranges from citation studies to descriptive bibliography of early modern printed texts.

Nicholas Cole
Statement of purpose

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. For technical reasons, our initial platform was unable to cope with any form of structured text. A new version of the platform does allow for structured text (including XML), though in practice the necessary algorithms to manipulate XML-TEI are currently described in theory by several academic papers over the last 20 years, but never seem to have been implemented in practice.

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.

Biography

I studied Ancient and Modern History at University College, Oxford, where I also completed an MPhil in Greek/Roman History and a Doctorate focused on American Political Thought. I have held several research and teaching posts. I am currently the director of the Quill Project, at Pembroke College, Oxford, and collaborate with a number of institutions in the United States, including a deep partnership with an open-enrollment university.