Rahtz Prize Call for Nominations

2018 Rahtz Prize for TEI Ingenuity: Call for Nominations

The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is a consortium which collectively develops and maintains a standard for the representation of texts in digital form. Its chief product is a set of Guidelines which specify encoding methods for machine-readable texts, chiefly in the humanities, social sciences and linguistics. Since 1994, the TEI Guidelines have been widely used by libraries, museums, publishers, academic projects, and individual scholars to present texts for online research, teaching, and preservation. In addition to the Guidelines themselves, the Consortium provides a variety of resources and training events for learning TEI, information on projects using the TEI, software developed for or adapted to the TEI, and an annual conference and members’ meeting. In August of 2017, the TEI Consortium and community as a whole will receive the esteemed Antonio Zampolli Prize from the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations.

The TEI Consortium (TEI-C) has created the Rahtz Prize for TEI Ingenuity in memory of Sebastian Rahtz, who contributed significantly to the TEI infrastructure. The award is intended to honour Sebastian’s noteworthy technical and philosophical contributions to the TEI, and to encourage innovation in the TEI community. The Rahtz Prize for TEI Ingenuity is awarded to an individual or team judged to have made a significant contribution to the TEI-C's mission in particular by means of non-commercial/openly-available projects or initiatives. Many members of the TEI community are engaged in exploring new ways of implementing and expanding the coverage of the TEI encoding system. It is hoped that the Rahtz Prize will not only recognize excellent work already completed, but through its celebration and dissemination of nominated works also encourage new projects and fresh approaches. The recipient(s) of the 2017 award will receive $1,000 USD or equivalent.

The TEI community is encouraged to nominate prospective candidates for the Rahtz Prize. Self-nominations will also be accepted. You do not have to be a member of the TEI-C to make a nomination.

Nominations should be submitted through a form, which requires contact information for the nominee, or nominees in the case of a team, a project title, and a brief statement for the nomination: https://goo.gl/forms/o7juxgAJIEAZSeVv2. Nominators will be asked to provide their name and contact details for the record and to ensure they are not robots. These data will not be published or otherwise shared.

The Awards Panel [1] will review the nominations and extend invitations for applications by mid-to-late April 2018. Nominees interested in applying will need to submit their application materials by 1 June 2018. For more information about the Rahtz Prize, including the nomination and application process, consult: http://www.tei-c.org/Activities/rahtz.xml.

Nominations are due 6 April 2018 by midnight Hawaii/Aleutian Standard Time (HAST).

[1] The Awards Panel is made up of the Chair of the Board of Directors, Chair of the Technical Council, and an appointed member of the TEI community. The Panel is in the process of convening and will be constituted by 1 April 2018.