TEI-C Elections 2017

Candidate Statements: TEI Technical Council

Elisa Beshero-Bondar

Statement of purpose

I am completing a first term on the TEI Technical Council (2015-2017) and I am eager to continue working together with this group on the major projects facing us. I have been learning much from those with longer experience on Council in maintaining and refining the TEI's codebase and preparing new releases of P5. I hope to continue on the XSLT Stylesheets working subgroup on Council to help identify, document, and not only repair but find the best approaches to repair the stylesheets we maintain for transforming and publishing from TEI. Being part of that Stylesheets group has been an intensive learning process for all involved, a process that is gradually producing improvements, learning how delicately to refine and update original code without breaking backwards-compatibility so that these stylesheets may continue to serve our community. I am especially interested to contribute to better methods and documentation for TEI ODD customizations and to improve ODD processing. This includes, in part, working with a group of Council members led by Raffaele Vigliante on a new and much-improved web interface for Roma. However, beyond re-desigining Roma, improving our support for ODDs also crucially involves providing our community more extensive guidance and examples on designing Schematron (XPath-based) customization rules. This work in customization should involve discussions of interoperability and documentation of project decisions such that other TEI project designers can "bridge" and interact with the custom-fitted code we design for our projects.

My delight in learning from and debating with generous friends in the TEI community makes me very grateful to be nominated again for a position on the Technical Council. Much of our work together is fueled by open debate in the Council sessions, over the TEI listserv and GitHub tickets, and in person at SIG and conference meetings. As a Council member I strive to keep that conversation lively and productive, to help connect related issues, and most importantly, to improve our documentation and examples in the Guidelines. 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.

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 investigating 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.

My work has lately involved "up-translating" digital editions produced from the 1990s onward, and locating intersections in multiple encodings of the same text produced at different times and for different purposes. I am collaborating this year on a Bicentennial Frankenstein project with fellow TEI Council member Raffaele Viglianti to collate the Shelley-Godwin Archive's rich diplomatic encoding of the novel's manuscript notebooks with existing digital editions of 19th-century published editions--in time for the bicentenary of _Frankenstein's first publication in 1818. This project will not only offer a new way to explore Frankenstein's textual "bodies", but will also contribute new material on TEI's capacities for interoperability, in bridging quite differently encoded documents of a text's history.

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 .

Institutional contribution: Time allowance for service, Contribution to expenses incurred

James Cummings

Statement of purpose

I have volunteered as a member of the TEI Technical Council since 2005, some of this time as its chair. In common with the other members of the TEI Technical Council, I want to demystify the TEI’s technical infrastructure. Recently, I was a member of the TEI Simple project which produced the TEI simplePrint customization but more importantly added methods for documenting processing models to the TEI ODD language. I welcome new TEI Technical Council members with diverse backgrounds, skills, and points of view, but feel it is also useful to retain Council members who are experienced with the technical infrastructure of the TEI. Concerning the TEI Guidelines, I tend to favour decisions that rationalize and consolidate the underlying content models of the TEI, while playing devil’s advocate in resisting any unjustified proliferation of new structures. If re-elected I would not only continue the drive towards an even more transparent and resilient open source model for all TEI Technical Council work, but I would also assist new members to document and understand these systems.

Biography

I have recently moved from a research support role at the University of Oxford to Newcastle University where I am a tenured Senior Lecturer in English Literature (c.1350-1510) and Digital Humanities. In this research-focussed post I am working in the areas of digital scholarly editing and late medieval drama. My TEI experience will be central to my own research and also projects under the umbrella of the Animating Text Newcastle University project. I founded, and continue to run, the grassroots openly nominated and openly voted annual DH Awards. Recently, I was a supervisor on the Marie Curie Initial Training Network: 'DiXiT' on the creation and publishing of digital scholarly editions. I helped run (as the founding director) the Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School. I was an elected member of Digital Medievalist (2004-2012; Director, 2009-2012). My Ph.D. was on “Contextual studies of the dramatic records in the are around The Wash, c. 1350-1550” and involved a significant amount of archival transcription of Late Middle English and Latin documents.

Institutional contribution: Time allowance for service, Possible hosting of TEI Technical Council F2F meetings

Yuta Hashimoto

Statement of purpose

I have made some attempts in the past to encode historical Japanese manuscripts with TEI, and through those experiences I have found there is a number of incompatibilities between the current TEI Guidelines and the writing systems in East-Asia, especially of Japan. I would like to contribute to the “globalization” of TEI and its community by fixing those problems. "Yuta Hashimoto is an Assistant Professor at National Museum of Japanese History. He holds M.A. in History of Science and is going to gain a PhD in Digital Humanities from Kyoto University by 2018. He has experience as a programmer for three years in the private sector.

Biography

He has engaged in several development projects for supporting research and education in Japanese studies. One of his recent works is KuLA ( https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=yuta.hashimoto.kula), a mobile learning app for reading classical calligraphic renderings of Japanese characters (kuzushiji), which has been downloaded 80,000 times. He is also the founder of Minnna de Honkoku (https://honkoku.org/), a crowdsourced transcription platform for pre-modern Japanese materials. The platform was launched in January 2017, and since then 4,000 folios have been transcribed by 3,000 registered users.

Institutional contribution: Time allowance for service

Huw Jones

Statement of purpose

Having provided training, documentation and technical support to a number of large TEI projects, and being myself a frequent user of the TEI Guidelines, I feel I am well qualified to take on a role on the TEI-C Technical Council. Through our use of the msDesc module, I have seen how the TEI Guidelines constantly have to adapt to accommodate new kinds of material and new research questions.

A central issue for us has been the standardisation of practice between different institutions and projects to facilitate collaborative work, and the TEI Guidelines have been fundamental to this work. I would look forward to collaborating with project using TEI to ensure that the Guidelines reflect their practice, and continue to promote both the standardisation essential to collaborative work, and the innovation necessary to support new research methods." "I am the Head of the Digital Library Unit at Cambridge University Library, managing a range of digital humanities projects in Cambridge and beyond. I have six years experience of promoting and supporting the use of TEI in Cambridge, and have worked closely with large TEI-using projects such as the Newton Project, Fihrist and Casebooks. I have also advised large digital humanities projects on their adoption of TEI, such as the Darwin Correspondence and Genizah projects.

Biography

Through my work with Fihrist and other large manuscript description projects, I am involved with efforts to standardise and document TEI practice between institutions, concentrating on use of the msDesc module. I am currently involved with a large TEI consolidation program based at Oxford University, which will lead to a shared Oxford/Cambridge schema for manuscript description, and also facilitate joint development projects around TEI. While most of my current work is in project management, I have good technical skills, particularly in XSLT. I have spoken about our use of TEI at various conferences, including the 2016 TEI Conference in Vienna, and lead the ‘TEI for Manuscript Description’ session at this year’s Digital Humanities Summer School in Oxford.

Institutional contribution: Time allowance for service, Contribution to expenses incurred

Katarzyna Anna Kapitan

Statement of purpose

My motivation to join TEI Technical Council is based on a great will to learn, and to share what I have already learned. I am user of TEI since 2012, and a member of TEI community since 2015, and I have an experience in working with the TEI-based manuscript descriptions, transcriptions and critical editions, but I am eager to learn more about the other modules covered by TEI. I would like to contribute to development of the guidelines, and the “Learn TEI” section, with tutorials which could be easily incorporated into teaching TEI in the classroom.

Biography

After obtaining MA in History (2011), Archaeology (2012) and Medieval Icelandic Studies (2014) I started a PhD-fellowship at the Arnamagnæan Manuscript Collection held at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark (2015-2018). I work on the project devoted to the transmission history of one Old-Icelandic saga, "Hrómundar saga Greipssonar", and I am preparing a digital edition of its text. In the course of my studies I had a chance to contribute to following TEI-based projects: Menota (menota.org) - "Medieval Nordic Text Archive", Handrit (handrit.is) – an online catalogue of Nordic manuscripts, the "Stories for all time" project (fasnl.ku.dk) – a bibliography and a manuscript catalogue of Old-Icelandic legendary sagas, and most recently "Manuscripta" (manuscripta.se) - a digital catalogue of manuscripts in Sweden, where I practice and expand my XML, ODD, XSLT skills. My research interest focuses mainly on Icelandic scribal culture, artefactual philology, and applications of digital tools and methods to manuscript studies. I teach Icelandic mediaeval literature, textual criticism, and basic XML for humanists.

Institutional contribution: Contribution to expenses incurred

Martina Scholger

Statement of purpose

I would much appreciate the opportunity to continue my work for the TEI Technical Council, if the TEI members would trust me to do so for another term. The task has been challenging and complex, but also very enriching and educational. My main interests remain (+) dealing with graphical elements and sketches like in notebooks where text and graphics have equivalent relevance, (+) genetic editing, (+) digital scholarly editing of art historical source material in general, (+) semantic enrichment of digital scholarly editions and linked open data.

I also want to continue working on the important topic of multilingualism which we started with the "TEI2German Translatathon", where we successfully translated a sizeable portion of the TEI specifications and also evaluated the potential of machine-based translation tools for the automated translation of the TEI specifications into other languages, I feel that there remains a lot to be done in this area and would appreciate to continue this task as part of the TEI Technical Council.

Biography

I am currently a PhD fellow and research associate at the Centre for Information Modelling – Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities at the University of Graz. A graduate of Art History, I have since focussed on digital scholarly editions and the application of digital methods and semantic technologies. My dissertation therefor examines the potential of digital scholarly editions in the analysis and reconstruction of artistic association and crafting processes, using the example of work diaries of the Austrian conceptual artist Hartmut Skerbisch, with a particular focus on modelling the complex graphics of the source and the semantic explication of relationships of text and image in general.

In addition to teaching text encoding with XML/TEI, processing XML data and digital scholarly editing for humanities students, I have also been teaching at pertinent summer schools, most recently in the context of IDE (Institute for Documentology and Scholarly Editing) and the DH Oxford Summer School.

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 IDE, and since 2015, I have had the honour to serve on the TEI Technical Council with the full support of my department.

Institutional contribution: Time allowance for service

Peter Stadler

Statement of purpose

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 continous work on improving the documentation, fixing bugs in the specification, and dissemination. Of course, a scholarly standard such as the TEI is never finished, 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. If elected, I'll especially try to push forward the current standoff proposal as well as the enhancement of ODD and Roma. " "I am a research assistant with the Carl-Maria-von-Weber-Gesamtausgabe since 2009 where my main focus is on our digital edition of Weber's letters, diaries and writings. Hence my daily work is full of angle brackets and a lot of X-Technologies around it. I am concerned with a broad spectrum of tasks: text analysis and concepts of text encoding, creation and documentation of appropriate XML schemata with ODD, and presentation of our TEI files on the web (based on eXist-db and Query).

Biography

I am involved with the TEI since 2008 and have initiated and convened the SIG Correspondence until 2016. which involves consulting for 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. For the term 2014/15 and 2016/17 I've been an elected member of the TEI Council.

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. Additionally, my department runs several other projects through which I am in close connection with the development of the MEI standard as well as our new center for Musik – Edition – Medien.

Institutional contribution: Time allowance for service, Contribution to expenses incurred

Magdalena Turska

Statement of purpose

My main interest lies in workflows and best practices for encoding and publishing scholarly editions of historical sources. After success of the TEI Simple project and subsequent incorporation of the TEI Processing Model into the TEI Guidelines I have been employing these principles in practice for a variety of projects. Recently my work concentrates on investigating efficient TEI-based database models for large TEI corpora, combining various research perspectives (eg paleography, linguistics, prosopography) and resources. I feel with my previous experience as a DiXiT fellow, privileged to work with many of the best scholars and TEI practitioners, and currently continuing to work on diverse academic projects 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.

Biography

I have studied Computer Science at the University of Mining and Metallurgy in Cracow, Poland and for many years worked as freelance software developer and IT consultant. I was always interested in how IT can aid humanities research and assisted various projects at the University of Warsaw until finally coming into TEI fold with the online edition of vast 16th-century correspondence collection (Ioannes Dantiscus Correspondence) there. 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 where majority of my work is still dedicated to digital editions based on TEI-encoded sources and leveraging the TEI Processing Model principles.

Since 2015 I am a member of the TEI Technical Council and TAPAS Advisory Board. I am an active member of TEI community, taking part in the ongoing discussion through usual communication channels (TEI-L, but also DiXiT project blog and my personal gitHub account), extensively engaging in teaching and outreach events across Europe and regularly serving as a reviewer and program committee member for TEI Members Meetings.

Institutional contribution: Time allowance for service

Candidate Statements: TEI Board of Directors

Martin Mueller

Statement of purpose

"Many years ago I walked into the student loan office at Indiana University to apply for a loan. A legend on the wall said something like “Money may not be everything, but it is way ahead of whatever comes next.” I have remembered that. Whatever else the Board of a non-profit organization does, its members are expected to give money, raise money, and spend it prudently. The TEI Board has been a prudent manager of its resources, but its members have no money and have not shown much interest or energy in raising it. That is my memory of several years on the Board, and recent minutes do not suggest much change. Raising money is a very boring business. But broadening the revenue base will be a key problem for the TEI in the years to come. It was supported in its early years by some twenty institutions each contributing $5,000.00 a year, but these supporters have drifted away, and there are now three or four at the most. Individual memberships have gone up over the years, but at $50.00 a head they will never account for more than a small share of income . If elected to the Board I will argue for a membership campaign whose tag line could be “From 20 x 5,000 to 200 x 500”. In my view the most promising revenue model for the TEI consists of an increasingly global network of institutional supporters, counted in the low hundreds and contributing membership fees in the low or mid hundreds of dollars. To reach that goal the TEI must do a better job of preaching beyond the choir of producers of encoded texts, reach the wider audience of their consumers, and tell them what TEIi-encoded texts do for them. That is not an easy task. The TEI provides an important piece of infrastructure for scholarly work, but infrastructure often is visible only when it does not work.

Biography

Martin Mueller is Professor emeritus of English and Classics at Northwestern University.