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.

Candidate Statements: TEI Technical Council

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.

Jessica H. Lu

Statement of purpose

I am profoundly honored to be nominated for election to the TEI Technical Council by my colleague and Council veteran, Raffaele Viglianti. I am also keenly aware that I am a relative newcomer to the TEI community and I take this opportunity—to actively participate in the Council’s many projects and learn from my more experienced colleagues—very seriously. I aim to bring a unique perspective to the Technical Council as an encoder, teacher, and researcher who found TEI quite by accident, and who has actively sought to bring the guidelines into conversation with theory, scholarship, and communities for which it was not necessarily designed. As digital practices and ethics become increasingly important in learning and research across many disciplines and throughout all levels of rank, TEI has the potential to mature into a truly “global language,” but doing so requires attention to how different communities across the world are represented, preserved, annotated, and marked up in text. I hope to steer the Council’s agenda toward meaningful revisitation of the P5 guidelines and best practices, and contribute toward a P6 that serves not only those who use it, but also the human lives—past, present, and future—whose dignity, value, and wellbeing are affirmed or diminished by the work that we do. I additionally aim to support and advocate strongly for the extension of TEI instruction to unexpected spaces and places, as we look toward a future for TEI that is increasingly diverse in application, age, region, discipline, class, race, and ethnicity.

I enjoy the strong support of my home institution as I stand for election to the TEI Technical Council, and I am eager to attend council meetings and devote regular time to this energetic community and to the Council’s work.

Biography

I am a teacher, researcher, and administrator in the Honors College at the University of Maryland, College Park, where I also collaborate closely with the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH). As a former Postdoctoral Associate and, later, Assistant Director of the first African American History, Culture and Digital Humanities (AADHum) Initiative team, I regularly taught TEI to undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, and community activists broadly invested in exploring how digital tools and methods can enrich humanities inquiry, and how humanities theory and scholarship conversely trouble our use and approach to those same tools and methods. TEI remains central to my research and pedagogy, as I have continued to teach TEI to graduate students and faculty—most recently, upon invitation to teach a course, Introduction to the TEI for Black Digital Humanities, at Humanities Intensive Learning and Teaching (HILT) 2019—and to undergraduate students as Associate Director of the Design Cultures and Creativity (DCC) program at the University of Maryland.

Trained as a rhetorical critic, I began engaging TEI (and, later, XSLT and XPath) in 2017 as a mode of scholarly analysis for a corpus of historical documents relating to the legal, social, political, and economic freedom of former slaves at the culmination of the American Civil War. This exploration has since inspired my concerted effort, through both practice and pedagogy, to understand and theorize the potential affordances and significant challenges of TEI as a standard of markup for digital work that intentionally centers and celebrates Black life, history, and culture. I am currently pursuing this aim by developing a schema for Critical Black Digital Humanities, in collaboration with Caitlin Pollock, a fellow TEI consortium member and Digital Scholarship Specialist at the University of Michigan Library.

Martina Scholger

Statement of purpose

I have served two consecutive terms on the TEI Technical Council, and had the honor of acting as its Chair for the last two years. In addition to that, I am part of the recently established Infrastructure Group. I would much appreciate to continue my work for the Council for another term. The task remains to be challenging, but also very enriching. My main interests are:

• dealing with graphical elements and sketches (especially in sources where text and graphics have equivalent relevance)
• primary sources and genetic editing
• semantic enrichment of digital scholarly editions
• linked open data
• and interoperability of the TEI with other standards (e.g. RDF).

I also want to continue working on the important topic of multilingualism and the internationalization of the TEI Guidelines and specifications: building on several translation efforts and an evaluation of machine-based translation tools for the automated translation of the TEI specifications into other languages, we are now considering approaches to improve the translation workflow.

Biography

I am currently a senior scientist at the Centre for Information Modelling – Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities at the University of Graz. I completed my Ph.D in Digital Humanities in 2018. My research field is digital scholarly editing and the application of digital methods and semantic technologies to humanities’ source material. Recently, I have begun with exploring the application of Distant Reading methods to multilingual literary corpora encoded in TEI.

In addition to teaching text encoding with XML/TEI, processing XML data and digital scholarly editing for humanities students, I have been teaching at pertinent summer schools and workshops (e.g. DH Oxford Summer School, ADHO DH 2019 in Mexico City, IDE Schools) and organized schools on TEI, like the pre-conference school offered in Graz in September 2019.

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.

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 continuous work on improving the documentation, fixing bugs in the specification, and dissemination. Of course, a scholarly standard such as the TEI is never 'done', 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. In the last years, I already pushed the development of the TEI infrastructure, hosting several TEI related services such as Roma and Oxgarage at Paderborn University.

I would like to continue this work on the TEI Stylesheets as well as the TEI infrastructure (including documentation!) and try to mentor new Council members to make their own path in the TEI ecosystem.

Biography

I am involved with the TEI since 2008 and have initiated and convened the Correspondence SIG until 2016. Since then I advised and worked on 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. Since 2014 I've been an elected member of the TEI Council.

My daily work at the Carl-Maria-von-Weber-Gesamtausgabe focuses on the digital edition of Weber's letters, diaries and writings. This covers the whole range from text encoding and ODD schema development to development and deployment of web applications for publishing this digital edition.

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 and music. Additionally, my department runs several other projects through which I am in close connection with the development of the MEI standard.