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.

Magdalena Turska

Statement of purpose

My main interest lies in workflows and best practices for encoding and publishing scholarly editions of historical sources. After incorporation of the TEI Processing Model into the TEI Guidelines I have been following up on its principles of empowerment of the editors, sustainability and interoperability in the development on the TEI Publisher - an open source platform for publishing TEI and other XML corpora, now in version 5. 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 technical editor for a large editorial project at the University of Warsaw, later DiXiT fellow, privileged to work with many of the best scholars and TEI practitioners around the world, and currently working as a developer or advisor for numerous and 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 dedicated to the development of the TEI Publisher and creation of digital editions based on TEI-encoded sources as well as development of the eXist-db, native XML database underlying numerous DH projects.

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.

Candidate Statements: TEI Board of Directors

James Cummings

Statement of purpose

It is an honour to stand for election to the TEI-C Board. I have been involved with the TEI community as a user and volunteer for many years, serving as an elected member of the TEI Technical Council since 2005, including a stint as its chair. Over many years working for the University of Oxford, I worked on many projects using TEI, providing advice, support, and technological development. Some of these projects went on to benefit the infrastructure of the TEI Consortium itself. I have long been involved in teaching the TEI at many institutions internationally. Instead of accepting a kind nomination by someone to stand for the TEI-C Technical Council again, I have chosen to stand for the TEI-C Board, for a number of reasons. Firstly, I wish to continue to contribute to the TEI Consortium, but I want to make way for new people with a diverse range of skills to stand for election to the TEI-C Technical Council. Secondly, I believe that having a TEI-C Board member with a long history of experience on the TEI-C Technical Council will help as it works towards a more resilient technical infrastructure. Lastly, I believe that I have a lot to offer the TEI-C Board. If elected to the TEI-C Board, I will work to help ensure that the TEI improves its overall sustainability but retains flexibility in an ever-changing technological world.

Biography

In 2017 I moved from a research support role at the University of Oxford to Newcastle University, where I am a tenured Senior Lecturer in Late Medieval English Literature and Digital Humanities. In this research-focussed post I work in the areas of digital scholarly editing and late medieval drama. My TEI experience remains central to my own research and also projects under the umbrella of the Animating Text Newcastle University project. I created, and continue to run, the grassroots openly nominated and openly voted annual DH Awards. I founded and directed the Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School from 2010 (when it grew out of the TEI summer school) to my departure in 2017. 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 area around The Wash, c. 1350-1550” and involved a significant amount of archival transcription of Late Middle English and Latin documents.

Kathryn Tomasek

Statement of purpose

I am honored to have been nominated for a third term as a member of the Board of Directors of the Text Encoding Initiative Consortium, and I am happy to stand for re-election. If I am elected for a third term, it will be my last.

My understanding of the duties of the Board has evolved considerably since my first term. When I joined the Board in 2016, I had long agreed with the characterization of the Board’s responsibilities as “keeping the lights on,” that is, making sure that regular business of the Consortium is done—nominations, elections, the annual conference and Members’ Meeting. I still believe that the Council does the most important work of the TEI in maintaining the Guidelines, but I have come to a clearer understanding of the work of the Board. One of our jobs might be to “keep the lights on,” but there are broader duties that fall to the Board, duties one might characterize as having a sense of “the big picture.”

I would define “the big picture” as a sense of the long-term stability of the TEI-C: fiscally, as a set of services and practices, and as a community. And I have seen the Board work towards these ends during the time that I have served on it.

The founders of the TEI-C created an open, free resource with the intention of realizing the promise of the web’s potential for interchange of data. Over the past thirty-plus years, the TEI has evolved, and we have at the same time maintained our focus on the Guidelines, on openness, and on being a community-focused organization.

Generational change as people have retired or moved on to new interests have necessitated a shift from relying on institutional memory to more formal organization of some of the Board’s activities. My predecessor as Chair, Michelle Dalmau, did substantial work to document the practices of the Board, and I continue to be grateful to her for this contribution. In 2018, we began to work with the organization management firm Virtual, Inc., to handle the TEI-C’s business services. In 2019, we have organized an Infrastructure Working Group to inventory and establish protocols for maintaining all of the technical services of the TEI.

Understanding the TEI’s “big picture” means realizing that in addition to the Guidelines as maintained by the Council and the routine matters of elections and conferences that are the purview of the Board, the TEI is also the publisher of a journal, and it is an international community that continues to grow and flourish even as we face the kinds of challenges posed by the server fails of the past year. I see the work that we have done in my time as Chair to follow on the goal of preparing the TEI-C for its future by rationalizing the regular maintenance work overseen by the Board and carried out by the many volunteers on whose dedication the TEI-C relies.

The TEI is an community of volunteers that has been doing some of the foundational work of Digital Humanities for more than thirty years, and my goal is to ensure that we continue to be able to do that work for at least the next thirty years and beyond.

Biography

Kathryn Tomasek is Professor of History at Wheaton College in Massachusetts, where she teaches U.S. Women’s History and Digital History. She has been the PI on several grants focused on TEI markup of historical accounting records. An alpha version of her current project can be seen at https://gams.uni-graz.at/context:depcha.