TEI-C Elections 2023

Introduction

In 2023, TEI Members will hold an election to fill 4 open positions on the TEI Technical Council (3-year term). There are 2 open positions on the TEI Board of Directors (3-year term). The following people have been nominated and have agreed to stand as candidates for election to the TEI Technical Council and the TEI 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 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 will open on August 7, 2023

Voting closes on September 7, 2023 at 09:00 CEST

Candidate Statements: TEI Technical Council

Syd Bauman

Statement of purpose: Syd is currently heavily invested in both the new chapter on computer mediated communication (CMC — roughly the guidelines for encoding e-mails, tweets, etc.); and in ATOP, the new processor for converting ODD to usable schemas. He would also like to see progress in several other areas: “User-oriented” efforts, e.g., creating documentation, recommendations, and customizations for particular constituencies or user groups; improving the look-and-feel (and flexibility) of custom documentation; and creating or commissioning reference implementations expanding the scope of the Guidelines, e.g. to include greater support for legal documents, a method for encoding acrostics, and advice in using IIIF. He is also eager to see technical improvements to the Guidelines, e.g., further automated constraint checking, greater simplicity and expressivityin the ODD language, changes in TEI pointers to better align TEI with the existing W3C XPointer framework, and improvements to the automated deprecation system.

Biography:

Syd came to the TEI through an interest in markup and markup languages. He became interested in SGML just prior to its publication in 1986, but did not start engaging with a real markup language until late 1990. At that time he was already working at the Brown University Women Writers Project, where his first major task was to convert WWP legacy data to be in line with the newly published TEI P1. He still works at the WWP as the Senior XML Programmer/Analyst, and ever since that first challenge he’s been thinking of ways to improve the TEI. From 2001 to 2007 Syd served the TEI as the North American Editor, and since 2013 on the Technical Council; thus he is familiar with the workings of the Council. He has been very active in the TEI community as a frequent presenter on TEI topics at conferences; by consulting closely with nearly ½ dozen TEI projects, and providing occasional assistance to another dozen or so; as a member of several SIGs and editor of the Library SIG’s Best Practices for TEI in Libraries; as the chair of the Council’s ATOP task force; and of course, through teaching numerous TEI workshops and seminars. Syd has an AB from Brown University in political science, and has worked as a systems programmer and a freelance computer typesetter.

Gustavo Fernández Riva

Statement of purpose: As part of my work I regularly advise projects and instruct people on how to create editions with XML-TEI. As a result of this continuous exchange with students and other users of the TEI guidelines, I recognize a need to keep strengthening the TEI, particularly with regards to accessibility, outreach and innovation. As a member of the Technical Council I would like to focus not only on maintaining, expanding and improving the standard, but on incentivizing resources that help to broaden the community, make encoding and publishing XML editions easier, and integrate new technological developments (such as automatic transcription of handwritten sources). I am also committed to continuing the important work on internationalisation undertaken during the last years to help broaden the community in meaningful ways.

Biography:

I studied Comparative Literature at the University of Buenos Aires (Argentina) and Medieval Literature at the University of Porto (Portugal). My PhD dissertation at the University of Buenos Aires included a digital edition of medieval texts. I have held two postdoctoral positions in Germany researching different aspects of DH. Since the beginning of 2023, I have been a Research Associate in Digital Humanities at the University Library of Heidelberg, where I collaborate in the development of the library’s infrastructure for digital editions, heiEDITIONS.

Torsten Roeder

Statement of purpose: As a dedicated TEI user, I have immensely benefited from the diligent work of the TEI consortium. With admiration for the decades of work invested in crafting the TEI guidelines, I seek a position on the TEI technical council, eager to learn from the council's expertise and actively contribute my own knowledge.

My current focus lies in typography, collation, source descriptions, and TEI based frameworks/tools using TEI as an exchange format. I am particularly interested in expanding the guidelines to encompass born-digital heritage, which will likely play a vital role in future text collections and editions. Additionally, I aim to explore interfaces and interface descriptions within the TEI framework, and I have a keen eye on discussing solutions for the ecological sustainability of TEI related technologies.

I am honored by the opportunity to be considered for the TEI technical council and pledge to be a proactive and constructive member.

Biography:

I work at the newly founded Center for Philology and Digitality at the University of Wurzburg (Germany), managing digital scholarly editions and a research project on an early digital heritage collection.

With an academic background in musicology and Italian studies, I gained extensive expertise in TEI and related technologies during my PhD, while working on 19th century prints and manuscripts. I am an active member of the Institute for Documentology and Scholarly Editing (IDE) and currently serve as vice chair of the Scientific Coordination Committee for Editions in the German National Research Data Infrastructure consortium (Text+).

Nicholas Cole

Statement of purpose: I am exited to stand for election to the TEI Technical Council and honoured to have been nominated by two people. I previously served a one-year term on the Council. This is perhaps the most important single community in all of digital humanities (the future of humanities?) and I am eager to make a substantive contribution.

My academic work is focused on the analysis of collaboratively edited texts, and involved a workflow that begins in the archives with digitization and transcription, through analysis of complicated materials, to the creation of resources for public dissemination and use in classroom settings.

I have a good knowledge of the TEI codebase and the knowledge necessary to make a strong technical contribution to the standard and the other infrastructure that supports the TEI. I am also keen to enhance support for disabled users.

If elected I will serve with commitment and energy.

Biography:

I am a Senior Research Fellow at Pembroke College, University of Oxford, where I run one of Oxford University’s digitial humanities projects (www.quillproject.net). I collaborate with institutions in America, France, Australia, and India, and have prioritized creating opportunities for students from non-traditional backgrounds to contribute meaningfully to research projects.

As well as working in the fields of legal history and political thought, my interests over the last 8 years have increasingly focused on the digital future of humanities scholarship, including efforts to improve data encoding, discovery, analysis, and visualization, and project sustainability.

Raffaele Viglianti

Statement of purpose: During my tenure in the TEI council, my approach has focused on finding practical solutions and seeking a middle ground in the council’s discussions. My primary goals are moving the development of TEI Guidelines and schema forward effectively, as well as reducing barriers for users. This work strikes me as fundamental in order for TEI users to more easily achieve proficiency and create rich scholarly resources with our community standard. For example, since my early involvement with TEI, I have been pursuing an agenda that highlights the merits of ODD customizations and have redesigned and re-implemented the customization tool Roma, which I intend to continue perfecting and maintaining.

Finally, I regularly develop TEI software (on council and beyond) with longevity and sustainability in mind, by promoting low-tech and future-proof solutions. These approaches can make it progressively easier for council members to maintain the TEI ecosystem and for users to work with their TEI encodings sustainably regardless of their level of access to web infrastructure.

Biography:

Dr. Raffaele (Raff) Viglianti is a Senior Research Software Developer at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, University of Maryland. His research is grounded in digital humanities and textual scholarship, where “text” includes musical notation. He researches new and efficient practices to model and publish textual sources as innovative and sustainable digital scholarly resources. Dr. Viglianti is currently an elected member of the Text Encoding Initiative technical council (until Dec 2023) and the Technical Editor of the Scholarly Editing journal.

Matthew Evan Davis

Statement of purpose: I’m particularly interested in the ways that TEI can better reflect the material affordances of the manuscript and early printed object. The embedded transcription method has a lot of potential to capture the structure of the material object in ways that don’t divorce text from medium, but I feel it’s rarely used to that full potential. If elected to the board, I’d like to push for a reconsideration of the ways that content and context – in this case materiality and paratext – are reflected in how we build tools to make texts machine readable.

Biography:

Currently I am a Lecturer and Coordinator of the Graduate Theme in Digital Arts and Humanities at the University of British Columbia’s Okanagan campus. Prior to this I served in a number of postdoctoral positions, most recently as a ZKS-Lendrum Postdoctoral Fellow in the Scientific Study of Manuscripts and Inscriptions at Durham University. I currently working on a stylometric analysis of the corpus of the works of John Lydgate and continues to transcribe works for The Minor Works of John Lydgate Virtual Archive (in TEI, using embedded transcription), with an expectation that Lydgate’s mummings and disguisings will be available this year.

Joey Takeda

Statement of purpose: I am deeply honoured to stand for election for TEI Technical Council. I was thrilled to join Council in January of this year, and I have, over the last 8 months, gained not only a deep appreciation of the intensive and thoughtful work required by Council members, but also a strong sense of how I can contribute my expertise to the ongoing development and improvement of the TEI Guidelines, Stylesheets, and Infrastructure.

My goal is to ensure that the TEI not only remains useful to its users, but can also adapt and respond to the community’s changing needs (technical, textual, social, and political). To me, this means building infrastructures that are transparent, inclusive, and equitable and that are guided by anti-racist and decolonial approaches to addressing oppressive and exclusionary practices and protocols. In particular, I hope to continue work on maintaining, rationalizing, documenting, and modernizing the TEI’s codebase and infrastructure to improve usability, sustainability, and accessibility. Specific goals include creating instructions, guidelines, and mechanisms to facilitate and encourage community contributions; rationalizing and improving Technical Council Working Documents (“TCWs”) so that they offer a robust and clear guide to Council’s practices; and facilitating the continued adoption of “minimal computing” and “Endings-compliant” approaches to the development of the Guidelines and TEI-C website.

Biography:

I am a Developer in the Digital Humanities Innovation Lab (DHIL) at Simon Fraser University, specializing in digital textual editions, text encoding, and digital preservation. At SFU, I regularly teach workshops on text encoding, XML, XPath, and XSLT, and minimal computing, and I have extensive experience in developing and maintaining TEI projects, authoring ODD customizations, and developing CI/CD pipelines for web applications. I currently serve as the Technical Director of The Winnifred Eaton Archive, a member of TEI By Example’s International Advisory Board, and a member of the Public Knowledge Project’s (PKP) Technical Advisory Board.

I hold an MA in English Literature from the University of British Columbia, where my research focused primarily on the digital humanities, textual studies, and Indigenous and diasporic literature in Canada, and I am currently pursuing a Masters of Library and Information Studies at the University of Alberta. Before joining SFU in 2020, I worked as a contract programmer for the University of Victoria's HCMC on various projects (such as The Map of Early Modern London, The Landscapes of Injustice Digital Archive, and The Endings Project), and as a co-developer, with Martin Holmes, of staticSearch (https://github.com/projectEndings/staticSearch).

Candidate Statements: TEI Board

Julius Beneoluchi Odili

Statement of purpose: To advance the objectives of the TEI-C Board

Biography:

Julius Beneoluchi Odili was born on the 15th of February, 1965. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in English Language and Education, a Master of Education in Educational Administration, Postgraduate Diploma in Computer Science Science, Mast of Science in Computer Science and a PhD in Computer Science. He is presently a Senior Lecturer in Mathematical Sciences Department and the Acting Director, Institute of Digital Humanities, Anchor University Lagos, Nigeria

Gimena del Rio Riande

Statement of purpose: Since 2011 I have contributed to building a DH and TEI-interested community in many Hispanophone countries. Most of the TEI projects I have either coordinated or mentored relate the use of open source tools and standard languages to the encoding and publishing of multilingual texts. I have been part of the TEI board of directors since 2018 and I would love to continue strengthening initiatives related to textual scholarship, open source technologies, multilingualism and community building outside and inside the consortium. I also aim to explore ways in which the TEI could grow as a more open and grassroots community. The TEI is a global and diverse community and it is important to investigate and put into practice different ways of participation that do not only relate to membership.

Biography:

Dr. Gimena del Rio Riande is Associate Researcher at the Instituto de Investigaciones Bibliográficas y Crítica Textual at CONICET, the government agency that fosters the development of science and technology in Argentina. Her main academic interests deal with Digital Humanities, Digital Scholarly Editions, and Open Research Practices in the Humanites.

She is the director of the Laboratorio de Humanidades Digitales (HD LAB) at CONICET and the first Postgraduate training in Digital Humanities in Argentina. She serves as Chief editor of the journal Revista de Humanidades Digitales and takes part of the board of directors at the Text Encoding Initiative Consortium and the Asociación Argentina de Humanidades Digitales. Since 2020, she is one of the DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) Ambassadors for Latin America.

David Maus

Statement of purpose: I am delighted to be nominated to stand for election for the Board of Directors. Professionally, I grew up wedged between library metadata formats and TEI encoded documents, developing a growing knowledge of markup technologies to garden all those trees. I value the TEI community as a nerdy and welcoming group with markup as the common denominator. Where else can you learn about the encoding of multilingual illustrated children's braille books?

Yet there is room for improvement when it comes to TEI, the organization. If elected, I would like to focus on making TEI, the organization, more approachable. I hope to facilitate more timely and open communication. This includes, but is not limited to, coordinating the long overdue update of the homepage, drafting pragmatic guidelines for publishing to the homepage, and finding a solution for the dormant TEI wiki.

It is the organizational, not the technical, challenges I would help tackle. If not elected, my offer to help stands.

Biography:

I’m head of the research of development department at the State and University Library Hamburg. My team and I provide patron-facing information services, ranging from discovery systems to specialized XML processing. As part of my work, I act as a liaison to digital humanities research at the University of Hamburg and other higher education institutions. I’m the sole author of SchXslt, a modern implementation of the Schematron validation language for structured documents, and the main author of ATOP, the new TEI ODD processor. I serve on the program committee of the MarkupUK conference and act as speaker for QCovery, a regional consortium developing shared library services. I informally participate as a community representative in the standardization process of ISO Schematron.

Kevin McMullen

Statement of purpose: I am honored to be nominated to stand for election to the TEI Board of Directors. While I have never been formally involved with TEI-C as an organization, I have worked on TEI-based projects since 2010 and am thus a long-time TEI user, fan, and advocate of the standard's power to aid in the preservation of invaluable cultural materials. Having been involved in training dozens of students in the use of TEI—nearly all of them with no prior coding experience, let alone experience in TEI—I am a firm believer that introductory knowledge to TEI need not be a major intellectual or technological hurdle. I am therefore interested in helping to bring awareness of and training in TEI to a broader community, and in the process grow both the number of digitization projects as well as the organization's membership. I am also interested in making more visible the ways in which TEI users, of any level, can contribute to and build upon the TEI guidelines and be involved in the active development of the standard. It would be my pleasure to serve and give back to the TEI community in whatever ways I can as a board member, and I thank you for your consideration.

Biography:

I am a Research Assistant Professor of English at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln (UNL) and a Fellow in UNL's Center for Digital Research in the Humanities. Since 2018 I have served as project manager of the Walt Whitman Archive, and I have worked on the staff of the project since 2010. I also currently serve as the project manager of the Charles W. Chesnutt Archive, and am the co-founder and editor of Fanny Fern in The New York Ledger, a TEI-based online digital edition of the newspaper writings of the 19th-century American protofeminist Fanny Fern. For three years I served as president of the Digital Americanists society. I also occasionally teach classes on American literature and attempt to raise my three daughters in such a way that they grow up with no desire to go into academia (just kidding, sort of).

Emmanuel NGUE UM

Statement of purpose: I am grateful to the members of the TEI Consortium who nominated me for election to the Consortium's Board of Directors. I've been using the TEI framework in my linguistics study since 2014. Mainstream descriptive toolsets of structural, functional, and generative linguistics do not always lead to a consistent and transparent analysis of linguistic structures of African languages in the context of language diversity that characterises the social environment in which I carry out my research. This is especially true of tones. My contribution to the TEI is a proposal for the development of a standard for tonal encoding in Niger-Congo languages.

If elected to the TEI Board of Directors, my primary goal will be to advocate for TEI outreach in African linguistics circles.

Biography:

I am an Associate Professor of African languages and linguistics at the University of Yaounde 1 in Cameroon. My research interests include the study of language as a socially emerging reality, language technologies and revitalisation, language and espistemological (in)justice.

My interest in language work is primarily motivated by an aspiration to work towards wellbeing and social justice. In this regard, I consider myself to be a language activist.

Between 2010 and 2020, I was involved in two large language documentation projects, the first as a research fellow and the second as a lead investigator. I am currently a member of the Endangered Languages Project's Governance Committee.

I was the co-applicant and host of the first meeting of the Institute of Digital Humanities of Francophone Africa, which was held in Yaounde (Cameroon) in March 2022, with the goal of promoting Digital Humanities practices in less-endowed environments of higher education in Africa. I am currently the coordinator for the Association of Digital Humanities in Francophone Africa, as well as a member of the Humanistica Committee, the Francophone association of Digital Humanities.

Karen Bourrier

Statement of purpose: I am delighted to stand for the TEI-C Board. I have been working with the TEI for more than ten years now. I was first introduced to TEI through workshops in 2010 with Julia Flanders and Syd Bauman at Brown and then Northeastern when I was a lecturer at Boston University. I also apprenticed with Elisha Beshero-Bondar and the Digital Mitford Project. Since then, I have been involved in two projects using TEI, Digital Dinah Craik, which encodes letters, and Mapping Victorian Literary Sociability, which encodes historic geographic information. I have taught with the TEI in graduate seminars and trained several research assistants to its standards.

Biography:

I am Professor of English and the University of Calgary, specializing in nineteenth-century literature, women's writing, disability studies, and the digital humanities. I am the author of is the author of The Measure of Manliness: Disability and Masculinity in mid-Victorian Fiction (University of Michigan Press, 2015) and Victorian Bestseller: The Life of Dinah Craik (University of Michigan Press, 2019).

Diane Jakacki

Statement of purpose: My commitment to the TEI, and my interest in continuing to serve on the TEI Board of Directors, is rooted in my commitment to integrating TEI standards ever more thoroughly into pedagogical, training, and editorial and documentary research environments. I am particularly interested in working through the Board to support endeavours to create opportunities for the TEI to be adopted more widely by communities that can be daunted by the seeming complexities of the Guidelines and overwhelm of the assumed need to be able to code (I enjoy working with groups to prove that the feelings of dauntedness can be assuaged and in fact turned to great personal enjoyment!)

I truly value the time I spend on Board issues and believe it is the most gratifying and enjoyable service in which I am involved. I hope that I can continue to participate in ways that serve and extend the text encoding communities

Biography:

I am digital scholarship coordinator and associate faculty in Comparative & Digital Humanities at Bucknell University. My research focuses on digital humanities scholarship and pedagogy, early modern British literature and drama, critical making, digital scholarly production and publication.

I am lead of the REED London project, PI of the Mellon Foundation funded Liberal Arts Based Publishing Cooperative project and partner with CWRC in developing the LEAF virtual research environment. I am site tech lead for LEAF and a research contributor to the LINCS project, as well as co-PI (with James Cummings) of the NEH-AHRC funded Evolving Hands project.

I currently serve as Chair of the TEI Board of Directors and also as Chair of the Executive Board for ADHO.

I am the Fulbright Canada Research Chair in Digital Humanities (2022-3). I have published and presented broadly on DH and pedagogy, including co-edited volumes Early Modern Studies After the Digital Turn (ITER 2016), and What We Teach When We Teach DH (U Minnesota Press 2023).