TEI Officer Nominations — 2024-25
This document offers names, statements of purpose, and biographies of candidates for open positions for the TEI Board of Directors and Technical Council.
TEI Technical Council
Sandra Balick
Affiliation: Freie Universität Berlin
Statement of Purpose: With a background in library management and information science, TEI has been a constant companion throughout my career. I've spent the last few years working in digital humanities, with a particular focus on digital editions. What I appreciate most about TEI is how it connects researchers and their work across disciplines and languages, creating so many opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration.
Over the years, I've noticed that TEI's flexibility, which is one of its strengths, can also lead to some ambiguities that can make it difficult for data compatibility across projects. This can be a challenge for users without a strong technical background. While efforts are constantly being made to address this, there remains significant differences in how data modeling is approached across projects. If appointed to the Technical Council, I would focus on these challenges while maintaining the flexibility that makes the TEI so valuable.
I would be interested in working together to strengthen the TEI for the broader scholarly community, and in learning from the expertise of the Council.
Biography: I am currently working at the Freie Universität Berlin on a project focused on the collation of multilingual texts for Digital Editions. My work involves analyzing and visualizing alignment data generated by semi-automated processes, and exploring how this can improve editorial workflows. Previously, I have worked on several Digital Editions projects, where I was involved in all stages of the process, from data modeling and annotation to visualization and publication.
Elisa Beshero-Bondar
Affiliation: Penn State Erie, The Behrend College
Statement of Purpose: For the past two years I have been serving as chair of the Technical Council, and I seek re-election to Council in order either to continue in that role or to support the next chair in leading the group. Chairing the Council requires setting agendas for the monthly meetings, keeping track of issues we are committed to resolving, ensuring a timely release schedule and good documentation of our releases, but also looking ahead to support and implement significant enhancements to the TEI. In my time with the TEI Technical Council, I am happy to have led some intensive revision efforts, especially in the encoding of sex and gender in the Guidelines. I want to continue on Council now to ensure that more such good ideas from our community are seen through to completion, for example in pulling Council together to complete work on the new Computer Mediated Communication chapter. I am also committed to ensuring the the Council and community maintain strong lines of communication in times of transition. In the past year I have worked to ensure the stable migration of our TEI-L and SIG e-mail listservs to maintain an unbroken publicly searchable archive stretching back to 1990.
My experience with the XML stack (including Relax NG, XSLT, XQuery, Schematron) shapes my teaching and engagement with the TEI on Council. I firmly believe in sharing these technologies with colleagues and students in regular workshops as a vital “on ramp” for learning to process and develop projects with the TEI and for serving the TEI community. I hope to continue to help new Council members investigate the strangeness of the aging TEI Stylesheets, and to make sure we are all able to contribute to updating our technical processing.
Council work thrives on lively debate, and I strive to keep our conversations lively and productive, to help find connections in related issues, to educate and encourage new Council members, and to make sure people are comfortable asking questions when we are baffled. 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: My professional life is built on text encoding, and my positions at Penn State University and the University of Pittsburgh have provided me strong institutional support for my work with TEI to educate students and colleagues, and to conduct collaborative research. Since July 2020, I am Professor of Digital Humanities and Program Chair of Digital Media, Arts, and Technology at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College where I teach markup languages, digital scholarly editing, text analysis, and web project development. Prior to 2020, I taught coding courses and literature surveys at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg as Associate Professor of English and director of a Center for Digital Studies. I most enjoy guiding students to manage their own projects that apply CBML and TEI as well as their own invented XML schemas. My development site at newtFire shares my teaching materials, projects, and ongoing adventures with markup technologies.
My experience with TEI runs broad and deep, grounded in 18th- and 19th-century literary research. Most recently, my work with Raffaele Viglianti on the Frankenstein Variorum investigates how far we can take the TEI in collating differently-encoded editions (reconciling surface-and-zone encoding with structural markup). With my students I have been seeking methods to encode handwriting on printed survey forms, and this year with Syd Bauman I am exploring how we might encode listserv archives using CMC and correspondence modules. In the past decade I have experimented with 18th-century records of longitude and latitude in Pacific voyage publications, to distinguish references to mappable and mythical places across verse stanzas and paratext notes of epic poems, and (with help from Stacey Triplette and Helena Bermúdez Sabel) to model with TEI how much a 19th-century English translation condensed and altered a sixteenth-century Spanish text. I founded the Digital Mitford project to edit in TEI the 19th-century manuscript letters of Mary Russell Mitford together with her published poetry, drama, and prose fiction, and to develop an extensive prosopography from these documents to explore as a network. The Digital Mitford project engages researchers and students from multiple universities in TEI for drama, poetry, correspondence, and continues to help orient new scholarly editors and project designers to the TEI.
Nicholas Cole
Affiliation: Pembroke College, University of Oxford
Statement of Purpose: In my academic work, I both use and produce digital editions. I am particularly interested in legal and Parliamentary texts, and in the representation of extended negotiations. I am the principal investigator for one of Oxford University's largest digital humanities projects (The Quill Project). I am keen to see the creation of tools that enable the accurate and efficient production of modern digital editions, especially in the context of highly constrained research budgets. Having served on the TEI-C for a one-year term before, I am fully aware of the importance of this committees work and the time commitment required. I value the TEI community as perhaps the most important single community for the promotion of digital research methods in the humanities.
Biography: I am a Senior Research Fellow at Pembroke College, University of Oxford, and also serve as the College's Academic Director. My research group collaborates 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. I am one of the architects of the MSt in Digital Scholarship at Oxford and serve on its examination board.
As well as working in the fields of legal history and political thought, my interests over the last 9 years have increasingly focused on the digital future of humanities scholarship, including efforts to improve data encoding, discovery, analysis, and visualization, and project sustainability.
Dimitria Grigoriou
Affiliation: Instistute for Habsburg and Balkan Studies, Austrian Academy of Sciences
Statement of Purpose: In my role I have the opportunity to work on a number of projects involving TEI/XML within digital editions. I regularly support and advise other colleagues about the TEI and its guidelines. I would like to maintain, support and extend the standard by providing solutions tailored to the needs of editors. I am interested in teaching and introducing the use of TEI/XML to young researchers, and in encouraging ongoing dialogue between people in the humanities. I am eager to contribute to raising awareness and providing training in TEI to a wider audience, with the goal of expanding the number of digitization projects. Additionally, I am committed to highlighting how TEI users, regardless of experience level, can actively contribute to and enhance the TEI guidelines, as well as participate in the ongoing development of the standard.
Biography: In my MA thesis I dealt with the encoding of Ancient Greek Mathematical texts and in particular Euclid’s geometry using the TEI/ΧML standard where I first introduced to the encoding process. In October 2021 project I was an editor-collaborator in the FWF project 'Auden Musulin Papers: A Digital Edition of W. H. Auden's Letters to Stella Musulin’ (Grant-DOI 10.55776/P33754) at ACDH-CH. I am interested in languages and language structure and I speak seven of them. In the summer semester 2024, I taught an introductory course in Digital Humanities called (136142 KU Computational Background Skills for Digital Humanities) at the University of Vienna and is involved in initiatives and activities to promote Digital Humanities projects for younger generations with the KinderUni.I am particularly interested in supervising young researchers as part of the internship programme. I have working since 1 August 2024 as a technican for digital humanities in the long-term projects QhoD and the Minutes of the Council of Ministers - Habsburg Monarchy, supporting the encoding process. I have participated in various TEI conferences addressing issues related to encoding correspondence and uncertainty as well as providing potential solutions that could help improve and expand the TEI guidlines.
Todd Hanneken
Affiliation: St. Mary’s University
Statement of Purpose: I am honored to have been nominated to stand for election to the TEI-C Technical Council. Though considered technical among my peers, my formal training and academic position are in the humanities. Specifically, I am a professor of theology specializing in Hebrew Bible and ancient Jewish literature. As a teacher, I teach students to read very, very closely. I count the practice of encoding texts as a valuable tool along with the many established tools of historical-critical scholarship. If elected, my purpose would be to help scholars work directly with TEI. I would address various barriers to entry, especially the perception that humanists cannot learn technical encoding. I have found two concepts to be important in addressing this perception. First, the concept of the liberal arts is a long tradition of insisting that learning across disciplines is necessary in order to master any discipline. Second, the concept of minimal computing shows that the simplest tool for the job is often the most accessible, sustainable, and generally best. I would also draw on my work with IIIF to facilitate integration of TEI and IIIF.
Biography: Having dabbled with TEI since the 1990s, my first major project with TEI was an Open Educational Resources (OER) textbook titled Theological Questions. I wanted the textbook to be easy to update and accessible in web, PDF, and ePub formats. I identified TEI and XSLT as the best way to separate semantic structuring from visualization. I am currently using TEI to produce a scholarly edition of an ancient collection of writings attributed to Moses but excluded from the Jewish Bible. With support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, I am encoding in a single TEI file all the information required to derive a hypertext edition, a print edition, and IIIF presentation manifests and annotations. Because the manuscript is a palimpsest (erased and written over with a new text), my Jubilees Palimpsest Project has also become deeply involved in Multispectral Imaging.
Ulrike Henny-Krahmer
Affiliation: University of Rostock, Germany
Statement of Purpose: I have gotten to know the TEI through my work on digital humanities projects since 2011, especially digital edition and archive projects and most recently also in the context of creating larger text corpora in computational literary studies, and I am still enthusiastic about the guidelines as a basis for text encoding in the humanities and also about the TEI community as it regularly exchanges ideas and gives advice, e.g. via the TEI mailing list. I would very much like to join the TEI Technical Council to learn even more about the TEI, about how the standard is being further developed and about the technical infrastructure that goes with it, so that I can then also pass this knowledge on to others in my research and teaching. I am particularly interested in questions of mediation between text analysis tools that work with plain text and the TEI - how can the two be brought closer together? I also work with texts in Romance languages (Spanish and Portuguese) and hope that there will soon be more TEI resources in these languages. I would very much like to contribute the experience I have gained so far with the TEI to the work of the Technical Council.
Biography: Since 2021 I am Junior Professor for Digital Humanities at the University of Rostock in Germany, where I work on digital editions, digital text analysis and the sustainability of digital research, both in my own and in various collaborative projects in the humanities. Before that, I did my PhD at the University of Würzburg with a thesis on “Genre Analysis and Corpus Design: Nineteenth-Century Spanish-American Novels (1830-1910)” and worked at the Cologne Center for eHumanities. I have been a member of the Institute for Documentology and Editing (IDE) for over 10 years, where I contribute to the journal RIDE - A review journal for digital editions and resources.
Martin Holmes
Affiliation: University of Victoria Humanities Computing and Media Centre
Statement of Purpose: I'm a programmer in the Humanities Computing and Media Centre at the University of Victoria, where I've been involved with TEI-based projects since for over 20 years. I've been the principal programmer on TEI projects dealing with literary and historical texts and maps (The Map of Early Modern London mapoflondon.uvic.ca, The Colonial Despatches bcgenesis.uvic.ca), Indigenous language dictionaries (The Wendat Dictionary hcmc.uvic.ca/wendat/dictionary), poetry archives (Digital Victorian Periodical poetry, dvpp.uvic.ca), and many other diverse topics. I served two terms on Council between 2010 and 2015, and during that time I worked on image markup, the prefixDef element, bibliography encoding, and the jTEI article schema; I also I led the working group which researched and drafted the Writing Modes section of Chapter 5 of the Guidelines, and contributed to the the Ruby Annotations section of chapter 3. I've also assisted in maintaining the TEI plugin for Oxygen, and in documenting the TEI release process, and I served as Managing Editor of the Journal of the TEI from 2013 to 2015.
Since leaving Council I have remained engaged with the TEI, working with Syd Bauman to contribute a new set of build tests (Test2) to the TEI Stylesheets repository, assisting with the integration of Japanese translations, running one of the TEI's Jenkins build servers, and most recently serving on the ATOP working group, which is creating a new better-documented and more maintainable ODD-processing pipeline to generate schemas from TEI ODD files ATOP. The ATOP work has thrown up many ambiguities and problems in the specification of ODD, most of which require discussion and action by the TEI Council. This is the primary reason I would like to serve again on Council. There is a great deal of work to do not only on the ATOP ODD processor itself, but also in refining and documenting the ODD specification and the Guidelines sections dealing with it, and being on Council will greatly assist with this. When it is working, the new ODD processor will also have to be integrated into the Oxygen plugin, and I have some familiarity with that codebase. I would also like to focus more attention on date/time encoding and on GeoJSON support in the TEI geo element.
My institution is a member of the TEI and has been a strong supporter of my TEI work, so I will be able to attend Council meetings and commit regular time to Council work.
Biography: Martin Holmes has a BA (Hons) in English and an MPhil for research in phonology from the University of Manchester, and the RSA Dip TEFLA. He taught English in the UK, Japan, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia before settling in 1994 in Canada, where he now works as a Programmer/Analyst at the University of Victoria Humanities Computing and Media Centre. He was a director and founder of Half-Baked Software, Inc. (1999-2023), and authored several commercial and open-source software packages, including Hot Potatoes, Markin, and the Image Markup Tool. His work at UVic originally focused on technology and software for second language learning, but for the last 20 years he has been involved primarily in Digital Humanities projects, among them the Map of Early Modern London, Le mariage sous L'Ancien Régime, The Colonial Despatches of Vancouver Island and British Columbia, Linked Early Modern Drama Online, and The Endings Project. He has a particular interest in project resilience and sustainability. Nowadays he specializes in XML/XSLT/XQuery and HTML/JavaScript/CSS, but has written projects in Java, Delphi (Object Pascal) PHP/SQL, and other languages.
Dario Kampkaspar
Affiliation: University and State Library, Technical University Darmstadt
Statement of Purpose: I am excited and honoured to be nominated to stand for the TEI Council and thus contribute to the future of the TEI. For me, this means that while I have certain key interests, I’ll concentrate on what is most needed within the council: the TEI and its bodies are a group effort!
Over the past years and decades, the complexity of the TEI has increased continuously; there can be quite a learning curve, especially as there are often multiple ways of doing things. This is not a downside of the TEI but its strength as it enables its use in many different areas. But it might be helpful to more explicitly outline suggestions how phenomena could be addressed for certain use cases. Hence, one focus for me would be to work towards these kinds of suggestions (which would be a combination of a customization and an expanded documentation) so as to make the first steps in the TEI world easier and improve interoperability.
By now, the model to describe a text’s meta data or the entities (in the broadest sense) related to it, has become very powerful. I would like to work towards further improving and enhancing the possibilities to describe these kinds of data as well as to allow for a clearer distinction between the descriptions and the text contents. This separation of concerns will also be helpful when learning to use the TEI or when teaching its use (e.g. in environments that already have established ways of describing meta data).
I hope that, if elected, I can contribute to the open, fair and inclusive community the TEI is..
Biography: Currently, I am the head of the Centre for Digital Editions at the University and State Library in Darmstadt, Germany. The projects I’m involved in span from in-depth scholarly editions to large corpus building (240 years of newspapers) and mass conversion of different formats to TEI. Also, I am actively contributing to the development of the framework for digital editions used in the library.
My key interests are closely related to this background – the need to keep a large number of projects up and running while making sure that the markup is as consistent as possible.
I hold a degree in (medieval and early modern) history and English linguistics and literature.
Grace O'Mara
Statement of Purpose: I am very honored to be considered for a position on the TEI Technical Council. My work with the Women Writers Project introduced me to the world of DH and more specifically, TEI. I have spent the past five years learning about the diverse applications of TEI, and if elected, I promise to use that knowledge to aid the Text Encoding Initiative in any way I can. Additionally, I will commit to always evaluating and questioning my contributions through the lens of accessibility.
Biography: Grace O’Mara graduated from Northeastern University in the spring of 2024 with a BA in English and minors in Writing and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies (WGSS). Her personal research exists at the intersection of mythology, DH, and WGSS. She has produced multiple digital exhibits that aim to present the reader with a multimodal experience that illustrates how digital humanities can facilitate a memorable experimentation with form. Grace spent five years as an encoder for the Women Writers Project, honing her understanding of XML and TEI. Grace was a facilitator and speaker at the 2023 Antiracist Markup Practices Symposium. She is currently working on Pine Ridge Reservation as a fifth-grade elementary school teacher.
Gus Riva
Affiliation: Heidelberg Universität
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. I very interested in visualization technologies for digital texts as well as in using XML encoded texts as data for distant reading. During 2024 I had the great opportunity to be a part of TEI-Council, replacing an elected member on leave. During this year I have learned a lot and I would like to serve for a full term in the Council to be able to apply all this new knowledge to work on more issues, improve the guidelines and expand the community.
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. Since 2019, 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.
I have been a member of the TEI-Council for the year 2024
Martina Scholger
Affiliation: Department for Digital Humanities, University of Graz
Statement of Purpose: I have served four consecutive terms on the TEI Technical Council, and had the honor of acting as its Chair from 2018 to 2022. In addition to that, I have been part of the Infrastructure Group and the TEI Working Group on Internationalization for several years. I would be delighted to continue my work for the Council for another term.
My main interests are: digital scholarly editing and AI (generative AI-assisted transcription, automated annotation etc.); transcription and annotation of tonal languages ; internationalization of the TEI Guidelines and specifications,; providing introductory and multilingual materials for beginners and teaching; TEI and linked open data; TEI and object-oriented annotation
Biography: I am a Senior Scientist at the Department for Digital Humanities at the University of Graz. I completed my PhD 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. I have worked extensively on the application of text mining methods to multilingual historical literary corpora Distant Spectators encoded in TEI, and currently focus on the TEI-annotation of tonal languages Early Manila Hokkien and the application of generative AI-assisted transcription and annotation in digital scholarly editing.
In addition to teaching text encoding with XML/TEI, processing XML data and digital scholarly editing - with a view on machine learning - for humanities students, I have been teaching at pertinent summer schools and workshops (e.g. DH Oxford Summer School, ADHO DH and DHd conferences, IDE Schools) and co-organized schools on scholarly editing, TEI, and sentiment analysis, as well as international DH conferences.
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: the GAMS Humanities Asset Management System.) Since 2014, I have been a member of the Institute for Documentology and Scholarly Editing (IDE), and since 2015, I have had the honor to serve on the TEI Technical Council with the full support of my department.
TEI Board of Directors
Alex Bia
Affiliation: Miguel Hernández University (Spain)
Statement of Purpose: I became involved with the TEI through my interest in markup, web design, and document processing in the 1990s. In 1999, I was appointed head of research and development for the Miguel de Cervantes Digital Library (MCDL) at the University of Alicante. My first major task was to create an automated XML-TEI publishing workflow using XPath and XSLT. The MCDL quickly grew to become the largest digital library of Spanish literary works, digitizing over 20,000 texts, and it was among the first projects to implement TEI in XML format. I contributed to the migration from SGML to XML and supported the transition from TEI P3 to P4, and then P5, as part of the TEI migration task force in the early 2000s.
I also initiated a project to translate TEI tags and validators into other languages. During a two-month stay in Oxford, I collaborated with Sebastian Rahtz on translating portions of the TEI Guidelines into Spanish (2004). My relationship with the TEI Consortium dates back to its founding and the inaugural TEI meeting in Pisa (2001).
If elected, I will focus on advancing the integration of TEI standards in educational, training, and digital humanities research contexts. I am particularly enthusiastic about promoting initiatives for broader adoption of TEI and supporting digital humanities groups that may struggle post-encoding. My aim is to help them effectively utilize their encoded texts to produce compelling outputs and research findings, which will require training in advanced XML-TEI tools. Additionally, I hope to explore the integration of XML and TEI tools with emerging AI technologies.
My long term goal is to foster diverse participation in digital humanities scholarship through open-source technologies, multilingualism, and community engagement.
Biography: Alex is a long-time member of the TEI and DH communities, having served three terms on the TEI Council (2002-2004, 2004-2006, and 2017-2018) and two terms on the Executive Committee of the former Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing, now EADH (2004-2008 and 2008-2011). He was also the secretary of the Hispanic Digital Humanities (HDH) association from 2015 to 2019.
He has frequently taught XML-TEI workshops and seminars in various countries, including Austria, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, India, Italy, Mexico, Romania, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and Uruguay. For 13 years, he conducted a two-week, 40-hour workshop on XML-TEI, CSS, XPath, and XSLT at the European Summer University in Digital Humanities (ESU-DH), where he currently serves as co-chair of the Transition Steering Committee.
Alex has lectured for several digital humanities initiatives, including the Cultural Heritage Digitization Course at FUNED, Madrid, Spain (2013-2020) and the Master's in Digital Humanities at the University of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain (2005-2011). He also briefly taught XML-TEI for BS and MS courses at King's College, covering two lectures during a faculty member's leave (2006).
He is currently a tenured professor in the Department of Statistics, Mathematics, and Computer Science, as well as a researcher at the Institute for Mathematics, Data Science, and Artificial Intelligence, both at Miguel Hernández University in Elche, Spain. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Alicante, an MSc and BS in Computer Science from ORT University, a Diploma in Computing and Information Systems from Oxford University, and a diploma in Technological Innovation in Education from Miguel Hernández University.
Alex has participated in several publicly funded research projects, including the Impact of the Human Factor in Software Modeling (AICO 2020), CHispa (Agence Nationale de la Recherche de France and ECOS program, 2016-2017), the TRACEsofTools project for contrastive text analysis in parallel bilingual corpora (PI, 2013-2016), the Digital Humanities Workbench project (PI, 2012-2013), the Atenea project (University of Málaga, 2009-2012), the Bibliotheca Europa project (University of Alicante, 2006-2008), and the Digital Library of the National Library of Spain (as consultant, 2005). He has also served as a public-funded project reviewer for research agencies in Hungary and Cyprus.
James Cummings
Affiliation: Newcastle University
Statement of Purpose: I believe that community-based membership organisations like the TEI Consortium need to elect both a mix of fresh talent and historical knowledge. I’m in the latter category: I’ve been an elected member of the TEI Board of Directors from 2020 and prior to that was a member of the TEI Technical Council since 2005. In joining the TEI Board I was partly responsible for the transition from 2 to 3-year terms (I’ve had one) for both TEI Board and TEI Technical Council members. I believe this is a good compromise, preserving a certain degree of historical memory while giving room for new members. If I am fortunate enough to be elected to the TEI Board of Directors again (for what will be a final term before a break) I will commit myself to trying to ensure that more of the TEI Consortium’s legacy is properly preserved. In some cases this means updating and migrating data to the wonderful new website or organising the contents of the TEI Vault. Simultaneously, I want to make it easier for research projects to include membership of the TEI Consortium, and where appropriate partner with the TEI Consortium, in their funding bids.
Biography: I have a long history with the TEI, first as a user, and then from 2005 as an elected member (and sometimes Chair) of the TEI Technical Council, and since 2020 as an elected member of the TEI Board of Directors. I worked for 15 years providing technical research support (and then managing teams who did) at the University of Oxford. We taught an annual TEI Summer School which I eventually helped transform into the Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School (which I directed up until I left). I also run the annual DH Awards. In 2017 I moved to Newcastle University where I’ve since been promoted from Senior Lecturer to Reader in Digital Textual Studies and Late Medieval Literature in the School of English. While I also teach courses such as ‘Stagecraft in Early Drama’, a lot of my teaching and research involves the TEI. With Diane Jakacki and Susan Brown I’m part of the LEAF-VRE project (whose online TEI+RDF/LOD editor LEAF-Writer is gaining popularity). And I’m also Co-Investigator with Diane on the AHRC/NEH ‘Evolving Hands’ project looking at workflows for HTR to TEI conversion. I was very happy to host the TEI2022 conference in Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK.
Francesca Giannetti
Affiliation: Rutgers University–New Brunswick
Statement of Purpose: As a librarian, my particular wish is to reinvigorate interest in the TEI among librarians and archivists as a means of promoting local collections and connecting with students seeking meaningful engagements with technology in the humanities. At one time, library participation in the TEI was quite strong; today it is a little less so, primarily due to the contraction in digital library/technical services units. I would like to serve as a library advocate for the TEI Board of Directors and seek ways to build connections to research librarians with an interest in digital pedagogy using the TEI. I feel that the TEI is an important means of teaching and learning institutional history, for showcasing rare and unique materials, and for demonstrating to students that the humanistic study of texts can be pursued in tandem with the study and application of technology. More broadly, I advocate for data curation as a means of demonstrating thoughtfulness, care, and attention when the calls for automation, speed, and scale are nearly deafening.
Biography: I am the digital humanities librarian and liaison to Classics, Comparative Literature, French, and Italian at Rutgers--New Brunswick. At Rutgers, I lead initiatives in digital humanities—including the application of spatial and computational approaches to historical and cultural texts, and public outreach in the form of workshops, lectures, symposia, and open data crowdsourcing events. I have published extensively on digital libraries and digital humanities pedagogy and have worked on and managed numerous projects relating to text encoding and the dissemination of digital scholarly outputs in music. My digital projects mostly relate to digital editions and text encoding; two editions are in progress—the Still Papers and the Rutgers College War Service Bureau Correspondence. I am the maintainer of the Directory of Digital Scholarship in Music.
Stephan Kurtz
Affiliation: Austrian Academy of Sciences
Statement of Purpose: Grateful for the nomination, I stand for the TEI Board of Directors. Since 2008, I am an active user of the TEI Guidelines, and still, I cannot say that I ›knew‹ all the available TEI elements. The privilege of being able to afford to play with XML and well-defined TEI elements even brought me into my current position, so this may be the time to return the favour and actively participate in the community’s governing body.
Even though I am myself accustomed to XML tools, it is my strong belief that the core strength of the TEI as an institution and as the producers of the Guidelines is that a) we as a community b) do know a lot about text, in other words: The TEI hivemind has defined an accepted ontology of textual phenomena (and it would be applicable to things beyond XML).
As a middle-aged European male aware of the privileged situation I find myself in, I would not vote for myself. If elected, I would take the board position seriously. My goal is to talk about the TEI and the Guidelines as much as possible, continue to work to enlarge the user base – especially in the Balkans, but also in neighboring disciplines –, and work with Technical Council to improve and streamline procedures.
Biography: Working for the Austrian Academy of Sciences’ Institute for Habsburg and Balkan Studies as a technical editor for the ›Ministerratsprotokolle der Habsburgermonarchie 1848–1918‹ edition of governmental documents (in print and on the web), as well as for the ›Digital Scholarly Edition of Habsburg-Ottoman Diplomatic Sources 1500–1918‹ online edition project. Former German studies lecturer at University of Zagreb, Croatia, and University of Vienna, Austria. PhD thesis on German-language epistolary novels (correspDesc, but also objectDesc and genre theory, which surpasses textClass). Accustomed to organizational matters through various academic committees and representation of doctoral candidates on national and European level. Typography aficionado, LaTeX (ab)user. Feel free to ask for more traits.
Magdalena Turska
Statement of Purpose: I am working in the field of Digital Editions for over two decades now, with a very wide range of projects under my belt. I believe this broad experience makes me uniquely positioned to realize the impact that the TEI standard has in very practical terms on a scholarly community. As an open source developer I am also reasonably skilled in bringing various groups of interests and community members together to pool resources to achieve shared goals. I am hoping to use these assets to TEI's advantage. Personally I am particularly interested in making TEI more active as a partner in collaborative efforts with other institutions as well as pushing forward the work on a new version of TEI Lite.
Biography: I am an open source software developer and co-author of the TEI Processing Model and TEI Publisher - a publication platform for XML corpora. I have served several terms as an elected member of the TEI Technical Council and since its inception I am deeply involved in e-editiones, an international non-profit scholarly society dedicated to sustaining digital humanities projects through open standards and community collaboration, a goal very close to TEI's. I am a lead developer or technical editor for a number of editorial projects: Corpus of Ioannes Dantiscus’ Texts and Correspondence, Lexicon of Greek Personal Names and LGPN-Ling, eRabbinica and Jagiellonian Digital Platform just to name a few.