Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 15, No. 395.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
Date: Thu, 29 Nov 2001 08:17:38 +0000
From: John Unsworth <jmu2m@virginia.edu>
Subject: TEI members' meeting
Pisa (Italy), November 18th 2001
TEI HOLDS FIRST ANNUAL MEMBERS MEETING AND ELECTION
The first ever Annual Members' meeting of the Text Encoding
Initiative Consortium took place on November 17, 2001, in Pisa, Italy.
During the meeting, the Consortium also held its first elections.
The meeting began with a keynote from former TEI-editor C.M. Sperberg
McQueen on the subject "The TEI is dead: long live the TEI", and
included a wide range of presentations from different parts
of the international TEI community, on topics as diverse as the editing
of medieval manuscripts and the construction of language corpora for
minority languages, but the chief focus of the two day event was the
technical and organizational work lying ahead for the Consortium.
Technically speaking, the work already begun on creating a true XML
version of the Guidelines is well advanced. Participants were given
tangible expression of this in the shape of a draft printout of TEI
P4, the next version of the Guidelines (which has full support for
both XML and SGML); an updated edition of the Consortium's "XML
Resources for Text Encoding" CD was also distributed.
Organizationally speaking, the meeting also marked a major step
forward. The Consortium held its first elections, completing a
two-year process of restructuring the TEI as a non-profit membership
organization with elected leadership.
Peter Robinson (De Montfort University) and Harold Short (King's
College, London) were elected to two-year terms on the Consortium's
Board of Directors. Six candidates were also elected to two-year
terms on the TEI Council, the committee that will oversee the
technical work of the TEI: Matthew Driscoll (University of
Copenhagen), Tomaz Erjavec (Jozef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana,
Slovenia), Merrilee Proffitt (Research Libraries Group), Laurent
Romary (INRIA Laboratoire Loria), Perry Willett (Indiana University),
and Christian Wittern (Kyoto University). In addition, four members
of the TEI community were appointed by the Board of Directors to
one-year terms on the TEI Council, with the option to stand for
election next year: David J. Birnbaum (University of Pittsburgh),
David Durand (Brown University and ingenta plc), Fotis Jannidis
(University of Munich), and Geoffrey Rockwell (McMaster University).
Joining them on the Council will be two representatives from the Board
of Directors, Sebastian Rahtz (Oxford University) and John Unsworth
(University of Virginia). Unsworth will chair the Board and, at the
Board's request, the Council.
The existence of the new Technical Council makes it possible for the
technical work of the TEI to proceed on a well-founded and responsive
basis. At the meeting, a number of possible development priorities
were identified: the first order of business will be to oversee a
final review of the draft P4 Guidelines; this will be complemented by
a process funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities which
will develop and document tools and methods for moving TEI collections
from SGML to XML. The Council will also have the responsibility for
chartering and monitoring new TEI work groups to work towards the next
edition of the Guidelines, in response to the needs of the TEI
community as reflected in its membership. The first meeting of the
Council is planned for January of 2002.
TEI Board members will of course continue to recruit new members for
the Consortium, and to promote, develop, and organize TEI training
activities. In this context, new funding opportunities are being
vigorously pursued on both sides of the Atlantic, with a view to
expansion of the TEI community, in particular in the under-developed
economies, and to the availability of new TEI tools and training
materials.
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