Syd Bauman

Senior Programmer/Analyst

Scholarly Technology Group
Brown University Box 1841
Providence, RI 02912-1841
phone: 401 863-3835
fax: 401 863-9313
e-mail: Syd_Bauman@brown.edu

curriculum vitae (PDF)

Syd Bauman began working at the Women Writers Project in 1990. Although his title would have you believe that he is a computer programmer, Syd is fond of pointing out that he doesn't write that much actual code. When he does, it is usually in Bash, Perl, emacs lisp, or XSLT, and is always copylefted.

Syd became a hard-core computer user in 1982, and a devotee of descriptive markup two years later. He began using SGML and the TEI when he came to the Women Writers Project.

Since October of 2001 Syd's main job has been as North American Editor of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). Along with the European Editor, Lou Burnard, Syd is responsible for guiding the activities of the TEI: assisting the TEI Board of Directors in its task of administering a multi-national research and standards consortium, assisting the TEI Council in its task of setting strategic technical goals for the TEI, assisting each of the TEI work groups in establishing tactical recommendations for various arenas of text encoding, and coordinating and copyediting the Guidelines.[1]

Some of the things that Syd finds most gratifying about work at the WWP are meeting the challenges of encoding early texts and identifying the critical cases that support and refine the TEI Guidelines. He has written the WWP extensions to the TEI P4 DTDs to reflect structural phenomena found in the WWP texts. He has also written several less ambitious extensions to the TEI P4 DTDs and customizations to TEI P5 for documentation and for writing papers.

One of Syd's goals is to take advantage of his experience using TEI to make it easier for others to do so. Thus Syd often travels far and wide teaching TEI workshops and seminars with Julia Flanders.

Syd graduated from Brown in 1985. Prior to working for the WWP, he was a systems programmer at Brown and a freelance computer typesetter.

[1] Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange (Oxford, Providence, Charlottesville, & Nancy: TEI Consortium, November 2007), http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/.