Dr Maxim Fomin - Research Fellow

Maxim Sergeevitch Fomin commenced his work on the eDIL project in late September 2003.

Before taking his duties as the First Assistant Editor of the eDIL project, he was the Faculty of Arts Scholar and Research Associate of the Corpus of Electronic Language Texts (CELT) project at University College Cork.

His duties and tasks on the eDIL project included:

    -   Creation and supply of the document type definition (DTD) for the future capture of the hard-copy of the DIL into the eXstensible Mark-up Language (XML) files (Oct 03, with Gregory Toner).

    -   Quality control of the XML files after the completion of the data capture (Nov-Dec 03, with Ian Clark).

    -   Proof-reading of the files (checking through the files for typos, various mark-up errors, restoration of the hyphens omitted at the data capture, deletion and correction of non-standard entities accidentally typed in etc.) (Jan-Mar 04, with Thomas Torma and Caoimhín Ó Domhnaill).

    -   Modifications to the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) set of elements for Print Dictionaries (P4 version) in order to combine both the editorial and typographic view of the DIL and also the creation of the list of special entities and elements (DTD) for the digital files of the fasciculi of the DIL (Jan 04-Mar 04).

    -   Creation of the algorithm to establish the underlying principle of the subsequent transformation of the set of simple elements (base tag set for prose), imposed at the stage of the data capture, into the more complex set of elements employed for a mark-up of a digital dictionary (a base tag set for encoding human-oriented polyglot dictionaries) (Mar 04-Apr 04, with T. Torma, C. Ó Domhnaill, Julianne Nyhan and Peter Flynn).

    -   The trial of the first XML files of the eDIL based on the set of elements for Print Dictionaries. Delivery of a paper ‘Joined-up thinking: electronic texts relating to medieval Ireland/ Defining Objectives for Digitizing of the Dictionary of Irish Language’, at the 16th Joint International Conference of the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing and the Association for Computers and the Humanities (abstract published in Conference Abstracts. Göteborg University 11-16 June, 2004, p. 145) (May 04, Panel organiser: G. Toner)

    -   Digital mark-up of letters N, B, D (part 2), M, T, U, F, I, E of DIL (phase 1). Elements imposed included: <q> (Old Irish words, phrases and citations), <trans>, <def> (English translations of headwords and definitions), <case>, <per>, <mood>, <tns>, <gen>, <number>, <itype> (grammatical categories of case, person, mood, tense, gender, number, stem) etc.; revision of the eDIL’s DTD to incorporate new elements (Jun-May 05).

    -   Proof-reading and quality control of the elements in the individual files of the eDIL after the completion of the Phase 1 (Jul-Aug 05).

    -   Preparation of the XML files for subsequent SED transformation by J. Nyhan to impose the elements to encode the bibliographic abbreviations and the adjacent folio, column, page and line references (i.e. <bibl>, <title>, <biblScope> and <orphanScope>). Editing the <bibl>iographic group of elements in A-E, G-I, M-R, T-U (Phase 2: Sep-Mar 06)

    -   Creation of the XSLT stylesheet and the XML look-up tables to implement changes necessary at the Phase 3. The data types handled at the Phase 3 included the mark-up of languages, other than Old Irish and English (<frn>), lemmas (<lem>), translations of Old Irish citations by the editors of the DIL (<tr>) and quotations from external sources cited in the DIL (<quote>) (Mar-Aug 06, with Grigory Bondarenko)

    -   Creation of the XSLT stylesheet and the XML look-up tables to create the unique target= attribute of the <title> element to enable cross-referring between the individual eDIL files and the Prologue, containing the complete account of the bibliographic information of the DIL (Sep 06-Jan 07, with G. Bondarenko)

    -   Preparation of the eDIL web-site for on-line publication (Jan-Jun 07, with G. Toner, G. Bondarenko, Natalia Abelian, I. Clark).

Dr Fomin is Research Fellow of the Research Institute of Irish and Celtic Studies, University of Ulster, Coleraine.

His other research specialisms include

    -   Study of Celto-Indic and Celto-Slavic linguistic and cultural parallels

    -   Early Irish wisdom-literature

    -   Irish folklore

    -   Paradigms of ideal ruling in early societies