James Cummings helps to manage the InfoDev Team (Information Support Group Development Team) for the Oxford University Computing Services at the University of Oxford. This team provides data solutions, web projects, and research support and advice to OUCS, to the University, and also to external clients. This covers a wide variety of activities including the creation, management, analysis, visualisation and publication of digital information of all sorts. James normally manages research support and data solutions projects, which means that he helps researchers do interesting things with their data. This may mean working on local, national, or international projects at all levels of responsibility. Since 2004 he has served as an elected member to the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Technical Council. This involves playing an active roll in the development of new features and fixing bugs and other activities supporting this standard. He has a great deal of experience in teaching digital publishing concepts such as TEI XML. Before entering the field of Digital Humanities, James undertook a PhD in medieval drama, from the University of Leeds, an MA in Medieval Studies from the University of Leeds, and a BA in Medieval Studies from the University of Toronto. His PhD investigates the archival survival of information concerning the performance of drama, music, and similar paradramatic acts in medieval culture. It involved a significant amount of archival transcription. The relationship of medieval manuscripts to their digital surrogates is one of his interests. Since 2009 hw has been the elected director of the executive board of the Digital Medievalist project. This project encourages best practice in the creation of digital resources for medieval studies, runs an open access journal, wiki, mailing list and sponsors conference sessions. James attempts to bridge both Medieval Studies and Digital Humanities in his publications, conference papers and posters.
