Jeffery A. Triggs

jtriggs@gmail.com
6 Woodside Road
Madison, NJ 07940

WORK EXPERIENCE:

1999– Global Language Resources. Madison, New Jersey, Web Consultant.

• Developed Pittville History Works (http://pittvillehistory.org.uk), a growing, online database of census data about the inhabitants and houses of 19th century Cheltenham. The site is based on PHP and MySQL with jQuery and Javascript functions that allow complex on-the-fly graphing and mapping capabilities, scrolling elements, and a Google site search feature.

• Created HamletWorks.org, the web portal for the New Variorum Hamlet Project, including the searchable text of the variorum in XML, the Enfolded Hamlet text combining the 2nd Quarto and the 1st Folio editions, facsimiles of various early texts and playbooks (http://www.hamletworks.org).

• Developed The Century Dictionary Online (http://www.century-dictionary.com), the first fully functional online interface for an entire dictionary in DjVu format. Converted and ran OCR on twelve volumes and 10,000 pages of scanned dictionary text, created the word lookup and full text search engines, designed the web interface including graphics. Originally conceived as a showpiece for the DjVu software, it now includes a djvu2jpeg page turner as an option and is still the largest freely available dictionary on the World Wide Web.

• Created the Jamieson's Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language Online website (http://www.scotsdictionary.com/), an online interface for the famous historical dictionary of Scots with two volumes and two supplemental volumes in DjVu E-book format with a djvu2jpeg page turning option. The site includes full-text, KWIC concordance search engines.

• Created DjVu Editions (http://www.djvu-editions.com), a growing, online collection of classic texts in DjVu E-book format with djvu2jpeg page turning or PDF options. The texts are either scanned or converted from SGML to DjVu using LaTeX. The site includes a full-text, KWIC concordance search engine.

• Designed and implemented complex websites including an online full text corpus in XML, an online dictionary, online text processing tools, and an innovative multi-engine web search agent. Wrote a concordancing search engine for the online corpus and dictionary.

• Created the web interface for the Dictionary of the Scots Language, an XML combination of the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue and the Scottish National Dictionary, which was successfully launched on March 25, 2004 (http://www.dsl.ac.uk). The Dictionary of the Scots Language effectively merged two existing Scots paper dictionaries into an online product, and became an important vehicle for promoting Scots as a minority language worthy of serious study.

• Created Cold Fusion web portal (Project Popular Balanchine) for the Balanchine Foundation. This site helped preserve George Balanchine materials related to his experiences on Broadway that were in danger of being lost.

2002–2021 Rutgers University Libraries, SCC/CETH, Applications Developer

• One of the team leaders in implementing and writing back-end interactions with Fedora, a Java/XML-based digital library repository, at Rutgers, including an amberfish and later a Solr/Lucene search interface with SOAP-based and later REST API-based editing functions (http://rucore.libraries.rutgers.edu, http://www.njdigitalhighway.org/). This helped helped the libraries to create and promote the first institutional repository at Rutgers.

• Managed OJS journals and Wordpress installations published by the Rutgers Libraries. Edited OJS Smarty template code to allow OJS editors to customize their journals beyond the default limitations of the platform. The OJS journals helped establish Rutgers as a player in the world of scholarly “Open Access”.

• Created an online room booking system (https://roomschedule.libraries.rutgers.edu/) using JSON to interface with the Microsoft Outlook OAuth2 API. Created a GIT/Bitbucket repositories for these systems and wrote Markdown documentation for the main functions. This replaced an aging room booking system and allowed librarians to book rooms for various events using their own Outlook calendars.

• Managed and developed projects at the Scholarly Communications Center and the Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities. Led movement from proprietary NT/Access/Verity/Cold Fusion based projects to projects based on open source technologies, such as PHP, Perl, MySQL, Glimpse, amberfish, and Solr.

• Created new interface using PHP, Perl, and amberfish for Rutgers EAD collections (http://www2.scc.rutgers.edu/ead/). This replaced an aging Dynaweb interface that could only run on a Windows97 server that was about to be retired, and thus preserved the public EAD collections at the Rutgers Libraries.

• Created interfaces for The Spectator project http://www2.scc.rutgers.edu/spectator/), the Caesar Concordance, a new e-book version of the African American Poetry Database, and and e-book version of the complete works of Aristotle.

• Created a federated search function combining Z39/50 searches of library catalogs with amberfish searches of XML repositories.

• Designed and implemented the underlying architecture for a new electronic journal platform.

1999–2001 AT&T Labs, Middletown/Florham Park, New Jersey. Web Developer.

• Webmaster for the DjVu image compression software project of the Software Technology Services Group (http://www.djvu.att.com). Used gtml, Perl, Adobe Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, and the DjVu SDK, in addition to the standard HTML editing utilities to create dynamically generated web pages supporting the product. Worked at updating the DjVu digital library. Implemented a WAIS-based search engine for the site. Created a CGI-generated XML database of user and product information. Wrote the working proposal for developing an online e-commerce prototype.

• Web developer for Intranet portal using Cold Fusion and Verity.

• Webmaster for the AT&T Labs Research site, DjVu Zone (http://www.djvuzone.org), a portal hosting the DjVu digital library as well as documentation and links to other DjVu sites. Used the 3.0 version of the DjVu SDK to recreate the digital library in the new OCR'ed format and wrote a new search engine for the digital library and the rest of the site. Created many new DjVu resources, including early Hamlet facsimiles, the entire Soul of Grammar by A.E Sonnenschein, and papers of Alexander Graham Bell.

• Created the search engine for NIPS Online (http://nips.djvuzone.org), the collected proceedings of the Neural Information Processing Systems conferences from 1987 to 1999 represented 13,900 scanned pages in DjVu format.

• Created the DjVu Zone Community Server, a public content management system for OCR documents in DjVu format with database and search engine access. The site uses PHP, Perl, and mySQL to display dynamic content and allow users to edit database information through web browsers. Wrote a daemon to convert automatically uploaded files in various formats to DjVu, run an OCR process on them, and index them for searching.

• Created the any2djvu server (http://any2djvu.djvuzone.org), a free online server for converting documents from various formats to DjVu.

• Created a web interface for PlayMail (http://playmail.research.att.com), an email service using streaming videos of animated talking heads to deliver messages. Worked on a web interface for e-cogent, a project using streaming videos of animated talking heads to read news stories.

1989–1999 Oxford University Press, Director of the North American Reading Program Oxford English Dictionary.

1994–1999 OUP Web Product Developer.

Developed the Oxford English Dictionary Online dynamic prototype (http://www.oed.com) and OED North American Reading Program World Wide Web servers. Selected as one of the "Ten Best Sites of 1996" by Internet World, January 1997. Designed and created the unified interface, including the HTML front end, multimedia enhancements, graphics, and the CGI middleware (using Perl, Lex, C, Korn shell, JavaScript, and Java) to access, link, and present the OED, several other lexical and encyclopedic dictionaries, the 60 million word online library, the electronic card catalog of reading program quotations, and other large textbases using a variety of search engines, including Pat, Glimpse, and WAIS. Wrote customized search engines when such commercial search engines would not suffice. Designed and wrote a series of help pages for the OED Online, including automated guided tours. Designed and implemented a number of specialized textbase interfaces, including the Interlinear Bibles (4 parallel texts in English, Latin, and German), the Enfolded Hamlet, John Donne Online, The Romantic Poets, and a Web interface for the Brown Women Writers Project Corpus.

• The OED Online had the effect of changing the Oxford English Dictionary from a vast cost center that might not have continued as such much longer to the largest money making unit of the Oxford dictionaries. It is now the chief means of publication of the dictionary and has allowed the modern revision of the dictionary to continue to the present day.

1993–1999 OUP/Bellcore, Webmaster.

Developed and managed a World Wide Web server at Bellcore (one of the first 400 in the world) bringing a wide variety of reference sources, including seven dictionaries, the AP News wire, Bellcore's electronic library catalogue, and a National Weather server, together in a unified multimedia interface for wide area distribution.

1991–1999 OUP, Electronic Text Specialist.

Wrote software to convert and parse a series of electronic dictionaries associated with OUP from various formats to OUP's standard SGML. These include the Dictionary of New Zealand English from Pagemaker, the Dictionary of South African English from Word Perfect, and the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang from Wordstar.

• OUP used these SGML texts to create typeseeting tapes for book publications as well as later online publications. As searchable texts, they were also useful to the OED in its effort to broaden its coverage of world English.

In collaboration with people from the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) I converted a wide variety of texts from various formats to TEI-conformant SGML for publication at the Oxford Text Archive (OTA) and use by the OED as part of its “Historical Corpus”. I also supervised the creation of a number of new full texts in SGML format.

• The editors working on revisions of the OED and SOED were in need of examples of core vocabulary from the period after the publication of OED's first edition in 1928. The searchable Historical Corpus provided an important source of such vocabulary.

1989–1999 OUP Manager/Lexicographer

Developed, organized, and directed Oxford's first American and fully electronic reading program, collecting an electronic card catalog of over one million quotations used by the OED and other Oxford dictionary projects. Handled all organizational and financial details of the program. Managed a staff of twenty five people. Designed and wrote end-user technical manuals to assist in training readers and data entry personnel for the program. Configured and administered an Internet node and local area network based on a Sun Ultra Enterprise 2 server and linking UNIX, PC, and Macintosh platforms. Wrote programs in C, lex, Perl, awk, and shell to perform various functions such as corpus-searching, SGML-tagging, automatic error identification and correction. Wrote user-interface to the University of Waterloo Pat software for use by Oxford and Bellcore employees. Developed a C-based system of look-up programs for various dictionaries on line at Bellcore. Wrote a C-based interface for Internet access to electronic library catalogs. Developed and managed a relational database system to handle all financial aspects of the reading program. Developed a networked database to manage the OED's reference library. Working at Bellcore's AI research lab in Morristown, NJ, created an SGML-tagged corpus of over 60 million words. Developed and implemented customized software necessary to create and maintain the UNIX-based corpus drawing on sources in the UNIX, DOS, and Macintosh environments. Acted as a consultant on new American words for the OED and as a lexicographical and writing consultant for the AI group at Bellcore.

• As the founder of the North American Reading Program, I helped the editors gain access to a wide variety of American linguistic resources needed for a full, modern revision of the dictionary. The North American Reading Program initiated the collection of citations in fully searchable SGML form, which rendered them more useful than traditional word slips, which could only be found by their handwritten “catchwords”.

TEACHING EXPERIENCE:

2022– Adjunct Instructor of English at County College of Morris.

1988–89 Writing Consultant for Counterpoint, Bridgewater, New Jersey. Tutored clients at Exxon and AT&T in effective technical writing and oral communications with special emphasis on English as a second language.

1981–88 Instructor of English at Fairleigh Dickinson University. Taught various levels of composition from remedial to advanced; computer-aided instruction; Studies in Poetry; Studies in the Novel; Literary Experience; Contemporary Fiction; Folklore.

1988–88 Instructor of English at Montclair State College.

1978–87 Teaching Assistant and Instructor at Rutgers College, Livingston College, Douglass College. Taught various levels of composition; Shakespeare 319; Poems, Plays, and Fiction.

1980–81 Legal Writing Consultant for Maskeleris & Berowitz, Morristown, New Jersey. Tutored young legal associates in composition, with special emphasis on effective legal writing. Edited legal briefs.

EDUCATION:

1986 - Ph.D. English, Rutgers University - Dissertation: “The Well-Tempered Self: Structure and Autobiography in Victorian Sonnet Sequences”

1979 - M.A. English, Rutgers University

1977 - B.A. English, Fairleigh Dickinson University

PROFESSIONAL MEMBERSHIPS

Modern Language Association, Association for Computers and the Humanities

LANGUAGE:

German reading at research level.

ACADEMIC HONORS:

Awarded Bevier Fellowship for dissertation (1983–84)

Passed Masters Exam with Distinction (May 1978)

Graduated Summa Cum Laude, 4.0 Cumulative G.P.R.

Awarded Charles Angoff Scholarship (1976)

PUBLICATIONS LISTED SEPARATELY:

http://triggs.djvu.org/global-language.com/triggs/PUBS.html.