Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 38, No. 104.
Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
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Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
Date: 2024-08-18 16:15:42+00:00
From: Marinella Testori <testorimarinella@gmail.com>
Subject: Fwd: C. Michael Sperberg-McQueen (1954 – 2024): In Memoriam
--------- Forwarded message ---------
Da: Diane Jakacki <dkj004@bucknell.edu>
Date: dom 18 ago 2024 alle ore 15:09
Subject: C. Michael Sperberg-McQueen (1954 – 2024): In Memoriam
To: <TEI-L@lists.psu.edu>
The Consortium of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is saddened to pass
on the news of the death of Dr C. Michael Sperberg-McQueen (18 May 1954
– 16 August 2024). Michael was fundamental to the birth and development
of the Text Encoding Initiative, and was co-editor of the TEI Guidelines
and editor in chief of the TEI from 1988 to 2000. Many of the concepts
underlying and embedded in the TEI framework owe their existence to
Michael’s insight and dedication. Indeed, the TEI vocabulary in which
the TEI Guidelines are themselves written and customized (TEI ODD for
“One Document Does-it-all”) was originally designed by Michael and Lou
Burnard. In 2017, with Lou Burnard and Nancy Ide, Michael accepted (on
behalf of the TEI community) the Antonio Zampolli Prize of the
Association of Digital Humanities Organizations for a single outstanding
work in the digital humanities.
Michael took much of this TEI experience into his work with W3C
(1998–2009), developing technologies which underpin much of the XML
world. He was co-editor of the XML 1.0 Specification (1997-2008) and
later chair of the W3C XML Coordination Group. He was a member and later
chair of the W3C XML Schema Working Group and co-editor of the XSD 1.1
specification on datatypes, member and staff contact of the XSL Working
Group, member and staff contact of the Service Modeling Language (SML)
Working Group, member and alternate staff contact of the XML Processing
Model Working Group, as well as member and alternate staff contact of
the XML Query Working Group. Michael also served as the leader of the
W3C’s Architecture Domain from July 2001 to September 2003, and was a
participant in the W3C Invisible XML Community Group. For administrative
purposes he was employed by MIT at the MIT Computer Science and
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
In recent years, while he focused more on XML, Michael continued to be
an active member of the TEI community by contributing to discussions
around thorny issues, reporting bugs, reviewing for jTEI, attending
conferences, and advocating for the TEI.
Michael was the founder of Black Mesa Technologies and co-chair of
Balisage: The Markup Conference (and its predecessor, Extreme Markup
Languages), where he delivered the closing keynote address each year
until August 2024, two weeks before his death. During Spring and Summer
of 2015 he lectured at the Dept. of Linguistics and Literary Studies,
Technical University of Darmstadt (Institut für Sprach- und
Literaturwissenschaft, Technische Universität Darmstadt) in the Digital
Humanities programme, (April - July) 2015.
Michael spoke and published widely on the nature of markup systems,
overlapping markup, formal language systems, semantic theory,
computational linguistics, and a wide variety of other topics. Some
recent software projects include Aparecium (an XQuery/XSLT library for
invisible XML), and Thutmose (a tool for generating TEI headers from
MARC records). He authored many important book chapters and essays in
(among others) A Companion to Digital Humanities and A New Companion to
Digital Humanities, The Shape of Data in the Digital Humanities,
Digitale Infrastrukturen für die germanistische Forschung, and journal
articles including in Computers and the Humanities, Literary and
Linguistic Computing, the Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative, and
Digital Humanities Quarterly that helped to document the development of
Digital Humanities and guide our thinking about text technologies.
He served as a reviewer or panelist for the U.S. National Endowment for
the Humanities, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the
Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung, ACM Computing Surveys, the
ACM Conference on Document Engineering, Digital Humanities (and its
predecessor conferences), and a variety of other conferences and funding
agencies.
Michael had a background in German Studies with education at: the
Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, Freie Universität Berlin
(1975-56); an A.B. in German Studies and Comparative Literature, with
distinction, and with Honors in Humanities and Honors in German Studies,
Stanford University (1977); an A.M.in German Studies, Stanford
University (1977); Université de Paris IV (Sorbonne) (1978-79), and
Georg-August Universität zu Göttingen (1982-83). He was awarded a Ph.D
in Comparative Literature by Stanford University for a dissertation on
“An Analysis of Recent Work on Nibelungenlied Poetics.” in 1985.
Michael was an animal lover and was active with the New Mexico
Democratic Party. He is survived by his wife Marian, and by communities
of friends from around the world.
The TEI Consortium will remember Michael at the annual general meeting
of the consortium as part of the TEI 2024 conference.
Learn more about Michael:
Michael’s Wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Sperberg-McQueen
Personal Webpage: http://cmsmcq.com/
Black Mesa Tech: https://blackmesatech.com/
CV: https://blackmesatech.com/who/cmsmcq/vita.xhtml
Balisage ‘Remembering MSM’: https://balisage.net/RememberingMSM.html
2014 oral interview with Michael:
https://hiddenhistories.github.io/michael-sperberg-mcqueen
Michael’s closing keynote address at Knowledge Organization and Data
Modeling in the Humanities workshop, Brown University, 2012:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2F98I3bbOVM
--
Diane Jakacki, Ph.D.
Digital Scholarship Coordinator
Affiliate Faculty in Comparative & Digital Humanities
Bucknell University
diane.jakacki@bucknell.edu
(she/her)
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7836-1223
Executive Board Chair, ADHO
Chair, TEI-C Executive Board
Fulbright Canada Research Chair in Digital Humanities, 2022-3
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