Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 38, No. 110.
        Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
                      Hosted by DH-Cologne
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        Date: 2024-08-23 17:06:49+00:00
        From: Susan Hockey <shockey29@gmail.com>
        Subject: Michael Sperberg-McQueen

I was so sorry to learn of the death of Michael Sperberg-McQueen. Among my
many friends in digital humanities he was someone that I got to know very
well and always admired. I first came across Michael when I gave a talk
"Text Analysis and the Computer" at Princeton in October 1986. He was
sitting in the front row (as he often did) and asking interesting and
challenging questions (as he always did). I think he was in the second week
of his job at Princeton. Our next meeting was at the event in Columbia
South Carolina where, as Willard has so eloquently described, the idea of
Humanist was born.

In late 1987 Michael and Nancy Ide organised the meeting at Vassar College
where the TEI was born. About twenty-five of us came together to try to
find a common means of encoding primary source texts. We were all
introduced to SGML. Light dawned on what was needed but we had to find a
way of making it happen. The meeting established a Steering Committee to
organise the project and to raise funds. I was privileged to serve on that
committee and got to know Michael, who was one of the two ACH
representatives on the committee, very well during the course of several
year's work. Michael was co-editor of the TEI Guidelines along with Lou
Burnard and he also dealt with much of the day-to-day project management as
our NEH grant was administered through the University of Illinois at
Chicago where he was then located. We held most of our meetings in Chicago.
Michael was meticulous in his attention to detail in all his work and,
thoughtful as ever, he would arrive each morning carrying a large box from
Dunkin Donuts - a great cure for jetlag, especially when served with the
strong coffee he provided.

Willard and I were joint hosts and organisers of a two-week summer seminar
on electronic texts in the humanities at Princeton in the early 1990s. We
needed to include text encoding and there was only one obvious choice to
introduce the basics and to teach a strand on markup in more detail.
Michael was an excellent teacher. His presentations were always clear and
well-organised and he would happily answer questions for as long as they
continued. He also had enormous patience and stamina staying up late into
the evening helping participants with their practical work.

In the mid-1990s I was delighted to be working again with Michael on
the Model Editions Partnership project which was led by David Chesnutt, who
is also sadly no longer with us. The aim of the project was to work towards
a common format for electronic documentary editions. The three of us
visited several partner projects to discuss their needs. Michael had built
an XML-based model which we used to elicit ideas. Again he showed so much
patience as we introduced the model to scholars who were new to this kind
of approach.

By 2000 Michael and I had moved in rather different directions. His work on
markup for humanities source material was recognised by the World Wide Web
Consortium and he worked for them for several years before setting up his
own consultancy. But he remained within the digital humanities community,
attending conferences and doing some work in this area. It is only when
reading the online wake at https://www.balisage.net/RememberingMSM.html that
I realised how influential Michael had become in the markup community. It
is due to him that digital humanities has become recognised as a thriving
community which asks challenging questions that reach out into other areas
beyond academia.

On a personal basis I have many memories of time spent with Michael. On one
occasion he stayed with us at our house in Oxford and we went for a walk
through the fields and up the hill behind our house. I remember him saying
that he wanted to see gorse bushes. It was typical of his thirst for
knowledge that he had seen them mentioned in British novels but he didn't
know what they looked like. His curiosity was satisfied. There were plenty
on the hill near us, all in flower.

In May 2023 my husband and I went on a road trip in the American
South-West. I hadn't seen Michael for years but I emailed him before we
left and we spent a very enjoyable day with Michael and Marian at their
home in New Mexico. I'm so glad we went to see them but never thought that
there would not be any more occasions when we could meet.


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