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 (1975-76); 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