C. Michael Sperberg-McQueen (May 18, 1954 – August 16, 2024) was an American medieval German

philologist Philology () is the study of language in oral and written historical sources. It is the intersection of textual criticism, literary criticism, history, and linguistics with strong ties to etymology. Philology is also defined as the study of ...

and

markup language A markup language is a Encoding, text-encoding system which specifies the structure and formatting of a document and potentially the relationships among its parts. Markup can control the display of a document or enrich its content to facilitate au ...

specialist. He was founder and co-chair of Extreme Markup Languages (later known as Balisage: The Markup Conference), founder and principal of Black Mesa Technologies, co-editor of the

Extensible Markup Language Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. The Wor ...

(XML) 1.0 spec (1998), and chair of both the

W3C The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. Founded in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations that maintain full-time staff working together in ...

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing data. It defines a set of rules for encoding electronic document, documents in a format that is both human-readable and Machine-r ...

Coordination Group and the

XML Schema An XML schema is a description of a type of XML document, typically expressed in terms of constraints on the structure and content of documents of that type, above and beyond the basic syntactical constraints imposed by XML itself. These constrai ...

Working Group.

Biography

In the

digital humanities Digital humanities (DH) is an area of scholarly activity at the intersection of computing or Information technology, digital technologies and the disciplines of the humanities. It includes the systematic use of digital resources in the humanitie ...

sphere, Sperberg-McQueen was instrumental in the

Text Encoding Initiative The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is a text-centric community of practice in the academic field of digital humanities, operating continuously since the 1980s. The community currently runs a mailing list, meetings and conference series, and ma ...

(TEI), an international cooperative project to develop and disseminate guidelines for the encoding and interchange of electronic text for research. He was co-editor, with Lou Burnard, of the TEI's Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange in 1994, and he served as editor in chief of the TEI from 1988 to 2000. Sue Polanka (Head of Reference/Instruction, Wright State University Libraries) notes that the TEI "...in the 1980s and 90s established a fundamental set of methods and practices that now underpin most

scholarship." He held a Ph.D. in

comparative literature Comparative literature studies is an academic field dealing with the study of literature and cultural expression across language, linguistic, national, geographic, and discipline, disciplinary boundaries. Comparative literature "performs a role ...

from

Stanford University Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...

, and taught and published widely on markup systems, overlapping markup, formal languages, semantic theory, and other topics. In 2015, Sperberg-McQueen held courses on Digital Humanities at the Technische Universität Darmstadt as visiting professor. He also talked in an interview about his work experience for the Princeton University and the Symbiose of computers and humanities. In the

sphere (and

SGML The Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML; International Organization for Standardization, ISO 8879:1986) is a standard for defining generalized markup languages for documents. ISO 8879 Annex A.1 states that generalized markup is "based on t ...

before it) Sperberg-McQueen was a member of the technical staff at the World Wide Web Consortium from 1998 to 2009. He was a co-editor of the XML 1.0 specification published in 1998, leader of the W3C's Architecture Domain from July 2001 to September 2003, a member of the

Working Group and co-editor of the XSD 1.1 specification, and a regular participant in many other activities including the Working Groups responsible for XSLT,

XPath XPath (XML Path Language) is an expression language designed to support the query or transformation of XML documents. It was defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in 1999, and can be used to compute values (e.g., strings, numbers, or ...

, and XQuery, and the Service Modeling Language SML. Outside W3C, he was a key participant in the Extreme Markup Languages conference series and its successor, Balisage, where he was noted for his closing talks summarizing and identifying commonalities between the papers presented over the course of a week. He regularly contributed his own papers on a wide range of topics, often positioning XML technologies within a wider philosophical and linguistic context. He addressed the challenges of overlapping markup. When W3C wound down its work on XML technologies, he remained active in community groups working on Invisible XML and on new (4.0) versions of XPath, XSLT, and XQuery. Sperberg-McQueen died on August 16, 2024, at the age of 70.

Education

Sperberg-McQueen had a background in German Studies with education at: the

University of Bonn The University of Bonn, officially the Rhenish Friedrich Wilhelm University of Bonn (), is a public research university in Bonn, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. It was founded in its present form as the () on 18 October 1818 by Frederick Willi ...

, Free University of Berlin (1975–76); an A.B. in German Studies and Comparative Literature, with distinction, and with Honors in Humanities and Honors in German Studies,

(1977); an A.M., German Studies, Stanford University (1977);

Paris-Sorbonne University Paris-Sorbonne University (also known as Paris IV; ) was a public university, public research university in Paris, France, active from 1971 to 2017. It was the main inheritor of the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Paris. In 2018, it m ...

(1978–79), and

University of Göttingen The University of Göttingen, officially the Georg August University of Göttingen (, commonly referred to as Georgia Augusta), is a Public university, public research university in the city of Göttingen, Lower Saxony, Germany. Founded in 1734 ...

(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.

References

Sources

* http://www.w3.org/People/cmsmcq/ – Home page at the Web Consortium * http://cmsmcq.com/ – personal Web page, with selected publications at http://cmsmcq.com/doclist.html * http://www.gca.org/papers/xmleurope2001/papers/bio/s02-1auth1.html—bio from XML Europe 2001 conference * http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EIN/is_2003_Dec_10/ai_111110786/ -- "XML Cup 2003 Awards Presented" {{DEFAULTSORT:Sperberg-McQueen, Michael 1954 births 2024 deaths American computer programmers World Wide Web Consortium Stanford University alumni XML Guild Text Encoding Initiative Academic staff of Technische Universität Darmstadt People in digital humanities 20th-century American philologists 21st-century philologists