Dr C. Michael Sperberg-McQueen passed away on August 16, 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.
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.
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.
We mourn the loss of an internationally esteemed colleague and friend. His open, critical and warm-hearted manner contributed significantly to broadening the professional horizons of many of us in discussions and encouraged us to break new ground.
Friends and colleagues are encouraged to share their memories of Michael at the Balisage website.