Michael Sperberg-McQueen

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Michael Sperberg-McQueen at the XML 2007 conference. XML 2007- Michael Sperberg-McQueen.jpg
Michael Sperberg-McQueen at the XML 2007 conference.

C. Michael Sperberg-McQueen is an American markup language specialist. He was co-editor of the Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 spec (1998), and chair of the XML Schema working group.

Biography

He was also instrumental in the Text Encoding Initiative (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. He also served as editor in chief of the TEI from 1988 to 2000. [1]

XML and TEI have become ubiquitous in their domains. 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 digital humanities scholarship" [2] Sperberg-McQueen has been a key leader of these and other standards efforts through extensive speaking, teaching, writing, and research.

He holds a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Stanford University, and has taught and published widely on markup systems, [3] overlapping markup, [4] formal languages, [5] semantic theory, [6] and other topics.

In 2015, Sperberg-McQueen held courses on Digital Humanities at the Technische Universität Darmstadt as visiting professor. [7] He also talked in an interview about his work experience for the Princeton University and the Symbiose of computers and humanities. [8]

Related Research Articles

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">XML</span> Markup language by the W3C for encoding of data

Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. The World Wide Web Consortium's XML 1.0 Specification of 1998 and several other related specifications—all of them free open standards—define XML.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Geography Markup Language</span> XML grammar for geographical features

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Text Encoding Initiative</span> Academic community concerned with text encoding

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A structured document is an electronic document where some method of markup is used to identify the whole and parts of the document as having various meanings beyond their formatting. For example, a structured document might identify a certain portion as a "chapter title" rather than as "Helvetica bold 24" or "indented Courier". Such portions in general are commonly called "components" or "elements" of a document.

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The Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) is an open-source effort to create a system for representation of musical documents in a machine-readable structure. MEI closely mirrors work done by text scholars in the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) and while the two encoding initiatives are not formally related, they share many common characteristics and development practices. The term "MEI", like "TEI", describes the governing organization and the markup language. The MEI community solicits input and development directions from specialists in various music research communities, including technologists, librarians, historians, and theorists in a common effort to discuss and define best practices for representing a broad range of musical documents and structures. The results of these discussions are then formalized into the MEI schema, a core set of rules for recording physical and intellectual characteristics of music notation documents. This schema is expressed in an XML schema Language, with RelaxNG being the preferred format. The MEI schema is developed using the One-Document-Does-it-all (ODD) format, a literate programming XML format developed by the Text Encoding Initiative.

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In markup languages and the digital humanities, overlap occurs when a document has two or more structures that interact in a non-hierarchical manner. A document with overlapping markup cannot be represented as a tree. This is also known as concurrent markup. Overlap happens, for instance, in poetry, where there may be a metrical structure of feet and lines; a linguistic structure of sentences and quotations; and a physical structure of volumes and pages and editorial annotations.

Lou Burnard is an internationally recognised expert in digital humanities, particularly in the area of text encoding and digital libraries. He was assistant director of Oxford University Computing Services (OUCS) from 2001 to September 2010, when he officially retired from OUCS. Before that, he was manager of the Humanities Computing Unit at OUCS for five years. He has worked in ICT support for research in the humanities since the 1990s. He was one of the founding editors of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) and continues to play an active part in its maintenance and development, as a consultant to the TEI Technical Council and as an elected TEI board member. He has played a key role in the establishment of many other activities and initiatives in this area, such as the UK Arts and Humanities Data Service and the British National Corpus, and has published and lectured widely. Since 2008 he has worked as a Member of the Conseil Scientifique for the CNRS-funded "Adonis" TGE.

References

  1. Nancy Ide; C. M. Sperberg-McQueen (1995). "The TEI: History, goals, and future". Computers and the Humanities. 29 (1): 5–15. doi:10.1007/bf01830313. S2CID   32868213.
  2. Sue Polanka. (July 26, 2012). "DPLA receives $1 million award from the NEH". Archived from the original on July 30, 2012.
  3. Allen Renear; David Dubin; C. M. Sperberg-McQueen (2002). Towards a semantics for XML markup. ACM Symposium on Document Engineering. pp. 119–126.
  4. C. M. Sperberg-McQueen; Claus Huitfeldt (2000). GODDAG: A Data Structure for Overlapping Hierarchies. 8th International Conference on Digital Documents and Electronic Publishing, DDEP 2000, 5th International Workshop on the Principles of Digital Document Processing, PODDP 2000. Munich, Germany. pp. 139–160. ISBN   9783540210702.
  5. C. M. Sperberg-McQueen (2005). Applications of Brzozowski derivatives to XML Schema processing. Extreme Markup Languages.
  6. C. M. Sperberg-McQueen (2011). What Constitutes Successful Format Conversion? Towards a Formalization of 'Intellectual Content. International Journal of Digital Curation. Vol. 6. pp. 153–164.
  7. "Sperberg-McQueen, Michael". www.linglit.tu-darmstadt.de. Archived from the original on 7 July 2017. Retrieved 12 January 2022.
  8. Nyhan, Julianne; Flinn, Andrew (2016). Computation and the Humanities. Springer Series on Cultural Computing. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-20170-2. ISBN   978-3-319-20169-6. S2CID   35935691.