Michael Sperberg-McQueen (1954-2024): An Interdisciplinary Visionary

The computer science and humanities communities both mourn the loss of Michael Sperberg-McQueen, a visionary scholar and one of the founding fathers of text encoding standards. Sperberg-McQueen passed away unexpectedly on August 16, 2024, shortly after returning home to New Mexico from delivering the closing keynote at the Balisage 2024 conference. His passing leaves a huge void in the fields of digital humanities and document modeling.

Sperberg-McQueen was co-editor of two of the most influential document standards: First XML, the near-ubiquitous W3C recommendation for structuring high-value documents (and much more). Second, the Text Encoding Initiative, which established a standard for the representation of literary texts and corpora and laid the groundwork for countless digital humanities projects. He was also a major contributor to XML Schema, XQuery, and many other recommendations at the World Wide Web Consortium (where he served as Architecture Domain Lead), and to the scholarly literature in related domains.

Born in 1954, Sperberg-McQueen's academic journey was as diverse as it was impressive. He earned his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Stanford University in 1985, with a dissertation titled “An Analysis of Recent Work on Nibelungenlied Poetics.” Despite lacking formal training in computer science, Sperberg-McQueen's insatiable curiosity and autodidactic prowess allowed him to attain expertise in formal language and parsing theory, data structures, database and query language design, and more. He programmed extensively in a array of languages, including usual and less-usual ones (Rexx, Prolog, XSLT, ...). His unique blend of humanistic and technical acumen positioned him as a bridge between traditional scholarship and emerging digital methodologies. Sperberg-McQueen's contributions were recognized with several awards, including the Douglas Engelbart Best Paper Award from the ACM SIG on Hypertext and Hypermedia in 2000, for his and Claus Huitfeldt's “Goddag: A Data Structure for Overlapping Hierarchies.”

As an educator, mentor, and colleague Sperberg-McQueen inspired countless students and others through his teaching, workshops, and many publications. His ability to explain complex technical concepts with clarity and depth made him a sought-after speaker worldwide. Particularly distinctive was Sperberg-McQueen's ability to bring illuminating humanistic perspectives to the technical exposition of even subtle computational issues, commonly making long-dead philologists, historians, or mathematicians relevant to the most modern problems.

He also founded Black Mesa Technologies LLC, a consultancy for related projects. It was named after the scenic location of his home in New Mexico, not for a similarly named company in video games.

Sperberg-McQueen was known for his warmth, humor, and unique approach to leadership. While chairing committees he sometimes kept a red clown nose handy. When discussions went off-topic or someone spoke for too long, he would simply don the nose -- with such good-humor that no one felt insulted but the meeting quickly improved. In debates and discussions he was a reliable voice of calm, as a parody song about the creation of the TEI reflected: “Brother Michael came to us, speaking words of wisdom.”

His passing is a profound loss to the digital humanities and computer science communities. His pioneering work on text encoding and markup languages will continue to influence scholars, developers, and information architects for generations to come. He is survived by his wife Marian, a Professor of Germanic Studies who shared his passion for academic pursuit and supported his multifaceted career.

As we remember C. Michael Sperberg-McQueen, we celebrate his diversity of intellectual contributions but also the humor, creativity, and humanity he brought to his work. He will be greatly missed.

Steven J. DeRose