Dr. Michael Sperberg-McQueen

Dr. C. Michael Sperberg-McQueen is the founder of Black Mesa Technologies LLC, a consultancy specializing in information management using descriptive markup, He was a founding member of the XML Working Group at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), co-edited the XML 1.0 specification, and serves as an invited expert on the W3C XML Schema and XSL Working Groups. From 1999 through 2009 he was a member of the technical staff at W3C. Before that he worked for twelve years in the Academic Computer Center of the University of Illinois at Chicago, and for two years at Princeton University, where he served as a consultant for humanities computing questions. He also served from 1995 through 2004 as a co-coordinator (with David R. Chesnutt and Susan M. Hockey) of the Model Editions Partnership, and from 1998 to 2003 held a position as visiting researcher at the University of Bergen (Norway).

He has served as co-editor of the Text Encoding Initiative’s Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange (1994), of the W3C Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 specification, and currently serves as a co-editor of the XML Schema 1.1 specification.

He has a Ph.D. in comparative literature but strayed into computing as a graduate student and never came back out.