Responsibilities / Activities
- Visiting professor, Program in Digital Humanities, Dept. of Linguistics and Literary Studies, Technical University of Darmstadt (Institut für Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft, Technische Universität Darmstadt) summer semester (April - July) 2015 (my TU home page).
- Principal, Black Mesa Technologies.
- Co-chair of Balisage: The Markup Conference (every August; formerly in Montréal, now in Bethesda, Maryland).
- (As of December 2007) I have a blog called Messages in a bottle.
Background
- A member of the technical staff at the World Wide Web Consortium from 1998 to 2009. While at W3C, I filled several roles: member and later chair of the W3C XML Coordination Group; Member and staff contact of the W3C XML Schema Working Group and co-editor of the XSD 1.1 specification; Member and staff contact of the XSL Working Group; Member and staff contact of the Service Modeling Language (SML) Working Group; member and alternate staff contact of the XML Processing Model Working Group; member and alternate staff contact of the XML Query Working Group. I served as the leader of the W3C's Architecture Domain from July 2001 to September 2003, before escaping back to technical work. Administratively, I was attached to the MIT host site and was thus an employee of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
- Co-editor, Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 spec (1998).
- Co-editor, with Lou Burnard, of the Text Encoding Initiative's Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange (1994).
- Co-chair from 2000 through 2006 of the annual conference Extreme Markup Languages (before helping to form the new Balisage conference).
- Served as Editor in chief of the Text Encoding Initiative, an international cooperative project to develop and disseminate guidelines for the encoding and interchange of electronic text for research (1988-2000).
- Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, Stanford University (1985).
It appears I have Erdős number 6 (via Verner E. Hoggatt Jr., Leonard Carlitz, Jack Levine, Robert R. Korfhage, and David Dubin).
Contact Info
Email: cmsmcq@blackmesatech.com, Post: 259 State Road 399, Española, New Mexico 87532-3170. Tel: +1 (505) 747-4224.
N.B. I filter my email using a white list, so if you have not written me before your email will go into a folder for unknown senders rather than into my in box. I check the holding tank periodically, but (a) it does slow down delivery of mail from unknown addresses at the best of times, and (b) since about 99.5% of the mail in the holding tank is junk, I scan the subject lines of mail caught in the filter rather fast, so it's possible that I may miss a legitimate message if its subject line looks like one spammers use. So if you write me out of the blue, using an informative subject line is a good idea.
Or alternatively: if you are writing me out of the blue, but you have taken the trouble to find and read this page, perhaps I should give you a password. If you include the phrase “a fortiori” in your subject line, my white-list system will not put it in the unknown-sender mailbox. You don't need to find a way to use it naturally; the system will just look for the string in the subject line. (And since you are wondering, no, it has no occult significance. I used a random number generator to select a random headword from a random page of the collegiate dictionary that came first to my hand, and a fortiori was the selected headword on the selected page.)
I take this opportunity to note that since my name and email address are publicly available, they are routinely forged by mailers of spam and viruses. I apologize if you receive virus-laden email purporting to be from me, but it almost certainly isn't really from me.
Links
Some documents I make available on the web are listed separately. A fuller description of my background is also available in my vita, for the situations when such a document is necessary. A one-page version of the vita in PDF is available for letter-size and A4 paper.