Balisage 2017 Participant Biographies
Syd Bauman
Syd Bauman began working at the Women Writers Project in 1990. Although his title would have you believe that he is a computer programmer, Syd is fond of pointing out that he doesn’t write that much actual code; when he does, it is usually in XSLT, and his programs are always copylefted.
A large part of Syd’s job is teaching XML and TEI — and perhaps XPath and XSLT — to humanities students employed by the WWP and to scholars, librarians, and students around the world.
Syd became a hard-core computer user in 1982 and a devotee of descriptive markup two years later. He began using SGML and the TEI when he came to the Women Writers Project. From 2001 to 2007, Syd served as North American editor of the TEI, and he is currently on the TEI Technical Council.
Jeff Beck
Jeff Beck is a Technical Information Specialist at the National Center for Biotechnology Information at the US National Library of Medicine. He has been involved in the PubMed Central project since it began in 2000. He has been working in print and then electronic journal publishing since the early 1990s. Currently he is co-chair of the NISO Z39.96 JATS Standing Committee and is a BELS-certified Editor in the Life Sciences.
Elisa Eileen Beshero-Bondar
A scholar of British Romanticism and hybrid literary genres, Dr. Beshero-Bondar earned a PhD in English Literature from Penn State University in 2003, and afterwards took a post teaching literature at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg. Her publications include a book about women Romantic poets, titled Women, Epic, and Transition in British Romanticism, was published by the University of Delaware Press in 2011, and articles in Literature Compass, ELH (English Literary History), Genre, and Philological Quarterly on the poetry of Robert Southey, Mary Russell Mitford, and Lord Byron in context with 18th- and 19th-century views of revolution, world empires, natural sciences, and theater productions.
Since earning tenure in 2011, she has applied herself adventurously to the building of digital editions and digital research projects, such as studying studying associations among physical and mythical locations in epic poetry, and teaching undergraduates the XML family of languages in the context of designing research projects. She is the director of the Digital Mitford project, whose two-fold mission is:
- to produce the first comprehensive scholarly edition of the works and letters of Mary Russell Mitford, and
- to share knowledge of TEI XML and other related humanities computing practices with all serious scholars interested in contributing to the project.
In keeping with the second goal, she hosts an annual coding school at Pitt-Greensburg each May or June to teach TEI, regular expression up-conversion of documents, XPath, schema design, and XSLT or XQuery, based on the interests and background of registrants. Other digital projects in which she is enmeshed include a Bicentennial Frankenstein project to up-convert the 1990s electronic Frankenstein edition by 2018, and Amadis In Translation, which experiments with applying XML to quantify, categorize, and study alterations made by Robert Southey in translating an early modern Spanish text of Amadis de Gaule. She was elected to serve on the TEI Technical Council from 2016-2017.
David J. Birnbaum
David J. Birnbaum is Professor and Chair of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh. He has been involved in the study of electronic text technology since the mid-1980s, has delivered presentations at a variety of electronic text technology conferences, and has served on the board of the Association for Computers and the Humanities, the editorial board of Markup languages: Theory and practice, and the Text Encoding Initiative Council. Much of his electronic text work intersects with his research in medieval Slavic manuscript studies, but he also often writes about issues in the philosophy of markup.
Brett Bobley
Brett Bobley is the Chief Information Officer for the National Endowment for the Humanities. He also serves as the Director of the Office of Digital Humanities. Brett has a B.A. in philosophy from the University of Chicago and an M.S. in computer science from the Johns Hopkins University. In 2006 Brett received a Chief Information Officers (CIO) Council Leadership Award from the Office of Management and Budget. In 2007 he received a Presidential Rank Award from the President of the United States in recognition of his exceptional long-term accomplishments, such as cofounding the federal government’s Small Agency CIO Council and establishing the NEH Office of Digital Humanities.
Kurt Cagle
Kurt Cagle has been kicking around the XML, RDF and JSON communities for the last twenty years, exploring the bleeding edges, forgotten corners and horror hotspots of the data world. He currently lives in Issaquah, WA, where he spends most of his time staring at rain.
John Chelsom
John Chelsom is CEO of Seven Informatics Ltd. He trained as an electrical engineer before gaining a PhD in artificial intelligence in medicine. He has been a Visiting Professor in Health Informatics at City University, London and the University of Victoria, Canada. As Managing Director of CSW Group from 1993 to 2008, John was responsible for implementation of XML workflow and production systems for many major organisations, including the British Medical Journal, Jaguar Cars and the Royal Pharmaceutical Society.
The Case Notes product developed by CSW was based on XML and other open standards. In 2003 the UK government chose Case Notes as the primary clinical system in the national architecture for a shared electronic health record covering the 55 million citizens in England. In 2000, John founded the XML Summer School and continues as a board member and lecturer in this annual event.
Since 2010 he has been the lead architect of the open source cityEHR product ñ an XRX (Xforms, REST, XQuery) health records system currently used in a number of hospitals in England.
John Cooper
John Cooper has been working with structured text since 1994. Since then he has worn multiple hats: conversion programmer to OmniMark solutions architect, systems integrator, consultant. He has an Honours BSc in Physics and Computer Science from the University of Toronto.
Ronald Haentjens Dekker
Ronald Haentjens Dekker is a software architect and consultant at the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands. As a software architect, he is responsible for translating research questions into technology or algorithms and explaining to researchers and management how specific technologies will influence their research. He has worked on transcription and annotation software, collation software, and repository software, and he is the lead developer of the CollateX collation tool. He also conducts workshops to teach researchers how to use scripting languages in combination with digital editions to enhance their research.
Peter Flynn
Peter Flynn manages the Academic and Collaborative Technologies Group in IT Services at University College Cork, Ireland. He is a graduate of the London College of Printing and the University of Westminster. He worked in the UK for the Printing and Publishing Industry Training Board as a DP Manager and for United Information Services of Kansas as IT consultant before joining UCC as Project Manager for academic and research computing in 1984. In 1990 he installed Ireland’s first Web server and since then has been concentrating on academic and research publishing support. He has been Secretary of the TeX Users Group, Deputy Director for Ireland of EARN, and a member both of the IETF Working Group on HTML and of the W3C XML SIG; and he has published books on HTML, SGML/XML, and LaTeX. Peter also runs the markup and typesetting consultancy Silmaril, and is editor of the XML FAQ as well as an irregular contributor to conferences and journals in electronic publishing, markup, and Humanities computing, and a regular speaker and session chair at the XML Summer School in Oxford. He completed a late-life PhD in User Interfaces to Structured Documents with the Human Factors Research Group in Applied Psychology in UCC. He maintains a fairly random technical blog at http://blogs.silmaril.ie/peter
Caitlin Gebhard
Caitlin Gebhard is the Customer Support and QA Project Lead at Inera, where she provides user-focused technical support, documentation, project management, and design to the eXtyles and Edifix product teams. Ms. Gebhard uses her love of design and technology to enhance a variety of user experience and workflows in the scholarly publishing community. Prior to joining Inera in 2013, she studied technical writing and digital authorship. She received a BA in English from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Tony Graham
Tony Graham is a Senior Architect with Antenna House, where he works on their XSL-FO and CSS formatter, cloud-based authoring solution, and related products. He also provides XSL-FO and XSLT consulting and training services on behalf of Antenna House.
Tony has been working with markup since 1991, with XML since 1996, and with XSLT/XSL-FO since 1998. He is Chair of the Print and Page Layout Community Group at the W3C and previously an invited expert on the W3C XML Print and Page Layout Working Group (XPPL) defining the XSL-FO specification, as well as an acknowledged expert in XSLT. Tony is the developer of the “stf” Schematron testing framework and also Antenna House’s “focheck” XSL-FO validation tool, a committer to both the XSpec and Juxy XSLT testing frameworks, the author of Unicode: A Primer, and a qualified trainer.
Tony’s career in XML and SGML spans Japan, USA, UK, and Ireland. Before joining Antenna House, he had previously been an independent consultant, a Staff Engineer with Sun Microsystems, a Senior Consultant with Mulberry Technologies, and a Document Analyst with Uniscope. He has worked with data in English, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, and with academic, automotive, publishing, software, and telecommunications applications. He has also spoken about XML, XSLT, XSL-FO, EPUB, and related technologies to clients and conferences in North America, Europe, Japan, and Australia.
Ari Gross
Dr. Ari Gross, Ph.D., serves as Chief Executive Officer at CVISION Technologies, Inc. Dr. Gross has been involved in digital imaging for the past 20 years. His achievements include over 40 published papers and several patents in areas related to digital imaging and document understanding. Dr. Gross received a BS degree in Mathematics from Johns Hopkins University and a PhD in Computer Science from Columbia University.
Mark Gross
Mark Gross, President of Data Conversion Laboratory, is a recognized authority on XML implementation, document conversion, and data mining. Prior to founding DCL in 1981, he was with the consulting practice of Arthur Young & Co. Mark has a BS in Engineering from Columbia University and an MBA from New York University, and has taught at the New York University Graduate School of Business, the New School, and Pace University.
Mary Holstege
Mary Holstege is Principal Engineer at MarkLogic Corporation. She has over 25 years experience as a software engineer in and
around markup technologies and information extraction. She holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University in Computer Science, for a thesis on document representation.
Michael Kay
Michael Kay has been developing the Saxon product since 1998, initially as a spare-time activity at ICL and then Software AG, but since 2004 within the Saxonica company which he founded. He holds a Ph.D from the University of Cambridge where he studied databases under the late Maurice Wilkes, and spent 24 years with ICL, mainly working on the development of database software. He is the editor of the W3C XSLT specification.
Robin La Fontaine
Robin La Fontaine is the founder and CEO of DeltaXML. His background includes computer aided design software and he has been addressing the challenges and opportunities associated with information change for many years. DeltaXML tools are now providing critical comparison and merge support for corporate and commercial publishing systems around the world, and are integrated into content management, financial and network management applications supplied by major players. Robin studied Engineering Science at Worcester College, Oxford and holds an MSc in Computer Science from the University of Hertford. He is a Chartered Engineer and member of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers. He has three adult children, one granddaughter, and never finds quite enough time for walking, gardening and working with wood.
Deborah A. Lapeyre
Deborah Aleyne Lapeyre is a Senior Consultant for Mulberry Technologies, Inc., a consulting firm specializing in helping their clients toward better publishing through XML, XSLT, and Schematron solutions. She works with Tommie Usdin as architects and Secretariat for JATS (ANSI NISO Z39.96-2015 Journal Article Tag Suite) and BITS (Book Interchange Tag Suite). She teaches hands-on XML, XSLT, DTD and schema construction, and Schematron courses as well as numerous technical and business-level introductions to XML and JATS. Debbie has been working with XML and XSLT since their inception and with SGML since 1984 (before SGML was finalized as an ISO standard). In a previous life, she wrote code for systems that put ink on paper and used, taught, and documented a proprietary generic markup system named “SAMANTHA”. Hobbies, besides Balisage, include pumpkin carving parties.
David Lee
David Lee has over 30 years’ experience in the software industry responsible for major projects at companies of all sizes and cross-industry and the developer of “xmlsh”, a widely used open source scripting language. Examples include telephony automation, embedded systems, real-time video streaming (IBM), CRM systems (Sun, Centura Software), Security and infrastructure (Centura Software, RightPoint, MarkLogic), Software development frameworks (Centura, WebGain), Clinical information work-flows, mass mobile device information distribution (Epocrates), Core “NoSQL”/“XML” Database development, Cloud computing, Global secure telemetry distribution (MarkLogic), Digital publishing (internet and physical media), eCommerce and custom messaging systems (Nexstra). He has a long history of independent research in effective data processing and markup use in industry and has been involved in multiple W3C working groups. He currently serves an advisory role as CTO of Nexstra, a digital publication and services company he co-founded over 10 years ago.
Pietro Maria Liuzzo
Ancient Historian turned TEI and Digital Humanities advocate, Pietro Maria Liuzzo has worked for the EAGLE project on Greek and Latin epigraphy and now leads all aspects of the technical development of the project Beta maṣāḥǝft: Manuscripts of Ethiopia and Eritrea.
Vincent Lizzi
Vincent Lizzi is an Agile Product Owner and Electronic Production Manager at Taylor & Francis. Vincent is also a contributor to XSpec.
Debbie Lockett
Debbie Lockett joined the Saxonica development team in 2014 following post-doctoral research in Pure Mathematics at the University of Leeds. Her Ph.D and further research generally involved symmetries of infinite relational structures. Since moving into the “real” world of software development at Saxonica, Debbie has worked on performance benchmarking, developing the tools for creating Saxonica’s product documentation, and the implementation of XQuery 3.1 features, as well as the development of Saxon-JS.
Joshua Lubell
Joshua Lubell is a computer scientist in the NIST Engineering Laboratory’s Systems Integration Division. His interests include model-based engineering, cybersecurity, cyber-physical systems, long-term preservation of digital data, information modeling, and XML and other markup technologies. He received the United States Department of Commerce Silver Medal for his leadership in developing ISO 10303-203, a standard for representation and exchange of computer-aided designs. He is also a Balisage 2017 hyper-local, residing in the heart of Rockville, Maryland.
John Lumley
A Cambridge engineer by background, John Lumley created the AI group at Cambridge Consultants in the early 1980s and then joined HPLabs Bristol as one of its founding members. He worked there for 25 years, managing and contributing in a variety of software/systems fields, latterly specialising in XSLT-based document engineering, in which he subsequently gained a PhD in early retirement. Rarely happier than when writing XSLT to write XSLT to write XSLT, he is currently helping develop the Saxon XSLT processor for Saxonica and consulting on various aspects of using XSLT.
Murray Maloney
Murray Maloney is a technical writer by trade, an electronic technician by training, a markup language expert by circumstance, and an inventor by necessity. His areas of expertise are technical publishing and semantic markup. He has been working with publishing systems since 1975, as a writer, editor, publisher, hypertext system architect, typesetter, and quality advocate.
James D. Mason
James D. Mason, originally trained as a mediaevalist and linguist, became a writer, systems developer, and manufacturing engineer at U.S. Department of Energy facilities in Oak Ridge since the late 1970s. In 1981, he joined the ISO’s work on standards for document management and interchange. He chaired ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34, which is responsible for SGML, DSSSL, Topic Maps, and related standards, for more than 20 years. Dr. Mason has been a frequent writer and speaker on standards and their applications. For his work on SGML, Dr. Mason has received the Gutenberg Award from Printing Industries of America and the Tekkie Award from GCA. He recently retired from working on information systems to support manufacturing and documentation at DOE’s Y-12 National Security Complex (Y-12) in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
Mary McRae
Mary McRae first sat at a keyboard at the age of 6 and always knew that she would pursue a career in music, until she traded keyboards and decided to pursue a career in publishing technology instead. Since 1993, she has been engaged in helping organizations adopt structured markup and the tools, techniques, and systems that support content creation, editorial workflows, production, and content management. She is a past OASIS Board Member (1999), and served as the OASIS Technical Committee Administrator and Director of Standards Development from 2004 to 2010, shepherding standards — and the committee members that produce them — from initial draft submission through final approval. Today, Mary is a member of the NISO Z39-96, JATS: Journal Article Tag Suite Working Group as well as the BITS Working Group.
Ari Nordström
Ari Nordström is a freelance markup geek, based in Göteborg, Sweden, but offering his services across a number of borders. He has provided angled brackets and such to a number of organisations and companies over the years, with LexisNexis UK being the latest. His favourite XML specification remains XLink, and so quite a few of his frequent talks and presentations on XML include various aspects of linking.
Ari is the proud owner and head projectionist of Western Sweden’s last functioning 35/70mm cinema, situated in his garage, which should explain why he once wrote a paper on automating commercial cinemas using XML.
Evan Owens
Evan Owens has worked on technology implementation and management for academic publishing for 30 years including early migrations to SGML and XML and HTML and all the publishing workflow components. He has been involved in many standards for content and metadata including ISO 12083 DTD, NLM DTD, NISO JATS, PREMIS and in industry organizations and initiatives including Crossref, NISO, and CHORUS. He has attended the SGML and XML conferences for many years and been a frequent speaker on technology topics at scholarly publishing conferences.
Wendell Piez
Wendell Piez is an independent consultant specializing in XML and XSLT, based in Rockville MD.
Bruce Rosenblum
Bruce Rosenblum is CEO of Inera Incorporated. He has more than 35 years of experience designing and implementing electronic publishing solutions. He heads up software development activities at Inera, including the design and development of eXtyles and Edifix. He also consults on the design of electronic production workflows and application of XML in publishing. He developed the CrossRef Metadata Deposit Schema, co-authored the original NLM DTD, is an active member of the JATS and BITS working groups, and is co-chair of the NISO STS working group. He served on the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) Board of Directors from 2005 to 2013. His 16 years of joint work with CrossRef earned Inera and CrossRef the 2014 NEPCo Publishing Collaboration Award.
Yunhao Shi
Yunhao Shi is a senior software engineer at CVISION Technologies, Inc. He has been involved in digital imaging, OCR and automation for past 13 years and has a patent in super accurate OCR. Shi received a BS degree in computer science from Queens college.
C. M. Sperberg-McQueen
C. M. Sperberg-McQueen is the founder and principal of Black Mesa Technologies, a consultancy specializing in helping memory institutions improve the long term preservation of and access to the information for which they are responsible.
He served as editor in chief of the TEI Guidelines from 1988 to 2000, and has also served as co-editor of the World Wide Web Consortium’s XML 1.0 and XML Schema 1.1 specifications.
Helen St. Denis
Helen St. Denis originally joined Stilo as a technical editor in the documentation team and now works closely with our Migrate customers, helping to analyze their legacy content, configure dedicated conversion portals, and provide training and support on an ongoing basis. Over a period of several years, she has helped to convert many thousands of pages from FrameMaker, Word, RoboHelp, and InDesign files to DITA and other XML formats. Helen holds a BA in English from St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, and has pursued graduate studies at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.
Will Thompson
Will Thompson leads software development on core technologies for O’Connor’s Online, the web-based legal research platform that complements the company’s expanding library of mostly home-grown (and mostly Texas-based) legal books. Will works on a wide array of software, from back-end editorial toolchains to customer-facing search engines.
Matt Turner
Matt Turner is the CTO, Media and Entertainment at MarkLogic where he
develops strategy and solutions for the Media, Publishing, Entertainment
and Information Provider markets and works with customers and prospects to
create leading edge information and digital content applications with
MarkLogic’s Enterprise NoSQL database. Matt has worked closely with
MarkLogic customers NBC, Warner Bros., LexisNexis, McGraw-Hill Finance,
Dow Jones and more. Before joining MarkLogic, Matt was at Sony Music and
PC World pioneering the use of XML and developing innovative publishing
and asset delivery applications.
B. Tommie Usdin
B. Tommie Usdin is President of Mulberry Technologies, Inc., a consultancy specializing in XML and SGML. Ms. Usdin has been working with SGML since 1985 and has been a supporter of XML since 1996. She chairs the Balisage conference. Ms. Usdin has developed DTDs, Schemas, and XML/SGML application frameworks for applications in government and industry. Projects include reference materials in medicine, science, engineering, and law; semiconductor documentation; historical and archival materials. Distribution formats have included print books, magazines, and journals, and both web- and media-based electronic publications. She is co-chair of the NISO Z39-96, JATS: Journal Article Tag Suite Working Group and a member of the NISO Board of Directors. You can read more about her at http://www.mulberrytech.com/people/usdin/index.html
Andrea Vredberg
Andrea Vredberg holds a BA in Economics from University of Illinois and an MA in Economics from University of Illinois, Chicago. She was a consultant for the Huron Consulting Group where she assisted higher education institutions and academic medical centers to develop strategic and financial plans and to re-engineer outmoded content workflows to support an institution’s unique research mission. Ms. Vredberg extended her experience with intelligent content when she joined the staff of Idealliance, an Association focused on publishing technologies and the host organization for the development of many XML and metadata intelligent content industry specifications. Ms. Vredberg currently serves as Ictect’s Business Development and Economic Strategist. She recently completed General Assembly’s Digital Marketing Bootcamp and is a certified Microsoft Customer Immersion Experience Facilitator.
Norman Walsh
Norman Walsh is a Lead Engineer at MarkLogic Corporation where he helps to develop APIs and tools for the world’s leading enterprise NoSQL database. Norm is also an active participant in a number of standards efforts worldwide: he is chair of the XML Processing Model Working Group at the W3C where he is also co-chair of the XML Core Working Group. At OASIS, he is chair of the DocBook Technical Committee.