Elisa E. Beshero-Bondar
Elisa Beshero-Bondar explores and teaches document data modeling with the XML family of languages. She serves on the TEI Technical Council and is the founder and organizer of the Digital Mitford project and its usually annual coding school. She experiments with visualizing data from complex document structures like epic poems and with computer-assisted collation of differently encoded editions of Frankenstein. Her ongoing adventures with markup technologies are documented on her development site at newtfire.org.

David J. Birnbaum
David J. Birnbaum is Professor Emeritus 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 Technical 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.

Bram Buitendijk
Bram Buitendijk is a software engineer in the Research and Development team at the Humanities Cluster, part of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has worked on transcription and annotation software, collation software, and repository software.

Hugh Cayless
Hugh Cayless is a Senior Digital Humanities Developer at Duke University Libraries.

Steven J. DeRose
Steve DeRose has been working with electronic document and hypertext systems since 1979. He holds degrees in Computer Science and Linguistics and a Ph.D. in Computational Linguistics from Brown University.

He co-founded Electronic Book Technologies in 1989 to build the first SGML browser and retrieval system, DynaText, and has been deeply involved in document standards including XML, TEI, HyTime, HTML 4, XPath, XPointer, EAD, Open eBook, OSIS, and others. He has served as adjunct faculty at Brown and Calvin Universities and has written many papers, two books, and fifteen patents. Most recently he has been working as a consultant in text analytics.

Patrick Durusau
Patrick Durusau is the Co-Chair of the OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) TC and has been a member of that TC since its initial meeting on December 16, 2002. His employer/sponsor has changed several times over the years, and Patrick has been a co-editor/editor of the OpenDocument Format (ODF) for the majority of that time. Patrick is also the project editor for the ISO/IEC mirror of ODF as ISO/IEC 26300.

Patrick blogs about topic maps (being one of the co-editors of ISO 13250-5), other semantic issues and of late, how irregular forces can leverage data for their causes at Anothera Word for It.

Peter Flynn
Peter Flynn managed the Academic and Collaborative Technologies Group in IT Services at University College Cork, Ireland until his retirement in 2018. He trained at the London College of Printing and did his MA in computerized planning systems at Central London Polytechnic (now 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 1990 he installed Ireland’s first Web server and concentrated 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 has been a regular speaker and session chair at the XML Summer School in Oxford. He completed a PhD in 2015 on User Interfaces to Structured Documents with the Human Factors Research Group in Applied Psychology in UCC. He maintains a fairly random semi-technical blog at http://blogs.silmaril.ie/peter.

Ronald Haentjens Dekker
Ronald Haentjens Dekker is a researcher and software architect at DHLab at the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands, part of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. 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.

Mary Holstege
Mary Holstege spent decades developing software in Silicon Valley, in and around markup technologies and information extraction. She has most recently been pursuing artistic endeavours using the XML stack to construct generative art programs.

Joel Kalvesmaki
Joel Kalvesmaki is a software developer for the United States Government Publishing Office, the creator of the Text Alignment Network, and a scholar specializing in early Christianity.

Deborah A. Lapeyre
Debbie 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 Z39.96-2019 Journal Article Tag Suite), NISO STS (NISO Z39.102-2022, STS: Standards Tag Suite (Version 1.2)), and BITS (Book Interchange Tag Suite). She has taught hands-on XML, XSLT, DTD and schema construction, and Schematron courses as well as numerous technical and business-level introductions to XML and the JATS family of tag sets. Debbie has been working with XML and XSLT since their inception and with SGML since 1984 (before SGML was an ISO standard). In a previous life, she wrote code for systems that put ink on paper as well as programmed in, taught, and documented a proprietary generic markup system named “SAMANTHA”. Hobbies, besides Balisage, include pumpkin carving parties.

James David Mason
James David 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.

Ari Nordström
Ari is an independent markup geek based in Göteborg, Sweden. He has provided angled brackets to many organisations and companies across a number of borders over the years, some of which deliver the rule of law, help dairy farmers make a living, and assist in servicing commercial aircraft. And others are just for fun.

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.

Steven Pemberton
Steven Pemberton is a researcher, author, public speaker, and broadcaster, affiliated with the CWI, the Dutch national research centre for mathematics and informatics. His research is in interaction, and how the underlying software architecture can better support users.

His tutor at university was the man who built the world's first transistor computer, and whose tutor in turn was Alan Turing. Steven later coincidentally worked in Turing's old department writing software for the 5th computer in the line of computers Turing worked on. Steven co-designed the ABC programming language that formed the basis for Python, and was the first user of the open internet in Europe, when the CWI set it up in 1988.

Involved with the Web from the beginning, he organised two workshops at the first Web Conference in 1994. For the best part of a decade he chaired the W3C HTML working group, and has co-authored many web standards, including HTML, XHTML, CSS, XForms and RDFa. He continues to chair the XForms and ixml groups at W3C, and was until recently a member of the ODF (Open Document Format) technical committee. More details at http://cwi.nl/~steven

Jean Paoli
Jean Paoli is the Founder of Docugami Inc., a startup that uses AI to transform the unique document business processes of individual companies, making frontline users more efficient while giving COOs better compliance and insights — inspired by his deep belief that openness and interoperability raises all boats. He was formerly President of Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc., and one of the co-creators of the XML 1.0 standard with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Throughout his career, Jean has worked in startups: before Microsoft, with Inria, the renowned French research Labs (Gipsi S.A. and Grif S.A.); and within Microsoft creating four new startups: XML, InfoPath, opening the Office formats and MS OpenTech (Microsoft’s open source subsidiary). The startups he built created breakthrough platform technologies used today by millions. He is the recipient of multiple industry awards for his work on XML, semi-structured data, the convergence of documents and data and openness at large. In addition to core technical design, Jean takes deep care at building healthy ecosystems at worldwide scale. He is credited as one of the key leaders responsible for shifting in a fundamental way, under the guidance of the CEO, Microsoft’s strategy to embrace and love open source.

Hans-Jürgen Rennau
Hans-Jürgen is a software developer at parsQube GmbH, focused on the use of XML technology in general and the XQuery language in particular. Fond of rigorous abstraction, he thinks that structure is a form of energy. He has a keen interest in the question how to transform the potential energy stored in tree-structured information into logical work.

Michael Simons
Michael Simons is a Digital Media, Arts, and Technology (DIGIT) student at Penn State Behrend. After two years of studying Computer Science, he decided to pivot to Dr. Beshero-Bondar’s DIGIT program as it allows for greater creativity and a more focused path while still learning how to get the most out of today’s innovative technologies. In this program, he’s taken a deep dive into the XML stack where he enjoys using tools like XSLT—and more recently, ixml and XProc—to create rich markup that is both satisfyingly organized and able to be processed in interesting ways. Michael’s main passion is music, which he utilized to develop a large-scale text analysis project comparing the lyrics and chord progressions of seemingly similar artists.

Norman Tovey-Walsh
Norm Tovey-Walsh is currently a senior software developer at Saxonica Ltd, working out of his home in Swansea Wales. Previously, he was employed by MarkLogic Corporation, Sun Microsystems, Arbortext, and O’Reilly Media (then O’Reilly & Associates).

B. Tommie Usdin
B. Tommie Usdin is President of Mulberry Technologies, Inc., a consultancy specializing in XML for textual documents. 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 BITS Working Group and the NISO STS Standing Committee. You can read more about her at http://www.mulberrytech.com/people/usdin/index.html. and see some of her photos on: flickr.

Joris J. van Zundert
Joris J. van Zundert is a senior researcher and developer in humanities computing in the department of literary studies and the Digital Humanities Lab at the Huygens Institute. His research focuses on computational algorithms to analyze literary and historical texts, and on aspects of humanities information and data modeling. His PhD research in the field of Science and Technology Studies focused on methodological effects of the interaction between software engineers and humanities scholars. He was awarded the title of doctor cum laude on the basis of his dissertation “Scholarship in interaction” in 2022. His computational analytic work focuses on the correlation between text immanent features of texts and sociological processes around the concept of literature. He is also involved in developing computational approaches to stemmatology, narratology, and scholarly editions.