Syd Bauman
Syd Bauman 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 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, but usually writes in XSLT, and his programs are always free (as in speech). From 2001 to 2007 Syd served as North American editor of the TEI, and is currently on the TEI Technical Council.

Jeffrey Beck
Jeff Beck was a Technical information Specialist at the National Center for Biotechnology Information at the US National Library of Medicine for 25 years. He retired in April of 2025 and is now a Citizen of the Information Space. He remains a member of the NISO Z39.96 JATS Standing Committee and the JATS4Reuse Steering Committee. He is the editor of The Model Yacht, the journal of the US Vintage Model Yacht Group, and webmaster of usvmyg.org.

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.

Peter Boot
Peter Boot is a senior researcher at the Huygens Institute for the History and Culture of the Netherlands. He has worked as an XML consultant and project lead on various digital edition projects, such as the Letters of Vincent van Gogh, the Mondrian Papers and the Anne Frank manuscripts.

Kurt Cagle
Kurt Cagle is a consulting ontologist, IEEE Standards Editor at the IEEE Spatial Web Foundation, and founding contributor to the W3C Context Graph Community Group. He has authored more than twenty-five books on XML, semantic web, and knowledge representation technologies spanning thirty years of active engagement with the W3C and related standards bodies. He writes The Cagle Report on LinkedIn, and The Ontologist and The Inference Engineer on Substack.

Ash Clark
Ash Clark is the XML Applications Developer for the Women Writers Project and Northeastern University Library’s Digital Scholarship Group.

Caleb Clauset
Caleb Clauset is a software engineer at Typefi Systems working on XML-based publishing automation tools.

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 more than fifteen patents. Most recently he has been working as a consultant in text analytics.

Julia Flanders
Julia Flanders is the Director of the Women Writers Project and Director of the Northeastern University Library’s Digital Scholarship Group.

Amanda Galtman
Amanda Galtman maintains XSpec, is writing a book on XSpec to be published by XML Press, and also writes about XSpec at https://medium.com/@xspectacles.

Betty Harvey
As President of Electronic Commerce Connection, Inc. since 1995, Betty Harvey has led many federal government and commercial enterprises in planning and executing their migration to the use of structured information for their critical functions. She has helped develop strategic XML solutions for her clients. Ms. Harvey has been instrumental in developing industry XML standards. She is the co-author of Professional ebXML Foundations published by Wrox. Ms. Harvey was a member of “The XML Guild” and was a coauthor of the book Advanced XML Applications From the Experts at The XML Guild published by Thomson.

Claus Huitfeldt
Claus Huitfeldt works at the Department of Philosophy of the University of Bergen, Norway. He was founding Director (1990-2000) of the Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen, for which he developed the text encoding system MECS as well as the editorial methods for the publication of Wittgenstein’s Nachlass – The Bergen Electronic Edition (Oxford University Press, 2000).

Michael Kay
Michael Kay is the lead developer of the Saxon XSLT and XQuery processor, and was the editor of the XSLT 2.0 and 3.0 specifications. He was instrumental in establishing a W3C community group to create 4.0 versions of the XSLT, XQuery, and XPath languages. The company he founded, Saxonica, was set up in 2004 and continues the development of products implementing these specifications. He is based in Reading, UK.

Martin Kraetke
Martin Kraetke is Lead Content Engineer at le-tex publishing services.

Deborah A. Lapeyre
Debbie 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 has worked with Tommie Usdin as architects and Secretariat for JATS (ANSI NISO Z39.96, Journal Article Tag Suite), NISO STS (NISO Z39.102, STS: Standards Tag Suite), 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.

Joshua Lubell
Josh Lubell is a retired computer scientist. During his career at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, he used SGML and XML to further the development and deployment of documentary standards for manufacturing and cybersecurity applications. He currently sings in the Rockville Chorus, where he benefits from software implementing the MusicXML standard for digital exchange of music notations.

Yves Marcoux
Yves Marcoux has been a faculty member at EBSI, University of Montréal, since 1991. He is mainly involved in teaching, research, standardization, and international cooperation activities in the field of document informatics. Prior to his appointment at EBSI, Dr. Marcoux worked for 10 years in systems maintenance and development, in Canada, the U.S., and Europe. He obtained his Ph.D. in theoretical computer science from Université de Montréal in 1991. His main research interests are intertextual semantics, the design of communication, markup languages and digital humanities.

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.

Alex Miłowski
At one point, Alex Miłowski was a contributor to many XML-related standards, projects, and technologies; days filled with pointy brackets that were never sharp. Whilst his attention is elsewhere now, nostalgia for better days for XML technology remains.

Ari Nordström
Ari Nordström 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.

Thomas B. Passin
Thomas B. Passin retired from Noblis, a descendant of The MITRE Corporation, as a Principal Systems Engineer. With an ongoing interest in modeling systems and in enterprise architecture, he was an early adopter of XML. He is the author of the 2004 book Explorer’s Guide To The Semantic Web.

He has long standing interests in Topic Maps, Mind Maps, and highly simplified markup for exploratory purposes. His 2003 Topic Maps based bookmark manager [see “Browser Bookmark Management with Topic Maps”] was in essence an ancestral “Zettelkasten-light” application.

His papers from past Extreme Markup Languages® conferences can be found here: http://www.tompassin.net

Steven Pemberton
Steven Pemberton is a researcher affiliated with CWI, Amsterdam. His research is in interaction, and how the underlying software architecture can support users.

He co-designed the ABC programming language that formed the basis for Python and was one of the first handful of people on 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 now chairs the W3C XForms and Invisible Markup groups. In 2022, ACM SIGCHI awarded him the Lifetime Practice Award. More details at: https://www.cwi.nl/~steven

Wendell Piez
Wendell Piez is an independent consultant specializing in XML, XSLT and XProc, based in Rockville, MD.

Jonathan Robie
Jonathan Robie is a software engineer at Biblica and a researcher at the Nida Institute, focused on AI-assisted biblical scholarship and declarative pipeline systems for linguistic annotation.

Andrew Sales
Andrew Sales has led the Content Architecture team at Bloomsbury since 2016. He has worked with and for publishers in the XML space since 2000. Since 2016 he has been Project Editor for the Schematron international standard (ISO/IEC 19757-3).

Michael Roy Simons
Michael Simons graduated in May 2026 with a degree in Digital Media, Arts, and Technology (DIGIT) from Penn State Behrend. After two years of studying Computer Science, he decided to pivot to Dr. Beshero-Bondar’s Digit program as it allowed 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 has taken a deep dive into the XML stack where he enjoys using tools like XSLT, 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 has utilized to develop a large-scale text analysis project comparing the lyrics and chord progressions of seemingly similar artists; he presented this project at Balisage 2025.

C. M. Sperberg-McQueen
C. M. Sperberg-McQueen was 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 also served as co-editor of the World Wide Web Consortium’s XML 1.0 and XML Schema 1.1 specifications.

Sheila E. Thomson
Sheila Thomson is a software developer who has been working with XML technologies since the early 2000s, in domains such as online news and journal publishing, banking, and manufacturing, for a variety of organisations, but highlights include the BBC, Nature, LexisNexis, Sopra Steria, and, most recently, Saxonica. She has a BA(Hons) in Information Studies and Librarianship and an MSc in Computer Science and is honoured to have been a member of a team that won a Webby Award. She is based in London and, when not developing, sings in a local community choir, chauffeurs Basset Hounds for a charity, and takes deep dives down family history-related rabbit holes (such as shoemakers in 18th century Glasgow).

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.