Although there is no reason why Michael should have remembered it, I first met him after attending a TEI-related session at Western Michigan University’s Medieval Conference in Kalamazoo in 1994, approaching him as a geeky medievalist undergraduate he was patient with my naive questions. I was an undergraduate (UToronto) interested in both medieval drama and digital technology and about to move to the UK to undertake my MA and PhD (ULeeds). I never saw Michael at Kalamazoo again (and don’t remember seeing him at the UK equivalent conference in Leeds). However, as my acquaintance with the Text Encoding Initiative grew and flourished, I met Michael regularly at TEI conferences, DH conferences, Markup conferences, and various working groups and project meetings. His conference papers were always on my list to attend (when the vicissitudes of parallel session timetabling allowed), and these were always enjoyable and engaging even when I only understood about a third of what he was saying. While, later at a meal or conference reception, he might patiently explain the deeper implications of my surface understanding of what I thought he’d said, it was always clear that he was thinking several layers deeper and several moves ahead than what I’d managed to grasp.

Michael was always generous with his time and insights and he didn’t hesitate to agree to come speak in 2010 at one of the final TEI @ Oxford Summer Schools we organised (thereafter I expanded them to Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer Schools – DHOxSS) where his keynote of “Digitization, textual variation, and textual criticism: getting a better grip on the defiant multiplicity of textual traditions”, left the neophyte TEI users in awe. Michael’s overall design goals for the TEI still inform the development of the TEI Guidelines to this day. Indeed, even after years of pruning, buried deep in the TEI Guidelines source files are XML comments from Michael on the feasibility or complexity of some structure. (His initials here more often being ‘msm’ rather than the later CMSM or CMSMQ or CMSMcQ.) My favourite of such comments is:

Michael was the real example of the sophisticated and generous academic mind at its best.

As others have already said better, Michael was a friendly intellectual giant who will be sorely missed.