A giant has passed.

I first met Michael in the mid to late 80s, when he, Lou Bernard, Susan Hockey, Nancy Ide and a few others were hatching what became the Text Encoding Initiative. Historians generations hence will see this as an event as important (say) as Aldus Manutius’ journey to Venice in the 1490s, or Caxton’s to London in the 1470s. Others have spoken of his generosity, his curiosity, his prodigious knowledge. Most rarely, he created harmony where there might have been discord. There aren’t so many of us now still active who recall those heady days of the late 80s and early 90s when wild surmises turned into oceans of code and documentation. Michael himself always saw the TEI, and all he did, as a joint enterprise. He always sought to reach out to those who disagreed, questioned, or just failed to understand (as I usually did), and to give others space to speak. It would be wrong to say of anyone in that enterprise, that without him or her the TEI would not have happened. Yet, there is a special kind of leadership required in a collaboration. Michael was that leader, and the TEI happened, and much else to our great benefit.

A good year was one in which I saw Michael, a great year was when I saw him twice. I last spoke to him online in a virtual conference on digital editions last October, when for a few moments he, Lou Bernard and I resurrected unlaid ghosts of long-ago discussions. There were future conversations, even a pilgrimage to Black Mesa to consult the oracle, to be had: now gone. He was the best of us, as a person and as a scholar.