Michael is no longer with us. His acumen and strategic vision over the past decades have been instrumental in the development of the discipline of Digital Humanities, with which his name will forever be associated. The next generation of humanities scholars will have to grow up without his rhetorical brilliance and wit in the countless keynotes and lectures that have motivated and inspired all of us.

Michael has been with me my entire professional life. I got to know him during his lectures on TEI, where he also talked about the early concepts of XML, long before the spec was published. At the time, I was studying at the Hochschule der Medien, where the subject “digital publishing” didn't even exist.

In a memorable meeting with him - it must have been in 1996 or 1997, I had recently finished my studies - we discussed the extent to which the new upcoming XML format was also suitable for mapping and enriching publishing content and would become strategically relevant for the publishing houses. Michael - in his unique combination of technology specialist and humanities scholar - immediately jumped on the topic and encouraged me to pursue this path professionally. He is the reason why I not only systematically developed pagina Publikationstechnologien GmbH, of which I have been managing director since 1996, into an XML specialist for the publishing industry, but also why I took on a teaching position and later a deputy professorship for XML at the Hochschule der Medien, where XML training has been an integral part of the curriculum for the next generation of publishers ever since.

Over the years, Michael has been an important contact for me in many strategic matters. He was instrumental in motivating me to further develop the parsX data format into an open standard for publishers and also played an active role in this. The fact that the German publishing industry works with media-neutral data at an extremely high level today is therefore not least thanks to you, dear Michael.

We will never forget you.

Rest in peace.