Resume: Wendell Piez

Principles

Aim for the simplest and most elegant solution possible to fit the problem or address the need.
Automation and programming demand more craft and care, not less. Aesthetics matter.
Simplify a problem by refactoring it: this requires imagination as well as an awareness of context to address and solve problems at a high level while not forgetting what is practical.
Even the most ingenious invention is of limited use if those who come after don’t know how to use it. Transparent and intelligible work can endure.
Similarly, standards and standards-based technologies are essential for realizing the promises both of electronic books and of the web as a media platform.

Skills

I have developed XML tag sets and applications for both documentary publishing (such as journals and conference proceedings) and for more highly structured information processing systems. I am a leading practitioner of XSLT, and have designed and built schemas and validation systems using DTD, RNG, XSD and Schematron. I have also worked with XSL-FO, XQuery, SVG and much else.
I have designed and built solutions to hard problems in XSLT and XQuery such as overlap problems, and constructed, deployed and managed pipelining architectures. For pipelining I have used Apache Ant, XProc and XSLT natively (using Saxon extensions). I have used XSLT and XQuery for plain text conversion, indexing and profiling, heuristic and inferential analysis and (along with Schematron) for validation.
I am familiar with major XML-based documentary encoding formats including TEI, Docbook, DITA and NISO/NLM JATS, with their extension and profiling mechanisms, and with the joys and perils of boutique and custom-built solutions. I have used SVG extensively.
I have coded HTML and web pages since 1995, and CSS since its beginnings. I am following developments in web technologies including HTML5 and JQuery. My experience includes EPUB production.
I have experience with a wide range of XML and XSLT toolkits and applications, including Apache Cocoon and oXygen XML Editor, which I am able to configure and customize.
I am competent on all the major operating systems, and most familiar with Windows (MS-DOS to Windows 7), as with common applications including MS Word, Excel, Open Office and so forth.
I have experience organizing and leading workshops and teaching courses in commercial and academic settings, and can write, edit and copy edit.

Activities

Eat Your Vegetables (a blog) includes informal writings such as personal reflections on the technologies I use. I publish infrequently and haphazardly.
My professional web site presents a range of materials including XML and XSLT resources. I also post code to Github.
I am a long-time member of ACH (the Association for Computers and the Humanities) and of the TEI (the Text Encoding Initiative).
Prose by me has been published in print, several times.
My works and projects appear in Digital Humanities curricula. Some of my theoretical work has occasionally been cited. I am a developer and instigator of an alternative markup technology, LMNL (Layered Markup and Annotation Language), with interesting applications in (among other things) literary study.
I have contributed to HUMANIST since 1996 and XSL-List since its inception in 1998. Participation in other lists varies and changes over time.
In 2007 I co-founded Digital Humanities Quarterly, for which I serve as General Editor. Since 2008 I have been engaged with Balisage (The Markup Conference) and its predecessor conferences (since 1998), as peer reviewer, contributor and technical support specialist.
Many of my solutions to common or tricky problems in XSLT are cited in the XSL FAQ.
I am almost entirely quiet on Google+ as wendellpiez and on Twitter as @WendellPiez.

Background

2012 - current Independent consultant operating as Piez Consulting Services (Rockville MD).

2008 - current Adjunct faculty, University of Illinois GSLIS (Graduate School of Information Science). Responsible for teaching LIS 590DPL, “Document Processing”.

1998-2012 Employed at Mulberry Technologies, Inc. (Rockville, MD). Mulberry is a premier vendor of services in the XML and SGML industry. I built and supported internal systems (inevitably XML-based systems); worked for clients (demonstrating and building with XSLT, XSL-FO, Schematron and other languages, providing design and strategic services); and participated with colleagues in industry activities such as our annual conference series.

1995-1997 At the Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities (Rutgers and Princeton Universities), I developed prototype SGML applications in the humanities for research and demonstration.

1991-1995 Taught various courses in the Rutgers English Department including composition and rhetoric. Worked as a Project Archivist in the Rutgers Special Collections and University Archives.

1985-1991 Attended graduate school at Rutgers University Department of English (New Brunswick, NJ), where I focused on poetry, rhetoric and aesthetic theory. In Walter Pater’s Aesthetic Discipline (1991), I dissertated on the work of Walter Pater (1839-1894) in consideration of his concept of “ascesis”. Won awards for papers. MA (1986), PhD (1991).

1980-1985 Attended Yale College (New Haven, CT). Studied mostly European languages and literatures including English and Anglo-Saxon, Ancient Greek and Latin, and German. Majored in Classics (BA 1984, Ancient Greek), concentrating on literature and ancient philosophy.

Before 1980 Attended high school at the American School in Japan (Tokyo, Japan). Science and computer whiz. Scored 800 (top score) on ETS Math Level II Achievement Test. Played with microcomputer technology and early PCs (eg TRS-80). Learned BASIC and 6502 Assembler. Provided informal technical support to a range of clients (classmates, teachers and employers). Collaborated to solve technical problems with partners (classmates, my dad). In earlier years my family was posted in Reston, VA, Manila (Philippines), Kabul (Afghanistan), and Frankfurt (Germany).

Selected Bibliography

“The Craft of XML”. Invited keynote presentation to JADH 2015. Kyoto, Japan. September 2015.

“Frankenstein’s Skeleton”. Invited presentation (Catapult Colloquium series). Indiana University. April 2015.

“All Aboard! Round-tripping JATS in an HTML-based online CMS and editing platform” JATS-Con 2015. National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland. September 2015. At http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK279900/.

“Hierarchies within range space: From LMNL to OHCO”. Balisage: The Markup Conference 2014, Washington, DC, August 2014. At http://balisage.net/Proceedings/vol13/html/Piez01/BalisageVol13-Piez01.html.

“TEI in LMNL: Implications for modeling”. TEI Members’ Meeting 2013. Rome, Italy. October 2013.

“Markup Beyond XML” Digital Humanities 2013. Lincoln, Nebraska, July 2013.

“Luminescent: parsing LMNL by XSLT upconversion” Balisage: The Markup Conference 2012. Montréal, Québec, August 2012. At http://balisage.net/Proceedings/vol8/html/Piez01/BalisageVol8-Piez01.html.

“Three Questions and One Experiment”. Invited keynote address to the Workshop on Data Modeling and Knowledge Organization in the Humanities, Brown University (Providence RI), March 2012. See http://www.piez.org/wendell/papers/brown2012/ThreeQuestions-OneExperiment-slides.pdf

“Interoperability in Ten Minutes”. Invited presentation at Interedition Think Tank, TEI Members’ Meeting 2011. Würzburg, Franconia. October 2011. See http://www.interedition.eu/wiki/index.php/WendellPiezTEI2011.

“Taming the Beast: JATS data, non-JATS data, and XML Namespaces”. JATS-Con 2011. National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland. September 2011. At http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK62086/. (A video is linked.)

“Abstract generic microformats for coverage, comprehensiveness, and adaptability”. Balisage: The Markup Conference 2011. Montréal, Québec, August 2011. At http://balisage.net/Proceedings/vol7/html/Piez01/BalisageVol7-Piez01.html.

“Impractical Applications” Digital Humanities Quarterly Vol. 2,no.1 (Summer 2011). At http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/5/1/000095/000095.html.

“Fitting the Journal Publishing 3.0 Preview Stylesheets to Your Needs: Capabilities and Customizations”. JATS-Con 2010. National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland. November 2011. At http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK47104/. (A video is linked.)

“Towards Hermeneutic Markup: An Architectural Outline”. Digital Humanities 2010. London, July 2010. See http://piez.org/wendell/papers/dh2010/.

“How to Play XML: Markup Technologies as Nomic Game”. Balisage: The Markup Conference 2009, Montréal, Québec. August 2009. At http://balisage.net/Proceedings/vol3/html/Piez01/BalisageVol3-Piez01.html.

“LMNL in Miniature”. Invited presentation at Amsterdam Overlap Workshop. December 2008. See slides at http://piez.org/wendell/LMNL/Amsterdam2008/presentation-slides.html.

“Something Called Digital Humanities” Digital Humanities Quarterly Vol. 2, no.1 (Summer 2008). At http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/2/1/000020/000020.html.

“Separating Mapping from Coding in Transformation Tasks” (with B. Tommie Usdin). XML 2007, Boston MA. December 2007.

“Schema as Markup as Theory”. TEI Members’ Meeting 2007, College Park, Maryland. November 2007.

“LMNL by eXaMpLe”. Invited presentation at Extreme Markup Languages 2007, Montréal, Québec. August 2007.

“Form and Format: Towards a Semiology of Digital Text Encoding”. Digital Humanities 2007, Urbana, Illinois. June 2007. (An earlier version was presented at the University of Georgia, November 2006).

“XSLT Throughout the Document Lifecycle”. XML 2005, Atlanta, Georgia. November 2005.

“Format and Content: Can they be separated? Should they be?” Extreme Markup Languages 2005, Montréal, Québec. August 2005.

“XML in the Real World”. Keynote address to TriXML 2005, Raleigh, North Carolina. July 2005.

“Visualizing TEI using SVG”. Poster presented at ACH/ALLC 2005, Victoria, British Columbia. June 2005.

“Way Beyond Powerpoint”. XML 2004, Washington DC. November 2004. An early version was presented at ALLC/ACH 2004 (Gothenburg, Sweden).

“Half-steps toward LMNL”. Extreme Markup Languages 2004, Montréal, Québec. August 2004. See http://conferences.idealliance.org/extreme/html/2004/Piez01/EML2004Piez01.html.

“TEI or not TEI? XML for Authoring”. ALLC/ACH 2004, Gothenburg, Sweden. June 2004.

“XSLT for Quality Checking in an XML workflow”. XML 2003, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. November 2003.

“The Ecology of Scholarly Publication”. Presented at the Wayland Collegium Seminar on Computing and the Future of the Humanities (Brown University). Providence, Rhode Island. December 2003.

“Scholarly Transgressions”. ACH/ALLC 2003, Athens, Georgia. May 2003.

“Whither Deep Markup?” ACH/ALLC 2003, Athens Georgia. May 2003.

“TEI Beyond the Tag Set”. Invited address to the annual TEI Members’ Meeting 2002, Chicago, Illinois. October 2002.

“Human and Machine Sign Systems”. Extreme Markup Languages 2002, Montréal, Québec. August 2002. Available on line at http://www.idealliance.org/papers/extreme02/html/2002/Piez01/EML2002Piez01.html.

“LMNL: The Layered Markup and Annotation Language”. With Jeni Tennison. Extreme Markup Languages 2002, Montréal (August 2002). See http://www.lmnl-markup.org.

“HUMANIST: or, the Glory of Motion”. Computers and the Humanities. Vol. 36, no.2 (May 2002): 141-142.

“From HTML to XML”. XML 2001, Orlando, Florida. December 2001.

“Beyond the ‘Descriptive vs. Procedural’ Distinction”. Extreme Markup Languages 2001, Montréal, Québec. August 2001. Subsequently printed in Markup Technologies: Theory and Practice, Vol. 3 no. 2 (Spring 2001), pp. 141-172.

“XSL: Characteristics, Status and Potentials for the Humanities”. ALLC/ACH 2000, Glasgow, Scotland. July 2000.

Wendell Piez

Summary

Principles

Skills

Activities

Background

Selected Bibliography