Balisage: where serious markup practitioners and theoreticians meet every summer. If you are happy to be the person in your project who understands the angle brackets and stuff, then you are a markup geek and Balisage is the place for you. Even if you are NOT a markup geek, if you find it instructive to spend time with them now and then, you will enjoy Balisage.
Balisage: The Markup Conference
Balisage is an annual conference devoted to the theory and practice of descriptive markup and related technologies for structuring and managing information.
Balisage Conference News
19 August 2020
Balisage 2021 will be 2—6 August 2021. Details to be announced later. We don't yet know if Balisage 2021 will be virtual or a hybrid with an in-person component. Given the success of the all-virtual Balisage 2020, Balisage 2021 will accommodate remote participation.
Balisage 2020 Proceedings The preliminary proceedings of Balisage 2020 are now available: Balisage Series on Markup Technologies
Volume 25: Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2020Proceedings to be Updated The Balisage proceedings will be updated to include presenters slides/visuals, additional papers, and revisions/corrections to a few papers.
The Balisage 2020 program included papers that discuss:
- XSLT regular expressions for Unicode
- making high-quality Microsoft Word from XML
- the expressive powers of XSD schema patterns
- markup as a writing discipline
- converting typesetting codes to structured XML
- XSpec unit testing
- IDE code
- completion from XML documentation
- statistical plotting with XSLT and SVG
- XML for art
- pipelined XML transformations, and
- what can SVG learn from OHCO
and the use of declarative markup for:
- improving the accessibility of documents
- microrevisions in authorial manuscripts
- recipes (a 30-year-old promise)
- measuring document similarity
- accessibility metadata statements
- a spell-checking framework for custom dictionaries
- cybersecurity documents, and
- redesigning the Balisage Proceeding website for accessibility.
Unfamiliar with Balisage? To get a taste of Balisage, browse the Proceedings' Master Topics List by clicking on the "+" to expand the Concepts, Specifications, or Processes topics lists.
People involved with Balisage
The people making Balisage include markup theoreticians and practitioners, data modelers, designers, architects, and both aficionados and deep thinkers. We work as software developers, system architects, academics, integrators, librarians, data miners, lexicographers, archivists, document managers, standards developers, programmers, and publishers.
Conference Committee
- Chair
- B. Tommie Usdin, Mulberry Technologies
- Co-Chairs
- Deborah A. Lapeyre, Mulberry Technologies
- James David Mason
- C. M. Sperberg-McQueen, Black Mesa Technologies
- Norman Tovey-Walsh, Saxonica
Advisory Board
- Syd Bauman, Northeastern University
- Jeff Beck, National Library of Medicine
- David J Birnbaum, University of Pittsburgh
- Jon Bosak
- Robin Cover, OASIS
- Steve DeRose, Independent Consultant
- Bob DuCharme, CCRi
- Patrick Durusau
- Eric Freese, TopQuadrant
- Eduardo Gutentag
- G. Ken Holman, Crane Softwrights
- Sam Hunting
- Michael Kay, Saxonica
- David A. Lee, Nexstra, Inc
- Chris Lilley, World Wide Web Consortium
- Yves Marcoux, Université de Montréal
- Sean McGrath, Propylon
- Mary McRae, IQ Solutions
- Steven R. Newcomb, Coolheads Consulting
- Wendell Piez, Piez Consulting Services
- Ari Nordström, Creative Words
- Liam Quin, Delightful Computing
- Allen H. Renear, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Bruce Rosenblum, Inera
- Jeni Tennison, Jeni Tennison Consulting
- Henry S. Thompson, University of Edinburgh
- Fabio Vitali, University of Bologna
- Lauren Wood