Michael Beddow

Michael Beddow is a scholar of German Studies who has been involved in humanities computing since his undergraduate days in Cambridge in the mid 1960's. His 1982 monograph, The Fiction of Humanity: Studies in the Bildungsroman from Wieland to Thomas Mann was recently re-published electronically, using delivery techniques he later adapted for these dictionaries. The principal focus of his research is the impact of modernity upon German culture. Having examined that issue in the writings of Goethe and Thomas Mann, he is now working on a study that will extend the exploration to the official and unofficial Marxism of former East Germany. Since taking early retirement from the Chair of German at the University of Leeds, he has combined his research with providing advice and support on computing matters to local schools and charities, as well as to other scholars.

In January of 2001, having found the CJKV-E/DDB files in XML format on this web site, and seeing that they contained virtually no XML functionality, Michael set about building an entire system to provide XSLT and XLink/XPointer functionality, as well as one of the earliest stand-alone full-text search engines that could retrieve mixed Western/CJK data encoded in Unicode Utf-8 format. The current function of the XML version of both dictionaries can be mainly accredited to Michael. In addition to developing the current XML system, Michael has worked tirelessly at the maintenance and improvement of delivery from the server, in the process, dealing with a wide range of network security issues and other problems. The value of his support of this project is beyond measure.

During the summer of 2010, Michael performed a thorough renovation of the backbone structure of the CJKV-E and DDB dictionaries, adding background indexing functions, expanding the functions of the search engine, and creating an environment of interoperability between the two compilations, greatly enhancing the usefulness and usability of both lexicons. [8/31/2010].