Para1The Douai Shakespeare Manuscript Project team has developed an innovative editorial
procedure that could be of interest to other editorial teams within LEMDO and beyond.
The workflow is presented here for pedagogical purposes.
A Collaborative and Interdisciplinary Workflow
Para2The implementation of this Workflow aims to address several specific challenges:
Firstly, an editorial team working on a digital edition project is inherently multidisciplinary,
bringing together individuals with diverse skills in editing. This may include doctoral
students training in the field of Digital Humanities, scholars specialized in various
disciplines, colleagues experienced in more traditional forms of editing, or even
hybrid profiles close to research engineering. This diversity immediately leads to
a reality: team members do not possess the same skills and are not trained for the
same editorial tasks.
Secondly, this team does not have dedicated full-time staff for the project, which
is often the case. Editors or research engineers, in fact most team members, have
other professional commitments. Consequently, the team needs to establish a Workflow
that enables them to gain autonomy and efficiency in accomplishing, or even automating,
the most tedious tasks.
Para3The Workflow is thus designed with a dual perspective in mind. On the one hand, it
is collaborative, aiming at allowing each team member to contribute to the editorial
process based on their skills and availability. On the other hand, it is interdisciplinary,
providing low-code tools developed by research engineers to make the editorial work
more efficient and more pleasant.
The Stages of the Editorial Workflow
Para4 The graph below represents the various stages of the editorial process that plays
a vital role in team organization by identifying the tools to be used:
Para5 For the Douai Shakespeare Manuscript Project, our editorial schema includes five
key stages:
Text Transcription. This initial stage involves the whole editorial team; it aims at transcribing the
text as rigorously as possible, according to guidelines outlined in our transcription
protocol. Considerations such as modernization, diplomatic or semi-diplomatic rendering
of the text, and the eventuality of corrections are addressed. This phase requires
specialized skills in the studied domain, including some familiarity with 17th-century
English and paleography. The transcription is carried out using conventional word
processing software such as Word or LibreOffice.
Styling. This preliminary stage aims at preparing a document for later conversion into XML-TEI.
It involves associating paragraph or character styles with each text segment to be
annotated. The goal here is not to perform a detailed editing of the text, which will
be done directly in XML-TEI, but to lay the groundwork for text structuring. This
stage does not require specific skills, and any team member can carry it out.
Conversion to XML-TEI. The conversion of the prepared document is done using the online tool ODETTE, developed
and maintained by Sorbonne Université. This tool provides automatic conversion to
XML-TEI, which needs to be checked by the team. This phase is generally quick, although
intervention may be necessary in case of compatibility issues between the word processing
software and ODETTE.
XML-TEI Correction. The XML-TEI generated by ODETTE must be corrected to meet the scholarly requirements
of the edition. For this purpose, we use a set of tools specially developed for the
project. XSLT stylesheets help automate certain tedious tasks, such as the numbering
each speech, or the automatic addition of anonymous text blocks (ab in XML-TEI). Regular
expressions (regex) are also used to automatically replace certain characters or abbreviations,
as well as assign unique identifiers to each text segment (
@xml:id). These steps require some computer skills from the members of the team and a specific
training in the developed tools.
In-Depth Editing. Finally, the last stage involves the meticulous editing of the text directly in
XML-TEI. This phase requires advanced expertise in XML-TEI and close collaboration
between editors and the project leader, who supervises complex cases. Some editing
points may require consultation with different team members based on their areas of
expertise.
Segmentation of Editorial Work
Para6The Workflow presented is designed to evolve, and can be adapted to the changing needs
of the project.
Para7 It is inevitable that the members of an editorial team will vary over time, just
as editorial requirements evolve with the refinement of the scientific position over
time. The editorial outline remains a valuable tool, and it can be used, for instance,
to present the project when applying for funding or in scientific presentations to
peers.
Para8 In conclusion, the Workflow sets out the various stages in the publishing process,
but it also leaves each team member free to choose the stages that best correspond
to their specialities, interests and abilities. Some tasks may arouse varying degrees
of interest within the team: some team members are more comfortable with transcribing
the text, while others prefer to concentrate on XML-TEI encoding. The final proofreading
of the edition remains the responsibility of the project leader, who assumes overall
scientific responsibility for the work.
Prosopography
Côme Saignol
Côme Saignol is a PhD candidate at Sorbonne University where he is preparing a thesis
about the reception of Cyrano de Bergerac. After working several years on Digital
Humanities, he created a company named CS Edition & Corpus to assist researchers in classical humanities. His interests include: eighteenth-century
theatre, philology, textual alignment, and XML databases.
Line Cottegnies
Line Cottegnies teaches early-modern literature at Sorbonne Université. She is the
author of a monograph on the politics of wonder in Caroline poetry, LʼÉclipse du regard: la poésie anglais du baroque au classicisme (Droz, 1997), and has co-edited several collections of essays, including Authorial Conquests: Essays on Genre in the Writings of Margaret Cavendish (AUP, 2003, with Nancy Weitz), Women and Curiosity in the Early Modern Period (Brill, 2016), with Sandring Parageau, or Henry V: A Critical Guide (Bloomsbury, 2018), with Karen Britland. She has published on seventeenth-century
literature, from Shakespeare and Raleigh to Ahpra Behn and Mary Astell. Her research
interests are: early-modern drama and poetry, the politics of translation (between
France and England), and women authors of the period. She has also developed a particular
interest in editing: she had edited half of Shakespeareʼs plays for the Gallimard
bilingual complete works (alone and in collaboration), and, also, Henry IV, Part 2, for The Norton Shakespeare 3 (2016). With Marie-Alice Belle, she has co-edited two Elizabethan translations of
Robert Garnier (by Mary Sidney Herbert and Thomas Kyd), published in 2017 in the MHRA
Tudor and Stuart Translation Series as Robert Garnier in Elizabethan England. She is currently working on an edition of three Behnʼs translations from the French
for the Cambridge edition of Behn’s Complete Works
Navarra Houldin
Project manager 2022–present. Textual remediator 2021–present. Navarra Houldin (they/them)
completed their BA in History and Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. During
their degree, they worked as a teaching assistant with the University of Victoriaʼs
Department of Hispanic and Italian Studies. Their primary research was on gender and
sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America.
Orgography
LEMDO Team (LEMD1)
The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project
director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators,
encoders, and remediating editors.
Metadata
Authority title
Workflow
Type of text
About
Short title
Workflow
Publisher
Sorbonne Université and University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online
Platform
Released with Douai Shakespeare Manuscript Project 1.0
Sponsor(s)
The Douai Shakespeare Manuscript Project
Anthology Lead: Line Cottegnies. The project is a scientific collaboration between Sorbonne Université and the University
of Victoria.
Encoding description
Encoded in TEI P5 according to the LEMDO Customization and Encoding Guidelines
Document status
published
License/availability
This file is licensed under a CC BY-NC_ND 4.0 license, which means that it is freely
downloadable without permission under the following conditions: (1) credit must be
given to the author, the Douai Shakespeare Manuscript Project, and LEMDO in any subsequent
use of the files and/or data; (2) the content cannot be adapted or repurposed (except
for quotations for the purposes of academic review and citation); and (3) commercial
uses are not permitted without the knowledge and consent of the Douai Shakespeare
Manuscript Project, the editor, and LEMDO. This license allows for pedagogical use
of the critical paratexts in the classroom.
Images provided by the Bibliothèque Marceline Desbordes-Valmore are licensed under
a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. They can be downloaded and reproduced in scholarly publications
and presentations provided that credit is included. Credit must include the phrase:
Used by kind permission of the Bibliothèque Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Douai, and
must include the shelfmark MS 787 and the folio numbers. We ask that a copy of any
scholarly publication be sent to the Douai library via email attachment to the Curator,
currently Jean Vilbas at jvilbas@ville-douai.fr, or via mail to the following address:
Bibliothèque Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, 61 Parvis Georges Prêtre, BP 20625, 59506
Douai cedex, France.
