Tips for Editors Working in IML

This documentation contains tips for editors who are still working in IML (the old ISE Markup Language). If you follow these tips, our programmatic conversions will be better able to convert your IML tags to TEI tags, thus saving the person running the conversions a good deal of time.

General Tips

Below is a list of general tips for working in IML:
Do not add TEI tags to your IML. Our conversion processor is expecting valid IML, not a hybrid of two markup languages.
Check your tag hierarchy carefully. Misplaced closing tags trip up our conversion.
Close all of your tags properly with </elementName>. Check that every closing tag begins with a forward slash.
Do not use straight apostrophes or straight quotation marks except in the tags themselves. It will be helpful if you can correct these before sending the files to LEMDO.
Check that quotations in the annotations and critical paratexts are properly wrapped in beginning and ending quotation marks. Our processor is looking for opening and closing quotation marks to wrap the quotation in the <q> element that LEMDO requires. It is very time consuming for the LEMDO team to look up quoted material to see where the quotation begins and ends, and we do not have the resources to do that kind of work for you.
Edit the annotations and modern text file simultaneously. LEMDO uses string matching in the process of adding anchors and pointers, but, unlike the ISE, we no longer rely on string matching once the anchors and pointers are in place. If the lemma in the annotation differs from the reading in the modern text, we have to compare the files and try to figure out what the editor wants to annotate. Mistakes can occur if you edit either the modern text or the annotation file without updating the other file to match.

Spaces

Do not use the <SPACE> element to add vertical space to your modern texts. LEMDO applies generic styling to all modern texts, so there is no need to spend time adding tags that will be deleted when we convert your IML to TEI and remediate it for publication on the LEMDO platform.
You may continue to use the <SPACE> element in your semi-diplomatic texts to describe vertical white space in the early modern manuscript or printed playbook.
If you are using the <SPACE> element to make something indent, there is probably a semantic reason you are doing so. For example, it may be a letter read aloud within a speech, or the couplet in a sonnet. In those cases, leave a note in your file and we will encode the letter/couplet appropriately for you. You can wrap your note in an xml comment like the one below:
<!-- LEMDO team: This passage of the speech is a letter. -->

Collation

Do not use the @subst attribute. If you need to say more about the reading you have adopted, add a <note> to your <app> element in the collation or a <note type="textual> in your annotation.

Prosopography

Isabella Seales

Isabella Seales is a fourth year undergraduate completing her Bachelor of Arts in English at the University of Victoria. She has a special interest in Renaissance and Metaphysical Literature. She is assisting Dr. Jenstad with the MoEML Mayoral Shows anthology as part of the Undergraduate Student Research Award program.

Janelle Jenstad

Janelle Jenstad is a Professor of English at the University of Victoria, Director of The Map of Early Modern London, and Director of Linked Early Modern Drama Online. With Jennifer Roberts-Smith and Mark Kaethler, she co-edited Shakespeare’s Language in Digital Media: Old Words, New Tools (Routledge). She has edited John Stow’s A Survey of London (1598 text) for MoEML and is currently editing The Merchant of Venice (with Stephen Wittek) and Heywood’s 2 If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody for DRE. Her articles have appeared in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Elizabethan Theatre, Early Modern Literary Studies, Shakespeare Bulletin, Renaissance and Reformation, and The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. She contributed chapters to Approaches to Teaching Othello (MLA); Teaching Early Modern Literature from the Archives (MLA); Institutional Culture in Early Modern England (Brill); Shakespeare, Language, and the Stage (Arden); Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate); New Directions in the Geohumanities (Routledge); Early Modern Studies and the Digital Turn (Iter); Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers (Indiana); Making Things and Drawing Boundaries (Minnesota); Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study: Audiences, Authors, and Digital Technologies (Routledge); and Civic Performance: Pageantry and Entertainments in Early Modern London (Routledge). For more details, see janellejenstad.com.

Joey Takeda

Joey Takeda is LEMDO’s Consulting Programmer and Designer, a role he assumed in 2020 after three years as the Lead Developer on LEMDO.

Martin Holmes

Martin Holmes has worked as a developer in the UVicʼs Humanities Computing and Media Centre for over two decades, and has been involved with dozens of Digital Humanities projects. He has served on the TEI Technical Council and as Managing Editor of the Journal of the TEI. He took over from Joey Takeda as lead developer on LEMDO in 2020. He is a collaborator on the SSHRC Partnership Grant led by Janelle Jenstad.

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.

Nicole Vatcher

Technical Documentation Writer, 2020–2022. Nicole Vatcher completed her BA (Hons.) in English at the University of Victoria in 2021. Her primary research focus was womenʼs writing in the modernist period.

Tracey El Hajj

Junior Programmer 2019–2020. Research Associate 2020–2021. Tracey received her PhD from the Department of English at the University of Victoria in the field of Science and Technology Studies. Her research focuses on the algorhythmics of networked communications. She was a 2019–2020 President’s Fellow in Research-Enriched Teaching at UVic, where she taught an advanced course on Artificial Intelligence and Everyday Life. Tracey was also a member of the Map of Early Modern London team, between 2018 and 2021. Between 2020 and 2021, she was a fellow in residence at the Praxis Studio for Comparative Media Studies, where she investigated the relationships between artificial intelligence, creativity, health, and justice. As of July 2021, Tracey has moved into the alt-ac world for a term position, while also teaching in the English Department at the University of Victoria.

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