LEMDO: Introduction to Semi-Diplomatic Transcriptions: Manuscripts

Introduction to Semi-Diplomatic Transcriptions: Manuscripts

This chapter is designed for editors and encoders working on semi-diplomatic transcriptions for manuscript playbooks. Those working on printed playbooks can find information written specifically for them in Chapter 13. Semi-Diplomatic Transcriptions: Features Unique to Print Playbooks.¹

Prior Reading

Introduction to Semi-Diplomatic Transcriptions

Semi-Diplomatic Principles, Requirements, and Prohibitions

Rationale

The encoding guidelines in this chapter presuppose that you have read Chapter 12: Semi-Diplomatic Trancriptions and that you understand the transcription principles of your anthology. Most of the encoding for semi-diplomatic transcriptions of manuscript playbooks is the same as the encoding for semi-diplomatic transcriptions of printed playbooks.

Learning Outcomes

By the time you have worked through this chapter, you will:

Know how to encode the file categories for your semi-diplomatic transcription.

Be able to encode features unique to manuscript playbooks such as hands, special characters, commonplace markers, and doodles.

Section	Description
File Naming Protocols for Manuscripts	Learn how to name the file for your manuscript’s semi-diplomatic transcription
Describe Source Manuscripts	Learn how to identify and describe the manuscript in your semi-diplomatic transcription
Encode Hand	Learn how to encode different hands
Encode Page Layout for Manuscripts	Learn about LEMDO’s treatment of manuscript layout
Encode Deletions and Insertions	Learn how to encode later additions to or deletions from a manuscript
Encode Commonplace Markers, Underlines, and Braces	Learn how to encode additional marks on the page
Encode Manicules and Doodles	Learn how to encode marginal drawings such as manicules

Other Resources

LEMDO YouTube video: Semi-Diplomatic Transcriptions (Editorial)

Some useful external resources about encoding manuscripts in TEI include:

Burghart, Marjorie, ed. Creating a Digital Scholarly Edition with the Text Encoding Initiative: A Textbook for Digital Humanists. Digital Manuscripts, 2017.

Burghart, Marjorie, and Elena Pierazzo. Digital Scholarly Editions: Manuscripts, Texts, and TEI Encoding. DARIAH.

Flanders, Julia, Syd Bauman, and WWP Team. Manuscripts and the TEI Primer. Women Writer’s Project. Northeastern University. https://wwp.northeastern.edu/outreach/resources/ms_encoding.html.

Useful resources on drama in manuscript include:

Estill, Laura. Dramatic Extracts in Seventeenth-Century English Manuscripts: Watching, Reading, Changing Plays. University of Delaware Press, 2015.

Ioppolo, Grace. Dramatists and Their Manuscripts in the Age of Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton and Heywood: Authorship, Authority and the Playhouse. Routledge, 2006.

Long, William B. ’Precious Few’: English Manuscript Playbooks. A Companion to Shakespeare, edited by David Scott Kastan, Wiley, 2012, pp. 414-433.

Mayer, Jean-Christophe.Shakespeare’s Early Readers: A Cultural History from 1590-1800. Cambridge University Press, 2018.

Purkis, James. Shakespeare and Manuscript Drama: Canon, Collaboration, and Text. Cambridge University Press, 2016. WSB aaaf896.

Stern, Tiffany. Documents of Performance in Early Modern England. Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Werstine, Paul. Early Modern Playhouse Manuscripts and the Editing of Shakespeare. Cambridge University Press, 2013. WSB aaac5.

Notes

1.Note that an early iteration of LEMDO documentation’s referred to old-spelling texts, a term inherited from the Internet Shakespeare Editions and superseded by the term semi-diplomatic transcription.↑

Prosopography

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 Beatrice 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.

Laura Estill

Laura Estill is a Canada Research Chair in Digital Humanities and Associate Professor of English at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia, Canada, where she directs the digital humanities centre. Her monograph (Dramatic Extracts in Seventeenth-Century English Manuscripts: Watching, Reading, Changing Plays, 2015) and co-edited collections (Early Modern Studies after the Digital Turn, 2016 and Early British Drama in Manuscript, 2019) explore the reception history of drama by Shakespeare and his contemporaries from their initial circulation in print, manuscript, and on stage to how we mediate and understand these texts and performances online today. Her work has appeared in journals including Shakespeare Quarterly, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, Digital Humanities Quarterly, Humanities, and The Seventeenth Century, as well as in collections such as Shakespeare’s Theatrical Documents, Shakespeare and Textual Studies, and The Shakespeare User. She is co-editor of Early Modern Digital Review.

Mahayla Galliford

Project manager, 2025-present; research assistant, 2021-present. Mahayla Galliford (she/her) graduated with a BA (Hons with distinction) from the University of Victoria in 2024. Mahayla’s undergraduate research explored early modern stage directions and civic water pageantry. Mahayla continues her studies through UVic’s English MA program and her SSHRC-funded thesis project focuses on editing and encoding girls’ manuscripts, specifically Lady Rachel Fane’s dramatic entertainments, in collaboration with LEMDO.

Martin Holmes

Martin Holmes has worked as a developer in the UVic’s 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

Training and Documentation Lead 2025–present. LEMDO project manager 2022–2025. Textual remediator 2021–present. Navarra Houldin (they/them) completed their BA with a major in history and minor in Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. Their primary research was on gender and sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America. They are continuing their education through an MA program in Gender and Social Justice Studies at the University of Alberta where they will specialize in Digital Humanities.

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.

Bibliography