Manuscripts and the TEI Header

Rationale

We recommend that you begin by using a template for the teiHeader from an existing manuscript edition. The TEI Header and its component parts are explained at length in the TEI Guidelines.

Title Statement and Responsibility

In the <titleStmt> of the TEI header, the first element is <title> . Not all manuscripts have a clear title for their plays. In the text node of the <title> element, give the title of the play as you want it to appear for the title of your edition.
In the responsibility statements ( <respStmt> ), include all people who were involved in the creation of this edition. ( <respStmt> elements contain two paired elements, <resp> and <persName> , to indicate who participated in which roles. Responsibilities and people can be repeated in multiple <respStmts> , which is to say: people can have more than one responsibility, and more than one person can have the same responsibility. Names should point to entries in the LEMDO Personography using @ref attributes. See the LEMDO list of possible responsibility types. One important responsibility to indicate for manuscripts is the transcriber(s):
<resp ref="resp:trc">Transcriber</resp>
Here is a template for a series of responsibility statements in a manuscript transcription:
<respStmt>
  <resp ref="resp:aut">Author</resp>
  <persName ref="pros:SHAK1">William Shakespeare</persName>
</respStmt> <respStmt>
  <resp ref="resp:edt">Editor</resp>
  <persName ref="pers:COTT1">Line Cottegnies</persName>
</respStmt> <respStmt>
  <resp ref="resp:trc">Transcriber</resp>
  <persName ref="pers:BART6">Emma Bartel</persName>
</respStmt> <respStmt>
  <resp ref="resp:trc">Transcriber</resp>
  <persName ref="pers:DELS1">John Delsinne</persName>
</respStmt>
You will find a list of xml:ids to point to (for names of authors and contributors) under the Resources tab of the lemdo-dev site.

Publication Statement

<publicationStmt>
  <publisher>University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform</publisher>
</publicationStmt>

Manuscripts, LEMDO Categories, and the TEI Header

See Introduction to LEMDO’s Taxonomies to see more on how LEMDO files are categorized. Semi-diplomatic transcriptions have at least four category declarations: document type, format, editorial treatment, and work type (that is, genre). For details on these categories, see Encode File Categories in Semi-Diplomatic Transcriptions in the Semi-Diplomatic Transcription chapter.
Many manuscripts will have a similar declaration to the example below. The <textClass> element is nested in the <profileDesc> element in the <teiHeader> . The example below indicates that the encoded file represents a primary text (document type), a manuscript (format), a semi-diplomatic transcription (editorial treatment), and a play (genre).
<textClass>
  <catRef scheme="tax:emdDocumentTypes" target="cat:ldtPrimaryText"/>
  <catRef scheme="tax:emdBookFormats" target="cat:lbfManuscript"/>
  <catRef scheme="tax:emdEditorialTreatments" target="cat:letSemiDiplomatic"/>
  <catRef scheme="tax:emdWorkTypes" target="cat:lwtPlay"/>
</textClass>

Prosopography

Emma Bartel

Emma Bartel is a transcriber with the Douai Shakespeare Manuscript Project.

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.

John Delsinne

John Delsinne is a PhD candidate at Sorbonne Université where he is preparing a dissertation on the staging and representation of battles in Shakespeare’s history plays. He seeks to determine how the historical sources were adapted and tries to reconsider the vision of military history that arises from the plays. He is both an encoder and a transcriber with the Douai Shakespeare Manuscript Project.

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.

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, L’Éclipse 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 Shakespeare’s 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 Behn’s translations from the French for the Cambridge edition of Behn’s Complete Works

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.

William Shakespeare

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