Introduction to Annotations
¶ Rationale
Annotations are a form of critical paratext. Their purpose, length, and type will
depend on the scholarly objectives and intended readership of your anthology and as
well as the particular aims of your edition. In general, however, annotations serve
the following purposes:
They offer information necessary for the intended reader to understand the text. For
example, a student reader needs translations of non-English passages and explanatory
glosses. An anthology aimed at scholars will not need to provide such glosses.
They work in tandem with the collations to offer more information about textual variants
and cruces. They offer justifications for the editor’s emendations.
They point out intertextual connections, offer longer paraphrases than a gloss can
offer, and identify critically controversial or ambiguous passages, citing other primary
texts and secondary sources that will help the reader. The goal of such annotations
is not to display the editor’s erudition or lock down a single interpretation, but
rather to help the intended readership and support the scholarly objectives of the
edition within the anthology. They may constitute original scholarship in their own
right and may be cited by readers, critics, and future editors.
¶ Annotation Types
LEMDO’s annotation types are designed to categorize annotations by their purpose:
Anthologies can customize their interfaces to set a default view and to allow users
to turn annotations on and off by type.
Notes of
@type
"gloss" capture the editor’s translations and explanatory glosses.Notes of
@type
"textual" and "lineation" allow the editor to say more about text and emendations thereof.Notes of
@type
"commentary", the most capacious category, allow the editor to comment on any aspect of the play
not covered by the other categories.Editors can use notes of
@type
"lexical" to offer commentary on etymology or nuances of word usage, with links to the OED and/or LEME.LEMDO also allows for two additional types of annotations:
"pedagogical" annotations, which can be added either by the editor or by another scholar who has
experience teaching the play."performance" annotations, which can be used either to capture the results of a performance-as-research
editorial process or to describe stage history.¶ Digital and Print Views
By default, LEMDO includes all annotation types in the digital edition (the HTML pages).
By default, our LaTeX processing includes only gloss and commentary notes in the print
output.
Editors can also use the subtypes
"printOnly" and "onlineOnly" to designate where an annotation should appear. These subtypes are useful if the
editor wants to have a short commentary note in the print output and a longer version
of the same note in the digital output.Note that commentary notes longer than 225 characters are flagged by our LaTeX processing
as being too long for the LEMDO Hornbooks series.
¶ Collaborative Annotation
Annotations for an edition can be written synchronously by one or more editors, or
asynchronously by a later annotator. Annotations can bear a
@resp in order to give credit to multiple contributors. Pedagogical and performance annotations
lends themselves particularly well to asynchronous collaboration.¶ Anthology-Level Decisions
LEMDO supports various editorial approaches and ways of working. Consult with your
anthology lead to find out which types of annotations are required for your edition,
how verbose or terse your annotations should be, and how much you should be linking
to other texts and resources.
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 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.
Mahayla Galliford
Research assistant, remediator, encoder, 2021–present. Mahayla Galliford is a fourth-year
student in the English Honours and Humanities Scholars programs at the University
of Victoria. She researches early modern drama and her Jamie Cassels Undergraduate
Research Award project focused on approaches to encoding early modern stage directions.
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.
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
| Authority title | Introduction to Annotations |
| Type of text | Documentation |
| Short title | |
| Publisher | University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform |
| Series | Linked Early Modern Drama Online |
| Source |
TEI Customization created by Martin Holmes, Joey Takeda, and Janelle Jenstad; documentation written by members of the LEMDO Team
|
| Editorial declaration | n/a |
| Edition | Released with Linked Early Modern Drama Online 1.0 |
| Encoding description | Encoded in TEI P5 according to the LEMDO Customization and Encoding Guidelines |
| Document status | prgGenerated |
| Funder(s) | Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada |
| 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 and LEMDO in any subsequent use of the files and/or data; (2) the content cannot be adapted or repurposed (except in quotations for the purposes of academic review and citation); and (3) commercial uses are not permitted without the knowledge and consent of the editor and LEMDO. This license allows for pedagogical use of the documentation in the classroom. |