Types of Annotations

Rationale

LEMDO uses the <note> element for a number of different types of notes, including notes that you write for your edition’s annotations file. We require the @type attribute on the <note> element so that we can apply the appropriate processing to each note. This not only makes your encoding more specific and accurate, it allows us to render each type of note according to project-wide and anthology decisions.
This documentation will guide you through the process of choosing which value to put on the @type attribute on your annotations and it will provide useful information about how your notes will render.

Table of Types

@type Value Definition Where They Appear
"gloss" A short note that gives a brief description of the term Online and print by default
"commentary" Discussion of the meaning of the text, roughly equivalent to current annotation in editions like the Arden or New Cambridge; you may add multiple commentary notes in each annotation Online and print by default; you may limit to either the online or print edition only using the @subType attribute
"textual" Explains textual decisions made in the present and previous editions (often paired with a collation) Online only
"performance" Describes performance or production choices in specific productions named in the Production database (see Production Database (PROD1)), cited in the Performance essay, and/or made in Performance-as-Research productions that were part of the editorial process To be determined by anthology; online and print (QME)
"lexical" Discusses the etymology of a word/phrase and/or its meaning and prevalence in the early modern period; such notes will usually cite the OED and/or an early modern dictionary Online only
"lineation" Discusses the lineation or relineation of one or more lines in the text (often paired with a collation) Online only

Annotation Subtypes

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. Some anthologies may also choose to include performance notes in their print editions, as QME has done.
When you create a <note> with @type="commentary", that note may be used in the web version of the play, and it may also appear in the printed published version (if there is one). However, unlike the web version, the print document cannot be infinitely long; annotations in the print version appear as footnotes, and they must be constrained to a reasonable length. Since we want to retain long annotations where we can, but we also want to provide an alternative where necessary for the print version, you can also supply the @subtype attribute with one of these values:
"onlineOnly" means that the annotation should only be rendered in the HTML version, because it’s too long for the print version.
"printOnly" means that this is a shorter version of the annotation intended only for the print edition; it should be ignored when building the web output.
Any annotation that does not have @subtype will be used in both versions.
Note that commentary notes longer than 225 characters are flagged by our LaTeX processing as being too long for the LEMDO Hornbooks series.

Other Resources

LEMDO YouTube video: Annotations (Editorial)

Further Reading

Prosopography

Abby Flight

Remediator and encoder, 2024–present. Abby Flight completed her BA in English at the University of Victoria in 2024, and is now an MA student focusing on Medieval and Early Modern Studies.

Illya

Illya has a BA in English and Sociocultural Anthropology and an MA in English. Prior to joining the HCMC, he was a PhD candidate in English and Book History at the University of Toronto and worked on Records of Early English Drama and on the Modernist Archives Publishing Project. His work at the HCMC focuses on creating web-based applications for research projects led by members of the faculty of Humanities at the University of Victoria. This involves creating schemas for new and existing datasets, writing XSLT and build files to transform datasets into structured TEI and HTML formats, implementing staticSearch, and ensuring that new projects are Endings Principles compliant.

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.

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.

Samuel Seaberg

Samuel Seaberg, a University of Victoria English undergrad, enjoys riding his bike. During the summer of 2025, he began working with LEMDO as a recipient of the Valerie Kuehne Undergraduate Research Award (VKURA). Unfortunately, due to his summer being spent primarily in working to establish an edition of Thomas Heywood’s If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody, Part 2 and consequently working out how to represent multi-text works in a digital space, his bike has suffered severely of sheltered seclusion from the sun. Note: Samuel now works for LEMDO as the Assistant Project Manager, much to his bike’s chagrin.

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