Anthology About Pages

Rationale

Your anthology’s About pages are a key part of your anthology. You may add About pages to give readers additional context about the editions in your anthology and to provide information about your anthology’s history, scope, editorial practices, contributors, and more. In addition to pages you write for your anthology, LEMDO has some standard About pages that you must include in your anthology: User Guide, staticSearch, Privacy, Release Notes, and Publisher and Platform.
This documentation outlines what you can add in your anthology’s About pages, what is required by LEMDO, and who is responsible for writing and updating your About pages. It also includes information on your anthology page ([anth].xml; e.g., dre.xml) and explains how you will use your anthology page to include editions in your anthology.

Disambiguation

This documentation does not explain where to save your anthology About pages. Each anthology will have a slightly different folder structure in its anthology directory. For information about how to organize the files in your anthology directory, see Set Up Your Anthology in the LEMDO Repository.

About Pages Required in All Anthologies

All LEMDO anthologies must include the following About pages:
Anthology Bibliography (for works cited in the About pages)
Contributors (or equivalent)
Release Notes
StaticSearch
User Guide
Privacy
Platform and Publisher
In addition, each anthology will have homepage content. Homepage content is captured in the anthology page ([anth].xml; e.g., dre.xml). For more information on anthology homepages, see Special Case: Anthology XML Pages.

Anthology Bibliographies

You anthology bibliography will include all of the sources cited in your anthology’s About pages. Optional: You may also include all the sources cited in the editions in your anthology, but remember that every edition has its own bibliography page; for some anthologies (e.g., DRE, NISE), such a task would be daunting, while other anthologies (e.g., MoMS) might want to aggregate all the scholarship in one place. Use your common sense about what will serve your users best.
Use our edition bibliography template (lemdo/data/templates/editionBibliography_template.xml) to create your anthology bibliography file. Customize the divisions to match your anthology’s bibliography needs. For example, you may wish to have two bibliography lists, each contained within its own <listBibl> element: one for works cited in your About pages and one for works cited in your anthology’s editions. For information on creating a new file from a LEMDO template, see Use LEMDO’s Oxygen Templates. For information on how to structure and encode your bibliography, see Curate Edition Bibliography.
In your anthology bibliography, add a <bibl> element for each of the unique sources cited with a <ref> element in your anthology directory (e.g., lemdo/data/anthologies/dre. Ensure that you also add commented-out human-readable information about the source as outlined in Practice: Create Sections in Your Edition Bibliography.
To compile sources for your anthology bibliography from your About pages (and, if you wish, your anthology’s editions), follow these steps:
To find all of the sources cited in your anthology About pages, go to the Project pane in Oxygen and find your anthology’s directory (e.g., lemdo/data/anthologies/moms).
Right-click on your anthology’s directory and select Find/Replace in Files …. (Note that you are merely finding things, not replacing them.)
In the Text to find search bar, type <ref type="bibl" (include the opening pointy bracket < but do not add a closing pointy bracket).
Click the Find all button. This search will find all of the sources cited with a <ref> element in your anthology directory.
Optional steps if you are aggregating edition bibliographies:
Go into each of your published editions’ bibliography files and copy the contents of their <listBibl> elements (i.e., copy all of the <bibl> elements and their associated XML comments).
Paste the contents as children of the appropriate <listBibl> element in your anthology bibliography file.
Put the pasted <bibl> elements in alphabetical order, ensuring that you keep the correct XML comment beside each <bibl> element.
Where there are duplicate entries, delete all but one. The easiest time to delete duplicates is after you have put the bibliography into alphabetical order.

Contributors Page(s)

Your anthology should have at least one page listing and giving credit to contributors. There are various ways to organize and title such pages. Here are some examples from already published anthologies:
LEMDO’s People page (under the About menu)
MoMS’s Team page (under the Credits menu)
MoMS’s Editors page (with a table showing editions, links, and release dates; also under the Credits menu)
QME’s Acknowledgements page (also under the About menu)
DSMP’s People page (under their About menu)
DSMP’s Supporters page (under the Credits menu)
Remember that every name can be tagged with a <persName> element and a @target attribute pointing to the contributor’s bio-bibliographical note from the LEMDO-wide PERS1.xml file. The LEMDO processing will automatically create a clickable link and a pop-up window with the contributor’s name and their LEMDO bio at the time of your anthology release. If you want to customize someone’s bio or capture their bio at a particular moment in time other than the release, then you may wish to include and encode a bio (instead of tagging the person’s name). Generally, however, it’s better to pull in the current contributor bio by tagging the contributor’s name.
If LEMDO developers, designers, and project managers contribute substantially to the functionality, design, and release of your anthology, please acknowledge them.1

Release Notes

Every anthology must have a Release Notes page. LEMDO recommends beginning the page with an explanation of the static release model. Recommended text:
<p>The <!-- insert project name --> (<!-- insert project acronym -->) follows the <ref target="https://endings.uvic.ca/principles.html#release-management">Endings Principles for Release Management</ref>. We periodically release new static versions of this website as new material is created and peer-reviewed. The release is comprised of a complete and self-contained set of HTML files; these files have no dependencies on external code libraries or on a back-end server. The Endings <ref target="https://endings.uvic.ca/staticSearch/docs/howDoesItWork.html">
  <title level="m">staticSearch</title> engine</ref> (created by <name ref="pers:HOLM1">Martin Holmes</name> and <name ref="pers:TAKE1">Joey Takeda</name>) is built into the release so that <!-- insert project acronym --> is fully concordanced, indexed, and searchable. The <!-- insert project acronym --> release schedule allows us to publish editions as they are completed, add new documentary discoveries, and update our bibliography in a systematic way. Each static release has a version number. Major releases are indicated by a change to the whole number integer (1.0 to 2.0). Minor releases of content are indicated by a change to the point number (1.0 to 1.1). The first <!-- insert project acronym --> release on the LEMDO platform is numbered 1.0. Releases are described on this page in chronological order.</p>
With each release, you will add a new <div> below the <div> for the previous release.2 The <head> element should contain the release number. Here’s an example for the second release of the Douai Shakespeare Manuscript Project:
<div xml:id="douai_release_1.1">
  <head>DSMP 1.1</head>
  <p xml:id="douai_release_p5">This second release of the DSMP anthology on the LEMDO platform on 2025-07-03 is the first release of the semi-diplomatic editions of the Douai <title level="m">As You Like It</title>, <title level="m">Comedy of Errors</title>, and <title level="m">Romeo and Juliet</title>. The contextual pages released with DSMP 1.0 are largely unchanged, except for some minor rewording in the metadata.</p>
  <p xml:id="douai_release_p6"><!-- Paragraph content here --></p>
</div>
Information to include in each set of release notes, with notes about who is responsible for writing the notes:
New additions to the anthology, written by the anthology lead(s)
New functionalities (if any), written by the LEMDO team if there have been improvements to LEMDO’s publication and processing
Corrections/changes to previously published contents, written by the anthology lead(s)
Intentional omissions (if any), written by the anthology lead(s) if the omissions pertain to content and by the LEMDO team if the omissions pertain to functionalities
Acknowledgements of (and/or credit to) the contributors and the release team. Anthology lead(s) will write most of this section; the LEMDO team will add a bit of information about the release team and any RAs who helped with the pre-freeze and freeze processes.
Use narrative paragraphs and/or lists as seems appropriate to the information you need to convey. Add links to new content if you wish. Here are some examples from already published anthologies:
MoMS’s Release Notes page (under the Preface menu)
QME’s Release Notes page (under the About menu)
DSMP’s Release Notes page (under the About menu)

staticSearch

LEMDO includes staticSearch (a fully functional, Endings-compliant search engine) in each anthology. A member of the LEMDO team will add an [anth]_search.xml file to your anthology’s about folder; this file generates a landing page (i.e., a search page) in your anthology with all the functionalities of staticSearch. Generally speaking, you will not need to make any changes to the search page.

User Guides

LEMDO has a standard user guide that we add to each anthology. You may make minor changes to some parts of your user guides, following the instructions in the LEMDO template for what to update and what to leave as it is. If your anthology has added features that are not mentioned in the user guide, you will want to add a section for each added feature.

About Pages that are Unique to Your Anthology

You will likely wish to add additional About pages, such as a page about your anthology, a mission statement, and/or an anthology history page. When deciding what you want to add, you may find it helpful to look at what our other published LEMDO anthologies have included in their anthology about pages by clicking through the options in their top navigation bars. For a list of our published anthologies, see the public LEMDO homepage.

Special Case: Anthology XML Pages

Each anthology has its own anthology XML page named [anth].xml, where [anth] is replaced by your anthology’s abbreviation (e.g., dre.xml). Your [anth].xml page has three functions:
To provide metadata for the anthology as a whole.
To provide the metadata and content for your anthology’s homepage.
To include editions for publication in your anthology.
The LEMDO team will create this file and set up its structure for you, but you will update and maintain it. If you have questions about how to update your [anth].xml file, contact the LEMDO team.
Your anthology XML file is different from the other XML files in your anthology and its editions. The anthology XML file is rooted not on the <TEI> element (as is the case in every other LEMDO TEI-XML file) but on a <teiCorpus> element. The <teiCorpus> element has a <teiHeader> element followed by a <TEI> element containing its own <teiHeader> and <text> children and a series of processing instructions:
<teiHeader> : This is the first of two <teiHeader> elements in your [anth].xml file. It gives the metadata for your anthology as a whole.
<TEI> : This is a standard <TEI> element that contains a <teiHeader> giving metadata for your anthology homepage and a <text> element that contains (in a child <body> element the content of your anthology homepage.
<?lemdo-import ref="doc:emd[ABBR]_edition"?>: This processing instruction is the mechanism by which an edition is included in your anthology. You will have one processing instruction for each edition.

Practice: Include Editions for Release

For each edition that you wish to include in your next anthology release, you will add a lemdo-import processing instruction to import the entire edition and all its files into your anthology. LEMDO’s processing instructions allow you to include content from elsewhere in the project; in this case, the lemdo-import processing instruction includes in your anthology build the edition file and all the files listed as <relatedItem> s in the edition file. To add the processing instruction:
Copy this instruction into the bottom of your anthology XML file after the closing </TEI> (as a child of <teiCorpus> ): <?lemdo-import ref="doc:emd[ABBR]_edition"?>.
Replace [ABBR] with the play ID of the edition that you wish to include. If you do not know the play ID, search for the play title in DRE Play IDs.

Further Reading

Notes

1.Individual LEMDO team members who contribute substantially to editions should be acknowledged at the edition level and (if appropriate) at the level of files within editions.↑
2.If you wish to present release notes in reverse chronological order, note that you will have to renumber all the paragraphs in the file.↑

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

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.

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 Anthology About Pages
Type of text Documentation
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.