Chapter 13. Collation

This chapter of our documentation is still in beta. We welcome feedback, corrections, and questions while we finalize the page in our 2024–2025 work cycle.

Introduction to Collations

If you are new to editing (e.g., if you are an RA working with an editor), you may have seen (and possibly ignored!) the collations at the bottom of the page in an Arden edition. Other editions put them at the back of the book, and many editions pitched at students do not include collations at all. They are usually cryptic and require an understanding of the abbreviations and typographical conventions used.
What to collate—and how much to collate—is an anthology-level decision. For example, the DRE policy is to eschew the variorum approach: A complete record of textual changes throughout a work’s editorial history is known as a variorum, and while variorum editions are useful tools, their thoroughness and comprehensivity are outside the goals of the DRE project. Consult with your anthology lead(s) before you read the rest of this chapter.

Rationale

The point of a collation is to track variations in a text both as it differs between copies of an early edition and as it changes in later editions because of editorial interventions. A collation may attempt to capture some or all of the following variations and interventions:
Variants in the extant copies of a single printed edition, usually with the aim of identifying press variants between the uncorrected and corrected states of the sheets that make up the book. For example, one might collate all the surviving copies of the first quarto of Richard II in order to address questions about the way the book was put together.
Differences between multiple early editions. Early editions can be significantly different from each other, having different copytexts (a manuscript, promptbook, a previous printed playbook). Sometimes they bear signs of revisions, by the author(s) and/or later revisers. For example, an editor might collate Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4, F1, and F2 of Richard II.
Sometimes the differences are so significant that scholars think of the early editions as constituting different texts (e.g., the three texts of Hamlet, the two texts of King Lear, or the multiple texts of Mucedorus). Depending on the anthology’s approach to such texts, you may need to make multiple collations to capture all the information you wish to include in your edition. Consult with your anthology lead to decide on an approach to multi-text plays. Documentation for extended collations is forthcoming.
Variants among manuscript witnesses (e.g. the six known manuscripts of Middleton’s A Game at Chess).
Editorial interventions made over a play’s 300+ years of editorial history (in the case of Shakespeare, Rowe’s edition of 1709 up through the latest Arden 3 edition, say).

Collation Types

Rationale

LEMDO separates collations into two types: horizontal and vertical. This documentation will explain the difference between these two types of collation, define a number of key terms, and explain the decision-making process that you will follow when preparing to collate.

Practice: Collate Textual Variants

A horizontal collation (also referred to as a synchronic or a press-variant collation) captures variants across multiple extant witnesses of a single edition. This type of collation file points to anchors embedded in an semi-diplomatic transcription. LEMDO does not require this type of collation, nor do most of its anthologies.
Copy-specific collation requires time, money, and travel, luxuries that are not equally available to all editors. Copy-specific collation may not offer much in the way of editorial or pedagogical return and may delay your work on other parts of the edition for which there is a more pressing need. For Shakespeare, copy-specific collations are widely available in other publications or resources. For non-Shakespearean plays that have not been subject to the same textual scrutiny as Shakespeare, you may be able to make a genuine contribution to scholarship. Consult with your anthology lead if you have the ability, resources, and desire to undertake such a collation.
Should you undertake a collation of extant copies, you will first create a semi-diplomatic transcription of a single copy of an early edition. You will anchor your collation of variants in a semi-diplomatic transcription.

Practice: Collate Historical Editions

A vertical collation (also referred to as a diachronic or a historical collation) captures substantive variants between editions from the early editions (early printed playbooks—e.g., quartos and folios up to 1700) through subsequent editorial interventions (from 1700 on). This type of collation usually presupposes an ideal copy of the edition being collated. This type of collation file points to anchors embedded in a modernized text. These collations are required by LEMDO, but you will consult with your anthology lead about how many witnesses you need to collate for your edition.
Before you begin to modernize your text, you will choose your copy-text. LEMDO will prepare a template for your modernized text from your chosen copy text. The template will contain your semi-diplomatic transcription of your chosen copy-text and the basic tagging for a modernized text. Before you begin to modernize the text, you must collate at least the early editions (pre-1700). For example, if an editor decides to base their modern edition of Heywood’s 2 If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody on the Q1 text (transcribed from the the Boston Library copy) we will convert the XML file of their semi-diplomatic transcript into a base XML file upon which the modernized text can be inscribed. That base XML file is essentially a palimpsest, which will begin by containing both the semi-diplomatic transcript and the skeletal tagging for the modernized text. See Convert IML to LEMDO TEI for more information on this conversion.
The point of this type of collation is to prepare you for the modernization process. If you end up adopting a reading introduced by an earlier editor, this collation also serves the function of giving credit where credit is due, as LEMDO editors build on the work of their predecessors by adopting, adapting, and/or rejecting the interventions and changes made by earlier editors. While all accepted or adapted collations must be recorded, not all rejected interventions need to be collated. Consult with your anthology lead before you undertake this task.

File Comparison of Horizontal and Vertical Collations

Collation type Main text (containing lemmatic readings and anchors) Example Collation file (containing stemmatic readings and pointers)
Horizontal collation Semi-diplomatic transcription of an early edition emdMV_Q1 emdMV_Q1_collation.xml
Vertical collation Modern text (before the text is modernized) emdMV_M emdMV_M_collation.xml

Terms for Working on Collations

Extant: Surviving. Not all materials of the past have lasted to the modern day; those that do are said to be extant.
Witness (in the context of editing): A witness is an extant document or part of a document. It could be a manuscript or a particular copy of an early edition.
Witness (in the context of encoding): Any manuscript or print edition. For encoding purposes, the TEI Guidelines treat all manuscripts and printed editions (early editions and modern editions alike) as witnesses.
Edition: A printed text, from the earliest printed texts up to the most recent edited modernized texts.
Reading: What an edition or witness says (the lineation, words, characters, punctuation, and spacing).
Lemma (lemmatic reading): What the text says in the digital file in which you are putting anchors. A lemma helps your reader establish a comparison between the base text/edited text and alternatives expressed in the stemma.
Stemma (stemmatic reading): What a selection of other editions and witnesses say. Not all stemma need to be represented in a collation note.
Siglum (plural sigla): An abbreviation for either an edition (e.g., Q, Q1, Q2, F, F2, Rowe, Pope, Capell, Jowett) or for a particular witness, usually a manuscript (e.g. Ard., Dev., Mid).

When to Collate

There are two distinct approaches to the timing of collation, each with its own rationale:
Collate then modernize.
Modernize then collate.

Collate then Modernize

You will normally prepare your collation of substantive variants between editions before you begin to modernize your text. Doing this collation prepares you to make sound decisions grounded in deep knowledge of the editorial history of the text. (LEMDO recognizes that many editors making the transition to LEMDO will have already modernized their text before they create the collation file because of the ISE platform’s use of string-matching.)
LEMDO’s practice is to convert the semi-diplomatic transcription of your choice to a base file that you will modernize. For example, if you wanted to base a modern edition of The Merchant of Venice on the 1619 Pavier quarto, LEMDO would take your semi-diplomatic transcription of Q2 and create a template for your modern edition. When you begin work on this file, you will see your old semi-diplomatic transcription with skeletal tagging in place for the modernized text that you will eventually create by modernizing the semi-diplomatic transcription. We will remove the tagging that captures forme works (running titles, signature marks, etc.) and compositorial line beginnings.
Before you begin to modernize this text, you will insert anchors in your modern file and create the individual apparatus entries (in your collation file) that point to these anchors. See Create Anchors and Practice: Encode the Root <app> Element for more information on adding anchors.

Encode Witness List

Prior Reading

This documentation assumes that you are familiar with the basic of collations. See Introduction to Collations.

Disambiguation

This section of the documentation assumes that you are preparing your vertical collation of edition variants and that the collation is linked to the file that you will modernize (or have modernized). We have separate documentation (forthcoming) for collating press variants.

Rationale

Editions conventionally offer a list of witnesses collated, with their edition-specific sigla. The LEMDO witness list gives full details for each of the witnesses and publications you collate, in order to give credit where credit is due. It also defines an abbreviation (or siglum) for each publication; LEMDO reproduces this siglum (plural sigla) in the collation pop-up note and hyperlinks it to the full bibliographical details of the publication indicated by the siglum. Finally, it allows you to create a unique xml:id for each witness and publication you collate. You will use these xml:ids in your collation to indicate the source of each reading.

Practice: Basics

LEMDO uses the TEI <listWit> element to capture the witness list in the <teiHeader> of the collation file. Each witness is listed in a <witness> element inside the <listWit> element.
The <witness> element has two required attributes: @xml:id and @n. There is one optional attribute, @corresp.

Practice: Create the List of Witnesses

Before you begin collating, you will want to create a list of the editions and witnesses you wish to include in your stemma. Consult with your anthology lead about the number and nature of the editions and witnesses in your list. Some projects may wish to have an exhaustive collation of substantive variants (useful for texts with limited editorial history). Other projects may be more selective (appropriate for texts with lengthy editorial histories, such as Shakespeare’s texts, which have seen hundreds of editions).
To find early editions: Consult DEEP.
To find copies of early editions: Consult the ESTC.

Practice: Get xml:ids for Editions and Witnesses

The xml:ids for editions and witnesses—if they are already in the LEMDO ecosystem—can be found in LEMDO’s bibliographic database (BIBL1). We include the xml:id of the entry on the BIBL1 page, in the column on the right. Each entry for early editions (i.e., those published up to about 1700—Q1, Q2, F1, F2, etc.) includes the DEEP number, which will help you cross-reference and ensure that you are selecting the right edition from BIBL1.
If you were working on an edition of The Honest Whore, you would want to collate the first edition. The Honest Whore Q1 is listed in BIBL1 as
Dekker, Thomas and Thomas Middleton. The Converted Courtesan. London: Valentine Simmes, 1604. STC 6501. DEEP 362. BIBL1
The xml:id of this edition in LEMDO is DEKK5.
If the edition you want to collate is not yet in BIBL1, send all the bibliographical information for the edition (including the DEEP number) to the LEMDO team at UVic (lemdo@uvic.ca). See Prepare Edition Bibliography for more about what information to include for bibliography entries.
LEMDO does not list specific copies of playbooks or manuscripts in BIBL1. If your collation includes such unique witnesses, you will list all the bibliographic details and assign an xml:id in your own collation file in the witness list.

Step-by-Step

Make a list of all the witnesses and publications you wish to collate.
If the publications are already listed in BIBL1 make a note of the xml:id of the publication. If they are not already in BIBL1 , send your list to the LEMDO Team. A team member will add the items to the sitewide databases and tell you what the xml:ids are.
If your edition directory does not already contain a collation file in the app folder, create your own file from the LEMDO template called collation_template. See Use LEMDO’s Oxygen Templates for instructions on how to create a new file using one of the LEMDO templates. The template contains instructions that complement the documentation on this page. You may also ask the LEMDO Team to make a collation file for you.
Following the instructions in the template, give your file a filename and save it in your edition directory. See Advanced Subversion Commands to learn how to add files to the repository.
Find the <listWit> element in the template. There are two sample <witness> elements in the template.
For each witness and publication, create a <witness> element.
Add an @xml:id attribute to the <witness> element. Follow the instructions in the template to construct a unique ID to use in your collation.
Add an @n attribute. The value of @n is your preferred siglum for the witness. Consult your anthology lead about preferred sigla patterns (F or F1, for example). The sigla for your witnesses do not have to be unique across LEMDO, but they do need to be unique in the context of your edition.
Link your witness to the corresponding entry in BIBL1 by adding a @corresp attribute. The value of the @corresp attribute is the prefix bibl: followed by the xml:id of the item in BIBL1 . Do not put anything in the text node of the <witness> element. The <witness> element will be a self-closing or empty element. At processing time, we will pull in the citation from BIBL1 .

Quick Reference

Attribute Value Example
@xml:id Must be unique to the LEMDO project. Make sure it is unique by using the already-unique name of the file, then adding your siglum. emd1HW_M_collation_Q1
@corresp If the entry is in BIBL1 , use the bibl: prefix plus the unique xml:id of the entry in BIBL1 . bibl:DEKK14 (to point to an entry in the LEMDO bibliography)
@n Your siglum, which must be unique to your edition but not to the whole project. Q1; Dodsley

Special Case: Providing Your Own Citation

If there is no entry in BIBL1 and you do not want to add an entry to BIBL1 (which would be the case for manuscript witnesses or for individual copies of an edition), do not add a @corresp attribute to the <witness> element. Add your own citation in the text node of the <witness> element.
If you add content to the text node, the LEMDO processor will not pull in the data from BIBL1 ; instead, your own content will be displayed in the citation.
In some cases, you may want to provide a more detailed explanation of a witness which is somehow more complex or problematic. In this case, do not use @corresp; instead, provide your explanation inside the <witness> element, making sure to include links to any relevant items in BIBL1 using the <ref> element, as shown below:
<witness xml:id="emd1HW_M_collation_Q2S" n="Q2S">
  <ref type="bibl" target="bibl:DEKK4">The second quarto of <title level="m">The Honest Whore</title>
  </ref> was partially set from <soCalled>standing type</soCalled> that was never distributed back into the cases after Q1 was printed. Q2S refers to the pages that were printed from the standing type.</witness>

Special Case: Your Own Edition

You want to be able to give yourself credit for readings that are created by you (usually with the siglum This edition). Add an entry to the witness list for yourself. In this case, you will almost certainly want to override your own biography with a simple phrase, either the word editor or, in cases where there are two or more editors working collaboratively, your surnames:
<witness xml:id="emdMV_M_collation_thisEd" n="This edition">Edited by <persName ref="pers:JENS1">Janelle Jenstad</persName> and <persName ref="pers:WITT1">Stephen Wittek</persName>.</witness>
If you want to give credit to individual editors of the present edition, which might be the case if you have divided the work of modernizing by acts or scenes, make two witness entries, one for each editor. You will need to create a unique xml:id and a unique siglum for each editor.
<listWit>
  <witness xml:id="emdMV_M_collation_thisEdJJ" n="This edition (Jenstad)">
    <name ref="pers:JENS1">Janelle Jenstad</name>, co-editor of this edition.</witness>
  <witness xml:id="emdMV_M_collation_thisEdSW" n="This edition (Wittek)">
    <name ref="pers:WITT1">Stephen Wittek</name>, co-editor of this edition.</witness>
</listWit>

Examples

<listWit>
  <witness xml:id="emdFV_M_collation_thisEd" n="This edition">Edited by <name ref="pers:MART1">Mathew Martin</name>.</witness>
  <witness xml:id="emdFV_M_collation_Q1" n="First Quarto" corresp="bibl:THEF1"/>
  <witness xml:id="emdFV_M_collation_Q2" n="Second Quarto" corresp="bibl:THEF2"/>
  <witness xml:id="emdFV_M_collation_Bullough" n="Bullough" corresp="bibl:BULL4"/>
</listWit>

Rendering Note

For empty <witness> elements with a @corresp attribute, LEMDO processing will pull in the information from BIBL1 to populate the element.

Further Reading

Now that you have created your witness list, you will want to move on to creating your collations. See Encode Collations.

Encode Collations

Prior Reading

This documentation assumes that you are familiar with the basics of collation and that you have made a witness list. See Introduction to Collations and Encode Witness List if you have not yet completed these steps.

Create a Single Apparatus Entry

Each apparatus entry has the following elements:
The <app> element, which contains the entire apparatus entry for a single character, string, word, or phrase.
A child <lem> element that gives the lemmatic reading.
One or more child <rdg> elements that give the stemmatic readings.

Practice: Encode the Root <app> Element

Every lemmatic reading for which you want to record variants in the editorial history is rooted on the <app> element. You will link to your modernized text from the <app> element.
Before you can link to your lemmatic reading, it must have milestone <anchor> elements on either side of it in your modernized text. Note that anchors do not wrap around text; they are simply milestones or waypoints in your primary text. See Create Anchors for instructions on how to add anchors in your modernized text.
Each anchor has a unique xml:id. To point to the anchor before the lemmatic reading (i.e., the start of the reading that you wish to collate), add the @from attribute on the <app> element with a value following this pattern: the prefix doc: followed by the xml:id of the file that you are linking to, a hash character, and the xml:id of the anchor before the lemmatic reading. To point to the anchor after the lemmatic reading (i.e., the end of the reading that you wish to collate), add the @from attribute on the <app> element with a value following this pattern: the prefix doc: followed by the xml:id of the file that you are linking to, a hash character, and the xml:id of the anchor after the lemmatic reading. For example:
<app from="doc:emd1HW_M#emd1HW_M_anc_31" to="doc:emd1HW_M#emd1HW_M_anc_32">
<!-- ... -->
</app>
Note that it is standard practice to have both your modern file (i.e., to-be-modernized modern file) and your collation file open at the same time in your Oxygen window.

Practice: Capture the Lemmatic Reading

To capture your lemmatic reading, add a <lem> element as a child of <app> . Put the @source attribute on <lem> with the value of a hash character (#) followed by the xml:id of the source that you defined in your witness list (i.e., in the <witness> element in your <listWit> ).
Type the lemmatic reading in the text node of the <lem> element. Write it as you wish it to appear when it is rendered on screen or on the page. You can abbreviate the lemma if doing so will help the reader see differences between the lemmatic reading and stemmatic readings more clearly. This means that the text node of the <lem> element does not have to match your lemmatic reading precisely, though it often will. Use an ellipsis character to abbreviate your lemma (not three spaced periods) as LEMDO looks for the ellipsis character at processing time. For practice, see Ellipses in Lemmas.

Ellipses in Lemmas

You may shorten your lemma in the collation by typing an ellipsis character, exactly as you do with the label in an annotation. Because the anchors indicate the precise string being collated, the lemma ( <lem> ) in your collation functions more like a label than a lemma. We never want three spaced periods to be used as ellipses, so you must use an ellipsis character ( … ) from the character map on your computer or from LEMDO’s pre-mapped characters. See Practice: Insert an Ellipsis Character.

Practice: Capture the Stemmatic Readings

Add a <rdg> element as a child of <app> for each stemmatic reading that you wish to capture. Indicate the witness for each reading by using the @wit attribute on <rdg> with the value of a hash character (#) followed by the xml:id of the witness that you defined in your witness list ( <listWit> ).
Type the relevant part of the reading precisely. Do not abbreviate or shorten readings if doing so would lose important information about the publication and editorial history of the text. If you do wish to shorten readings by omitting material from the middle of the reading, use the <gap> element, the @reason attribute, and the sampling value to indicate that the omission is yours. (It will be rendered as an ellipsis wrapped in square brackets.)
If there is an ellipsis in the witness, type an ellipsis character and wrap it in the <pc> element. See Practice: Insert an Ellipsis Character.

Encode Omissions

If you want to indicate that a witness omits the entire string that is captured in your lemma, create an empty <rdg> element:
<app from="doc:emdFV_M#emdFV_M_anc_23" to="doc:emdFV_M#emdFV_M_anc_24">
  <lem source="#emdFV_M_collation_thisEd">
    <supplied>Sir John Oldcastle</supplied>
  </lem>
  <rdg wit="#emdFV_M_collation_Q1"/>
</app>
See TEI Guidelines 12.4.: An editor wishing to signal an omission in one witness should encode the omission using an empty rdg.
At processing time, LEMDO will supply the phrase (Omitted) (without the quotation marks).

Substantive Adoption

Sometimes you will adopt a reading substantively with only a minor accidental variation. In such cases, you will want to give credit to the source of your reading in the <lem> element and include the exact text of the witness in a <rdg> element. In this example, the editor acknowledges F1 as the source of their modernized punctuation and gives the exact F1 reading:
<app from="doc:emdH5_FM#emdH5_FM_anc_60" to="doc:emdH5_FM#emdH5_FM_anc_61">
  <lem source="#emdH5_FM_collation_F1">high, uprearèd,</lem>
  <rdg wit="#emdH5_FM_collation_F1">high, vp-reared</rdg>
</app>

Examples

Example of a basic entry:
<app from="doc:emd1HW_M#emd1HW_M_anc_31" to="doc:emd1HW_M#emd1HW_M_anc_32">
  <lem source="#emd1HW_M_collation_Ed">Gentlemen</lem>
  <rdg wit="#emd1HW_M_collation_Q2S">All</rdg>
  <rdg wit="#emd1HW_M_collation_Q1">All</rdg>
</app>
Example of a lemmatic reading that has been truncated using an ellipsis:
<app from="doc:emdH5_FM#emdH5_FM_anc_6127" to="doc:emdH5_FM#emdH5_FM_anc_6128">
  <lem source="#emdH5_FM_collation_F1">O braggart … exhale.<note>verse F1</note>
  </lem>
</app>
Example of truncated lemmatic and stemmatic readings:
<app from="doc:emdH5_FM#emdH5_FM_anc_6138" to="doc:emdH5_FM#emdH5_FM_anc_6139">
  <lem source="#emdH5_FM_collation_Pope">We’ll give … bring them.<note>one line</note>
  </lem>
  <rdg wit="#emdH5_FM_collation_F1">Weele giue <gap reason="sampling"/> audience. / Goe, and bring them.</rdg>
</app>
Example of an entry where ellipses are not advisable:
<app from="doc:emd1HW_M#emd1HW_M_anc_135" to="doc:emd1HW_M#emd1HW_M_anc_137">
  <lem source="#emd1HW_M_collation_Dodsley_1">O yes, my lord, so soon.</lem>
  <rdg wit="#emd1HW_M_collation_Dodsley_1">O! yes, my lord, so soon.</rdg>
  <rdg wit="#emd1HW_M_collation_Q1">O yes my Lord, so soone:</rdg>
  <rdg wit="#emd1HW_M_collation_Q2S">O yes my Lord, so soone:</rdg>
  <rdg wit="#emd1HW_M_collation_Dyce">O yes, my lord. So soon?</rdg>
  <note>Punctuated substantially as in Dodsley 1.</note>
</app>

Collate Stage Directions

Prior Reading

This documentation assumes that you are familiar with the basic of collations and that you have made a witness list. See Introduction to Collations, Collation Types, and Encode Witness List if you have not yet completed these steps.

Rationale

The collation file (1) captures differences between stage directions in the modernized text and in the earliest publications, (2) gives credit where credit is due to editorial predecessors, and (3) indicates where you (the editor) have offered a new stage direction or moved a stage direction from its original or traditional placement.

Practice: Encode Collated Stage Directions

If your editorial witness contains square brackets (as many print editions do), type them in the text node of the <rdg> element.1
If you want to add an editorial comment on the reading, add a <note> element. Do not include your comments in the text node of <rdg> .
To indicate that the stage direction does not appear in a witness, create an empty <rdg> element. See Encode Omissions.
Some projects (e.g., QME) are asking editors to wrap editorial stage directions in the <supplied> element.2 If your lemma contains material that you have supplied, replicate the encoding in your modernized text. In other words, if you have a <supplied> element in your modernized text, include the <supplied> element in your lemma. Do not type square brackets into your lemma. LEMDO does not permit editors to type square brackets in modernized texts or born digital texts. Some anthologies (e.g., QME) use the <supplied> element to indicate supplied editorial stage directions. DRE and all anthologies following the DRE guidelines prohibit the use of <supplied> in stage directions. But

Examples

In the following example, the editor captures the facts that he adds an editorial stage direction in the modernized text of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, that Dyce adds a different editorial stage direction in his 1861 edition, and that Bevington adds yet another editorial stage direction in his 2002 edition.
<app from="doc:emdFBFB_M#emdFBFB_M_anc_640" to="doc:emdFBFB_M#emdFBFB_M_anc_641">
  <lem source="#doc:emdFBFB_M_collation_ThisEd">
    <supplied>She steps forward.</supplied>
  </lem>
  <rdg wit="#doc:emdFBFB_M_collation_Dyce1861">[Comes forward]</rdg>
  <rdg wit="#doc:emdFBFB_M_collation_Bevington2002">[She approaches Lacy.]</rdg>
</app>
In this example, the editor indicates that she is following Capell in providing an exit for attendants, but not adopting Capell’s stage direction verbatim. She also indicates that there is no stage direction in Q1 by providing an empty <rdg> element:
<app from="doc:emdR2_M#emdR2_M_anc_21" to="doc:emdR2_M#emdR2_M_anc_22">
  <lem source="lew:Capell_1768">
    <supplied>Exit one or more attendants</supplied>.</lem>
  <rdg wit="lew:Capell_1768">[Exeunt some Attendants.]</rdg>
  <rdg wit="lew:Q1"/>
</app>

Collate Lineation

Rationale

Early publications sometimes set verse as prose and vice versa. Subsequent editors will relineate the text, sometimes in different ways. You may wish to capture the compositorial lines in the early publications and/or subsequent editorial relineations. Print collation practice is to put a forward slash at the point of the line break. We ask you to encode the line beginning (beginning is TEI’s term) using a TEI element so that we have the encoding in place for to visualize these variants in the future.

Practice

You can collate the relineation, provide an annotation, or both. In general, if you want to record a point where you have moved the line beginning by a word or two, collate the difference. If you have relineated an entire passage (i.e., changed an entire speech set as prose into a speech set as verse), you will want to provide an annotation (with @type value of lineation). If you have relineated a long passage in ways that different from your editorial predecessors, you will want to provide both an annotation and collation. We give examples of both a collation and an annotation below.
If you choose to collate the relineation, include an empty <lb> element in the lemma and/or reading at the point of the new line beginning.

Rendering Note

At processing time, we will turn the <lb> element into a forward slash in the collation pop-up pane.

Examples

<app from="doc:emdLr_FM_collation#emdLr_FM_collation_anc_1" to="doc:emdLr_FM_collation#emdLr_FM_collation_anc_2">
  <lem source="bibl:Q1">Kent. Remember</lem>
  <rdg wit="bibl:Q1">Kent, remember</rdg>
  <rdg wit="bibl:F1">Kent: <lb/>Remember</rdg>
</app>
<div type="annotations">
<!-- ... -->

  <note type="annotation" target="doc:emdPer_M#emdPer_M_anc_4560" targetEnd="doc:emdPer_M#emdPer_M_anc_4110">
    <note type="label">Lord Cerimon, … resolve you.</note>
    <note type="lineation">I have preferred this lineation to avoid the rhyme of <quote>man</quote> with <quote>can</quote>. A defective line results from any proposed lineation that does not include Dyce’s emendation.</note>
  </note>
</div>

Further Reading

Notes

1.Note that this context is the only LEMDO context that permits square brackets. In other contexts, you will need to wrap square brackets in the <pc> element. You do not <pc> in the <rdg> element.↑
2.DRE and NISE are not asking editors to do this, on the grounds that the modernized text is already entirely supplied.↑

Prosopography

Isabella Seales

Isabella Seales is a fourth year undergraduate completing her Bachelor of Arts in English at the University of Victoria. She has a special interest in Renaissance and Metaphysical Literature. She is assisting Dr. Jenstad with the MoEML Mayoral Shows anthology as part of the Undergraduate Student Research Award program.

James D. Mardock

James Mardock is Associate Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Associate General Editor for the Internet Shakespeare Editions, and a dramaturge for the Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival and Reno Little Theater. In addition to editing quarto and folio Henry V for the ISE, he has published essays on Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and other Renaissance literature in The Seventeenth Century, Ben Jonson Journal, Borrowers and Lenders, and contributed to the collections Representing the Plague in Early Modern England (Routledge 2010) and Shakespeare Beyond Doubt (Cambridge 2013). His book Our Scene is London (Routledge 2008) examines Jonson’s representation of urban space as an element in his strategy of self-definition. With Kathryn McPherson, he edited Stages of Engagement (Duquesne 2013), a collection of essays on drama in post-Reformation England, and he is currently at work on a monograph on Calvinism and metatheatrical awareness in early modern English drama.

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.

Mathew Martin

Dr. Mathew R. Martin is Full Professor at Brock University, Canada. He is the author of Between Theatre and Philosophy (2001), Tragedy and Trauma in the Plays of Christopher Marlowe (2015) and Psychoanalysis and Literary Theory (2023), and co-editor, with his colleague James Allard, of Staging Pain, 1500–1800: Violence and Trauma in British Theatre (2009). For Broadview Press he has edited Christopher Marlowe’s Edward the Second (2010), Jew of Malta (2012), Doctor Faustus: The B-Text (2013) and Tamburlaine the Great Part One and Part Two (2014), and Robert Greene’s Selimus (2022). For Revels Editions he has edited George Peele’s David and Bathsheba (2018) and Marlowe’s The Massacre at Paris (2021). For Queen’s Men Editions he has edited The Famous Victories of Henry V (2016). He has published two articles of textual criticism on the printed texts of Marlowe’s plays: Inferior Readings: The Transmigration of Material in Tamburlaine the Great (Early Theatre 17.2 [December 2014]), and (on the political inflections of the shifts in punctuation in the early editions of the play) Accidents Happen: Roger Barnes’s 1612 Edition of Marlowe’s Edward the Second (Early Theatre 16.1 [June 2013]). His latest editing projects are a double-play Revels edition of Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and John of Bordeaux and a Digital Renaissance Editions edition of Dido, Queen of Carthage.

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.

Nicole Vatcher

Technical Documentation Writer, 2020–2022. Nicole Vatcher completed her BA (Hons.) in English at the University of Victoria in 2021. Her primary research focus was women’s writing in the modernist period.

Sarah Neville

Sarah Neville is an associate professor of English and Theatre, Film and Media Arts at the Ohio State University. She specializes in early modern English literature, bibliography, theories of textuality and Shakespeare in performance, chiefly examining the ways that authority is negotiated in print, digital and live media. She is an assistant editor of the New Oxford Shakespeare (2016-17), for which she edited five plays in both old and modern-spelling editions, as well as an associate coordinating editor of the Digital Renaissance Editions. She regularly publishes on textual theory, digital humanities, pedagogy, and scholarly editing. Neville’s book, Early Modern Herbals and the Book Trade: English Stationers and the Commodification of Botany (Cambridge, 2022), demonstrates the ways that printers and booksellers of herbals enabled the construction of scientific and medical authority in early modern England. A theatre director and film artist who is a great believer in experiential learning, Neville is the founder and creative director of Ohio State’s Lord Denney’s Players, an academic theatre company that enables students to see how technologies of textual transmission have shaped the reception of Shakespeare’s plays.

Stephen Wittek

Stephen Wittek is Assistant Professor of Literature at Carnegie Mellon University and co-editor with Janelle Jenstad for the ISE edition of The Merchant of Venice. He is the author of The Media Players: Shakespeare, Middleton, Jonson, and the Idea of News (University of Michigan Press, 2015), and has also written for journals including Studies in English Literature, Digital Humanities Quarterly, and Journal of Cognitive History. In 2014, the CBC Radio One program Ideas produced an hour-long episode showcasing Dr. Wittek’s research on the co-evolution of English theatre and news culture (available for streaming or download).
Dr. Wittek holds a PhD in literature from McGill University and a Master’s degree in Shakespeare Studies from the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-Upon-Avon, England. From 2013 to 2017, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow for McGill’s Early Modern Conversions project, a five-year research endeavor that brought together an interdisciplinary team of humanities scholars to study the multiform proliferation of conversion and conversional representation in early modernity (see http://www.earlymodernconversions.com). His continuing work for the project includes the essay collection Performing Conversion: Urbanism, Theatre, and the Transformation of the Early Modern World, which he is co-editing with José R. Jouve-Martin for the Early Modern Conversions book series (University of Edinburgh Press).
On the digital humanities front, Dr. Wittek is co-developer with Stéfan Sinclair and Matthew Milner for DREaM (Distant Reading Early Modernity), a database that will index 44,000+ early modern texts, thus making long-neglected material more amenable for use with tools for large-scale textual analysis.

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

Bullough, Geoffrey, ed. Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare. Volume IV: Later English History Plays: King John, Henry IV, Henry V, Henry VIII. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; New York: Columbia University Press, 1962.
Dekker, Thomas, and Thomas Middleton. The converted curtezan with, the humours of the patient man, and the longing wife. London: Valentine Simmes for John Hodgets, 1604. STC 6501.5. DEEP 363. ESTC S120001. Greg 204b.
Dekker, Thomas, and Thomas Middleton. The honest whore, with, the humours of the patient man, and the longing wife. London: Valentine Simmes for John Hodgets, 1604. STC 6501. DEEP 362. ESTC S105233. Greg 204a.
The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth: Containing the Honourable Battell of Agin-Court. As it was Acted by the Kinges Maiesties Servants. London: Barnard Alsop, 1617. STC 13073. ESTC S4698. DEEP 253.
The Famous Victories of Henry the fifth: Containing the Honourable Battell of Agin-court: As it was plaide by the Queenes Maiesties Players. London: Thomas Creed, 1598. STC 13072. ESTC S106379.

Glossary

empty element
“Empty elements are also called milestone or self-closing elements, but LEMDO uses the term empty element. Empty elements do not have child text or element nodes.”

Metadata

Authority title Chapter 13. Collation
Type of text Documentation
Publisher Linked Early Modern Drama
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Document status prgGenerated
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