Collation Types, Terminology, and Workflow
Rationale
LEMDO separates collations into two types: horizontal and vertical. This section of
the 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 of print variants 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.
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 |
Terminology
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. Dev., Mid.).
Workflow
From the user’s perspective, your collation will be linked to your modernized text.
But you cannot modernize spelling and punctuation until you have collated and emended
your copy-text. The basic workflow is therefore:
Collate
Emend
Modernize spelling and punctuation
You have probably already indicated in your edition proposal which text you will take
as your copy-text. You will have prepared a semi-diplomatic transcription of that
text (or the LEMDO team will have prepared it for you and you will have reviewed the
LEMDO team’s work). LEMDO will take this semi-diplomatic transcription and convert
it to a new file that contains the semi-diplomatic transcription of your chosen copy-text
and the basic tagging for a modernized text. We will remove the tagging that captures
forme works (running titles, signature marks, etc.) and compositorial line beginnings.
When you begin work on this file, you will see the words of the semi-diplomatic transcription
with skeletal tagging in place for the modernized text that you will eventually create.
You will add anchors to this file, and point to the anchors from your collation file.
You can create your collation file using the template in lemdo/data/templates if you wish, but most editors ask the LEMDO team to set up the collation file for
them.
You will prepare your collation before you emend your text. Doing the collation prepares
you to make sound decisions grounded in deep knowledge of the editorial history of
the text.1
You will emend immediately after you prepare your collation, or, if you are an experienced
editor with a good knowledge of the textual issues pertaining to the play, you may
make your emendations as you collate.
When you have finished your collation and made your emendations, you will then modernize
the spelling and punctuation.
Other Resources
LEMDO YouTube video: Collation (Editorial)
Notes
1.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. In such cases, you will almost certainly find that the work
of collation leads you to make further emendations.↑
Prosopography
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.
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.
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 | Collation Types, Terminology, and Workflow |
| 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.
|