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.

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