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 modern 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 modern 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 modern 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 modern 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 modern 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 modern 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 text with skeletal tagging in place for the modern 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.

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.

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

Research assistant, remediator, encoder, 2021–present. Mahayla Galliford is a fourth-year student in the English Honours and Humanities Scholars programs at the University of Victoria. She researches early modern drama and her Jamie Cassels Undergraduate Research Award project focused on approaches to encoding early modern stage directions.

Martin Holmes

Martin Holmes has worked as a developer in the UVicʼs 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

Project manager 2022–present. Textual remediator 2021–present. Navarra Houldin (they/them) completed their BA in History and Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. During their degree, they worked as a teaching assistant with the University of Victoriaʼs Department of Hispanic and Italian Studies. Their primary research was on gender and sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America.

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 womenʼs writing in the modernist period.

Sarah Neville

Sarah Neville is an assistant professor in the department of English at the Ohio State University who also holds a courtesy appointment in Theatre. Her published scholarly research explores how authority is constructed by authors and audiences in a variety of genres and technologies, including Renaissance science and medicine, contemporary textual and digital scholarship, and modern performance. She is currently finishing a monograph about printed books of botany in the early Renaissance book trade. Neville was an assistant editor of the New Oxford Shakespeare (2016–2017), for which she edited five plays, and is a coordinating editor of the Digital Renaissance Editions, an open-access project publishing online scholarly editions of non-Shakespearean early English drama. Neville’s textual and editorial scholarship is bolstered by her practice-as-research. She is the founder and creative director of Lord Denney’s Players, an academic theatre company housed within the OSU English Department that is designed to explore intersections of texts, criticism, and performance. At OSU she regularly teaches classes in Shakespeare, Renaissance poetry, research methods, and textual studies.

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
Type of text Documentation
Short title
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.