Literary Divisions in Modern Texts

Rationale

The basic literary divisions of the modern text of a play are acts and scenes. The smallest countable stable units in the digital edition of your modern text are speeches. Each one is given a unique @xml:id that makes it citable and linkable. Lines are not considered to be stable countable units in digital editions because prose lines will change length depending on the device (computer screen or mobile device), the sizing of the browser window, and the display font.
Line numbers will be assigned in the final stages of generating the print edition (if your anthology chooses to produce print editions through LEMDO’s partnership with UVic Libraries). If you have the resources and time to do so, you may add these numbers retroactively to your digital edition as milestones to help users move between the print edition and the digital editions. (Documentation is forthcoming about how to add milestone line numbers.)

Practice

In practice, we number the following units in a digital edition:
Acts: The xml:id of an act ends with the pattern _a1, _a2, _a3, and so on (where a1 is act 1). See Number Acts and Scenes.
Scenes: The xml:id of a scene ends with the pattern _a1_s1, _a1_s2, and so on (where a1 is act 1 and s1 is scene 1). See Number Acts and Scenes.
Running scenes: The xml:id of a scene in a play that only has scenes ends with the pattern _s1, _s2, and so on (where s1 is scene 1). See Number Acts and Scenes.
Speeches (the smallest stable unit): The xml:id of the <sp> element wrapped around a single speech of spoken text ends with the pattern _sp1, _sp2, and so on (where sp1 is speech 1). See Encode Speakers in Modern Texts for more information. See Number Speeches.
Preliminary spoken text: The xml:id of the <div> element wrapped around preliminary spoken text (choruses, prologues, and inductions, but not dedications or addresses to the reader) ends with the pattern _pr1, pr2, and so on (where pr1 is the first piece of preliminary spoken text). See Text Before an Act (or Scene) for more information.
Intermediary spoken text: The xml:id of the <div> element wrapped around spoken text that falls between scenes or acts ends with the pattern _bt1, bt2, and so on (where bt1 is the first piece of intermediary spoken text). See Text Between Acts (or Scenes) for more information.
Postliminal spoken text: The xml:id of the <div> element wrapped around spoken text after the final act or scene of a play ends with the pattern _ps1, _ps2, and so on (where ps1 is the first piece of postliminal spoken text). See Text After the Last Act (or Scene) for more information.

Further Reading

Prosopography

Chloe Mee

Chloe Mee is a research assistant on the LEMDO team who is working as a remediator on Old Spelling texts. She is about to start her second year at UVic in Fall 2022 and is pursuing an Honours degree in English. Currently, she is working on the LEMDO team through a VKURA internship. She loves literature and is enjoying the opportunity to read and encode Shakespeare quartos!

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.

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.

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 Literary Divisions in Modern Texts
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.