Preface

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.

Credits and Acknowledgements

The first version of LEMDO’s Documentation was written from 2018 to 2023 and published in 2023 with the v0.3a release of LEMDO. During and after LEMDO’s SSHRC-funded 2024-2025 series of 24 training webinars (published on the LEMDO YouTube channel), many parts of the documentation were augmented, revised, clarified, and occasionally reorganized. We released v0.4a in October 2025 (see Release Notes). In the v0.4a release, the documentation consists of 278 XML files, organized into 24 chapters and 4 appendices.
It has been a team effort to produce this documentation, which documents the TEI Customization created by LEMDO for the digital editing of early modern manuscript and printed plays.

Lead Authors

Janelle Jenstad: Documentation and TEI Customization
Martin Holmes: TEI Customization, Schematron, Diagnostics, Element Specifications, and Documentation
Navarra Houldin: Content Management, Workflow, and Major Revisions (0.3a and 0.4a)

Contributing Authors

Tracey El Hajj: Metadata and Taxonomy
Kate LeBere: Chapter Architecture, Content Management, and Workflow
Patrick Szpak: Anthology Customization
Joey Takeda: TEI Customization

Interface Design

Ongoing Revisions

Ongoing revisions to the documentation are made by Janelle Jenstad, Martin Holmes, Navarra Houldin, and the LEMDO Team.

Feedback

The LEMDO documentation is a living reference book that is responsive to user feedback, queries, and new challenges. Please send any comments to the LEMDO Team at lemdo@uvic.ca.

User Guide

LEMDO is primarily a documentation project. LEMDO supports anthologies and the editions therein, but LEMDO’s own project output consists of:
A customization of TEI-XML P5 for encoding editions of early modern drama.
A codebase for processing and rendering our TEI customization.
Documentation of the customization and codebase in an ODD file called emODDern.
The documentation you are reading right now, which offers editorial, encoding, remediation, documentation, and processing guidelines.

Scope

These guidelines have four intended audiences:
Anthology leads.
Play editors.
Encoders and remediators, including RAs and editors who are doing their own encoding and/or remediation.
Developers at UVic and elsewhere.
Because the guidelines are written for multiple audiences with varying expertise and experience, you may find that the guidelines explain concepts already well known to you. You may be a skilled encoder but the guidelines also need to serve editors and RAs with no experience of encoding. You may be an experienced editor but the guidelines also need to serve new editors and RAs who are supporting editors. The guidelines do include some non-technical information about how the platform works but assumes that most users will simply want to use the platform to prepare editions and anthologies. Whatever your domain of expertise and skill therein, please help us make these guidelines better by asking questions and offering comments.

Anthology Leads and Editors

For anthology leads, these guidelines explain how to:
Include editions or components thereof in an anthology.
Customize an anthology menu.
Create About pages.
For editors and anthology leads, these guidelines:
Address many editorial contingencies.
Explain where LEMDO has an established editorial policy.
Indicate where LEMDO offers anthologies flexibility to establish their own editorial policy.
However, the guidelines are silent on the following:
Matters of copytext.
What a modernized text is meant to capture.
Length and scope of critical paratexts.
Length and type of required annotations.
Number of witnesses transcribed as semi-diplomatic transcriptions.
Number and type of contextual materials (if any).
Inclusion/exclusion of exemplary video and photographic materials.
Modernization guidelines.
Anthologies will prescribe such matters for editors. Note, however, that LEMDO strongly recommends the adoption of the DRE Editorial Guidelines, which are available through the DRE anthology website.

Encoders and Remediators

For encoders and remediators, these guidelines:
Explain how to gain access to and use the LEMDO platform.
Cover every encoding scenario that an encoder is likely to encounter in the preparation of semi-diplomatic transcriptions, collations, modernized texts, annotations, and critical paratexts.
Explain to remediators, who are normally encoders working at UVic or trained by the UVic team, how to remediate the encoding of texts that LEMDO has converted from other markup languages or other customizations of TEI.

Developers

For developers, these guidelines:
Describe the build processes that UVic developers have written to convert the XML files to HTML digital editions and PDF print editions.
Describe how anthology developers elsewhere can work with anthology leads to customize the menus, logos, and colour schema of an anthology.

Documentation Structure

Chaper 1. Quickstart Guidelines consists of introductory tutorials and Quickstart documents. We have Quickstarts for the following user groups:
Chapters 2 to 5 cover features of the LEMDO platform:
Chapter 2. Getting Started with LEMDO explains what you need to do in order to start using the LEMDO platform to edit, encode, and remediate editions.
Chapter 3. LEMDO’s Taxonomies covers the controlled vocabularies (taxonomies) that we use across the entire LEMDO platform and in all the anthologies.
Chapter 4. Entities and Databases introduces the sitewide databases that you will link to while encoding editions.
Chapter 5. Making Links covers linking to the platform-wide databases, the concepts of entities and linked data, and the mechanics of making links to entities and URIs.
Chapter 6 sets out LEMDO’s preferred editorial and style guidelines:
Chapter 6. Style Guidelines covers LEMDO’s internal style guidelines for its own About pages and the style guidelines that all anthologies must follow.
Chapters 7 to 10 cover general encoding guidelines and encoding practices that you will need in many different parts of an edition
Chapter 7. General Encoding Guidelines covers filenaming conventions, xml:ids, document status values, titles, split elements, and editor tools.
Chapter 8. Bibliography and Citation Guidelines explains how to prepare bibliography entries for various sources (books, articles, websites, productions, performances) and how to cite those sources, with special instructions for citing Shakespeare, the OED, the ODNB, and LEME.
Chapter 9. Quotations explains how to encode quotations, terms, disclaimers, glosses, emphasis, foreign words, and more.
Chapters 10 to 16 address the components of the critical edition, in the order in which you will likely prepare them:
Chapter 10. Semi-Diplomatic Transcriptions covers general information about semi-diplomatic transcriptions and describes encoding practice that is shared across both semi-diplomatic transcriptions of both print and manuscript playbooks.
Chapter 11. Semi-Diplomatic Transcriptions: Features Unique to Print Playboks covers encoding practice specific to semi-diplomatic transcriptions of printed playbooks.
Chapter 12. Semi-Diplomatic Transcriptions: Features Unique to Manuscript Playbooks covers encoding practice specific to semi-diplomatic transcriptions of manuscript playbooks.
Chapter 13: Collation covers witness lists and collation of textual variants and editorial interventions.
Chapter 14. Modernized Texts covers modernization, lineation, character lists, literary units (acts, scenes, and speeches), letters and songs, and stage directions in the modernized texts.
Chapter 15. Annotations covers the various types of annotations and how to encode them.
Chapter 16. Critical Paratexts covers the preparation, encoding, and numbering of critical paratexts.
Chapters 17 to 19 explain how to include media in your edition and how to capture metadata for each file in an edition, for the edition as whole, for the anthology, and every page in the anthology.
Chapter 17. Media contains information about facsimiles of playbooks, metadata for facsimiles, the selection and preparation of images for use in critical paratexts and annotations, linking to and numbering images, and writing effective alternate text.
Chapter 18. Metadata explains how to capture metadata in the <teiHeader> of each XML file in editions and anthologies, including credits for everyone who has worked on the file or funded the work, revision history, status of the file, type of the file, editorial and encoding statements, and descriptions of sources.
Chapter 19. Editions and Licensing explains how editions are included in an anthology and how to license your edition for publication
Chapters 20 and 21 explain how you can customize your anthology and the process of building and publishing your anthology.
Chapter 20. Anthology Customization contains information about how LEMDO’s styling works and how you can customize your anthology to create a unique look and feel.
Chapter 21. Anthology Release contains information about the anticipated timeline for an anthology release and the roles and responsibilities of editors, anthology leads, and the LEMDO team leading up to an anthology release.
Chapter 22. Programming is written by and for developers (i.e., programmers and designers). The chapter covers:
LEMDO’s programming principles.
How the static build process works and how to run a build.
How to process various things, such as pointers, links, references, inline processing instructions, and witness lists.
The editor tools that we have built.
How to produce the PDFs for the LEMDO Hornbooks series.
Chapter 23. Documentation Guidelines sets out the guidelines for writing documentation. This chapter is meant primarily for the UVic-based team and for the LEMDO Group members who have contributed to the documentation. The chapter:
Describes the general structure of the documentation.
Sets out the documentation-specific style guide.
Explains how to structure, encode, and capture credit for each documentation file.
Explains how to encode references to elements, attributes, and values.
Explains how to encode examples of encoded texts using the <egXML> element, as well as snippets of non-XML markup and terminal commands.
Sets out our practices for linking between documentation sections.
Chapter 24. Conversions and Remediations consists of step-by-step instructions for LEMDO’s conversion editors and remediators. Once the IML-to-TEI remediations are complete, this chapter will serve as a record of how we treated the texts encoded in the ISE Markup Language. TCP-to-LEMDO conversions will continue to be run for many years, at the request of an editor or anthology lead. The light remediations usually required to create a print-ready PDF from the XML files are also documented in this chapter.
The documentation ends with Appendices 1 to 4:
Appendix 1. Elements contains an alphabetical list of all the elements used in the LEMDO project, with links to element specifications generated from the emODDern ODD file.
Appendix 2. Attributes contains a list of all the attributes allowed by the emODDern ODD file. Each attribute is followed by a list of elements that take the attribute and/or by the attribute class to which elements that can take the attribute belong. This appendix is useful mainly to experienced customizers and users of TEI.
Appendix 3. Supplementary Texts sets out the way LEMDO handles supplementary texts included in an legacy edition.
Appendix 4. Legacy Markup offers an IML-to-TEI conversion table to show how we have converted the ISE Markup Language in the legacy texts, along with tips for editors still working in IML. This appendix will eventually include documentation for any TEI-to-TEI conversions that we run on other files that are ingested into LEMDO.

Chapter Structure

Each chapter consists of a set of discrete HTML pages, each with its own underlying XML file. These HTML pages can be viewed in isolation if you click on the page link from the Documentation Index or on a link to a page from elsewhere in the documentation. If you click on the chapter heading in the Documentation Index, you will be able to read the entire chapter at once, with all the underlying XML pages combined and rendered as a continuous HTML page.
Each chapter begins with an introduction to the resources provided in the chapter. Following the introductory page, pages are organized by one or more of the following organizational principles:
Sequential (with the pages reflecting a logical workflow, as in Chapter 14. Modernized Texts).
Pedagogical (with foundational information presented first and more complex information presented later, as in Chapter 2. Getting Started with LEMDO).
Frequency of encountering an encoding challenge (with the most likely coming early in the chapter).
The size of the likely audience (with pages of the greatest value to the greatest number of users coming first in the chapter).
We expect that few users will read a chapter from beginning to end. You are likely to dive into the documentation at the page level. We have therefore included Prior Reading and Further Reading sections into many pages to direct you to other sections of the chapter that you will need to read before or after the page on which you find yourself.

Page Structure

Page titles usually begin with a verb. You are probably reading documentation because you need to do something. The verbs in the page titles are meant to help you find the right documentation for the task you need to do.
We have tried to keep pages short. We make frequent use of tables, lists, and examples so that you can find the information you need quickly by scanning the page.
Pages are divided in the underlying XML into <div> elements, each capturing a self-contained section of the page and each with its own header. When they are rendered as HTML pages, we add a clickable pilcrow beside the header. If you click on the pilcrow, the URL in your browser bar will become more precise; you can save and share this link as necessary.

Standard Headings on Pages

We use a controlled vocabulary to name the sections of a page. Pages generally begin with a Rationale section. Sometimes, the Rationale is preceded by a Prior Reading section. Pages usually include a Practice section that tells you in narrative form what you need to do. Some pages also offer a Step-by-Step section that breaks down the encoding task into a numbered or bulleted list. A page usually ends with Examples, and sometimes Further Reading.
We use the following standard headings and sections throughout LEMDO documentation:
Prior Reading sections include links to documentation pages that should be read before reading the current page.
Rationale sections explain why we follow the encoding practice being described in a particular documentation file.
Principles sections outline the project principles that we follow when developing encoding practices. Principles give us a set of rules by which to make encoding decisions in cases where we cannot outline every possible use case or example.
Practice sections explain specific encoding practices and often include both prose and lists.
Workflow sections are usually lists and outline the steps required to complete a particular encoding project and the order in which users typically undertake those tasks.
Step-by-Step sections are numbered lists designed to be skimmed quickly with short instructions on how to complete a certain encoding task.
Examples sections include examples of the encoding described in the documentation file.
Special Cases sections include examples that are atypical but still appear in encoding and must be taken into account.
Tips sections include non-essential but helpful information, such as strategies that allow users to work more efficiently.
Optional sections include encoding practices that are not relevant to some users or in specific scenarios.
Rendering Note sections give information on how the encoded material will look on the LEMDO site or how the encoding practice will affect rendering.
Disambiguation sections distinguish between similar things that users may assume are the same. They usually include links to other documentation pages with information on the thing being disambiguated.
Further Reading sections include links to documentation pages that should be read after reading the current page.

Verbs Indicating Requirements, Prohibitions, Recommendations, and Options

We use the following modal verbs in LEMDO documentation1:
Must or required means that you have to do this to achieve a valid, processable file.
Must not means that you cannot do this because it will make your file invalid.
Should or recommended means that you should follow these instructions unless you fully understand the implications of not doing so and have a valid reason for going against this recommendation.
Should not or not recommended means that you should not do this unless you fully understand the implications and have a valid reason for going against the recommendation.
May or optional means that you may choose to use this encoding because it is useful to your work while another user may not because it is not relevant to the work they are doing.

Technical Glossary

LEMDO has a glossary of technical terms. When the documentation uses these terms, we make a link to the glossary entry. You may also view the entire glossary at once if you wish.

Notes

1.This list is adapted from the TEI Guidelines, which in turn are taken from BCP 14/RFC 2119 (BCP stands for “Best Current Practice” and RFC for “Request for Comments”), with the exception that we do not follow the requirement of BCP14 /RFC 8174 that these terms be in uppercase.↑

Prosopography

Ada Souchu

Ada Souchu is an MA student at Sorbonne Université in Early Modern English literature. After a BA in Classics in 2021, they are currently doing an MA on Latin and Greek sources in Early Modern theatre. They are a junior transcriber on the Douai Shakespeare Manuscript Project.

Amogha Lakshmi Halepuram Sridhar

Research Assistant, 2021–2023. Amogha Lakshmi Halepuram Sridhar is a fourth-year student at University of Victoria, studying English and History. Her research interests include Early Modern Theatre and adaptations, water pageantry, decolonialist writing, and Modernist poetry.

Ashley Howard

Ashley Howard took her MA in Medieval and Early Modern Studies at the University of Victoria (2017–2020). During that time, she was a Remediating Editor for LEMDO. For her MA thesis, she prepared the first born-LEMDO edition, a critical edition of Ralph Knevet’s Rhodon and Iris.

Brett Greatley-Hirsch

Brett Greatley-Hirsch is Professor of Renaissance Literature and Textual Studies at the University of Leeds. He is a coordinating editor of Digital Renaissance Editions, co-editor of the Routledge journal Shakespeare, and a Trustee of the British Shakespeare Association. He is the author (with Hugh Craig) of Style, Computers, and Early Modern Drama: Beyond Authorship (Cambridge, 2017), which brings together his interests in early modern drama, computational stylistics, and literary history. His current projects include editions of Hyde Park for the Oxford Shirley (with Mark Houlahan) and Fair Em for DRE, a history of the editing and publishing of Renaissance drama from the eighteenth century to the present day, and several computational studies of early modern dramatic authorship and genre. For more details, see notwithoutmustard.net.

Chloe Mee

Chloe Mee (she/her) worked as a research assistant with the LEMDO team over several periods from 2022 to 2025. She graduated from the University of Victoria in 2025 with a BA (Hons with distinction) in English. She will be studying at the University of British Columbia to complete her MA in English. Chloe collaborated with the LEMDO team on a VKURA internship in summer 2022, mainly focusing on Hamlet quartos. Following her internship, she also worked as a research assistant in 2022–23 and 2025.

Chris Horne

Côme Saignol

Côme Saignol is a PhD candidate at Sorbonne University where he is preparing a thesis about the reception of Cyrano de Bergerac. After working several years on Digital Humanities, he created a company named CS Edition & Corpus to assist researchers in classical humanities. His interests include: eighteenth-century theatre, philology, textual alignment, and XML databases.

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.

Jesús Tronch

Jesús Tronch is Senior Lecturer at the University of Valencia, where he teaches English literature and creative translation. His main research interests are textual criticism (specifically on Shakespeare and early modern drama) and translation and reception studies (specifically the presence of Shakespeare in Spain). He has published A Synoptic Hamlet (2002), and Un primer Hamlet (1994), co-edited bilingual English-Spanish editions of The Tempest (1994) and Antony and Cleopatra (2001), and, with Clara Calvo, a critical edition of The Spanish Tragedy for the Arden Early Modern Drama series (2013). He has also published commissioned essays in book collections published by MLA, Palgrave, University of Delaware Press, Cambridge University Press, Manchester University Press, Iter Press, and articles and reviews on journals such as TEXT: An Interdisciplinary Annual of Textual Studies, SEDERI, Atlantis, Miscelanea, Shakespeare Quarterly, and Shakespeare Survey. He has contributed to the research project Shakespeare in Spain within the framework of his European reception based at the University of Murcia.
As for January 2017, he is editing Timon of Athens for the Internet Shakespeare Editions, collaborating with EMOTHE, an open-access, hypertextual and multilingual collection of early modern European theatre developed by the ARTELOPE research project, and coordinating a digital environment for early modern English drama in translation, both at the University of Valencia.
He was a member of the Conference Committee of the International Shakespeare Association (2007–2011), is presently a member of the Advisory Board of the International Shakespeare Conference, and referees for a number of journals such as Cahiers Élisabéthains, SEDERI, Amaltea, and Atlantis.

Jodi Litvin

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.

Kate LeBere

Project Manager, 2020–2021. Assistant Project Manager, 2019–2020. Textual Remediator and Encoder, 2019–2021. Kate LeBere completed her BA (Hons.) in History and English at the University of Victoria in 2020. During her degree she published papers in The Corvette (2018), The Albatross (2019), and PLVS VLTRA (2020) and presented at the English Undergraduate Conference (2019), Qualicum History Conference (2020), and the Digital Humanities Summer Institute’s Project Management in the Humanities Conference (2021). While her primary research focus was sixteenth and seventeenth century England, she completed her honours thesis on Soviet ballet during the Russian Cultural Revolution. She is currently a student at the University of British Columbia’s iSchool, working on her masters in library and information science.

Kim Shortreed

Kim is a PhD Candidate in Media Studies and Digital Humanities, through UVic’s English Department. Kim has worked for years in TEI and XML, mostly through the Colonial Despatches website, and in a number of roles, including technical editor, research and markup, writing and editing, documentation, and project management. Recently, Kim worked with a team of Indigenous students to find ways to decolonize the Despatches project’s content and encoding practices. Part of Kim’s dissertation project, Contracolonial Practices in Salish Sea Namescapes, is to prototype a haptic map, a motion-activated topography installation that plays audio clips of spoken toponyms, in SENĆOŦEN and English, of the W̱SÁNEĆ Territory/Saanich Peninsula, respectively.

Kirk Melnikoff

Kirk Melnikoff is Professor of English at UNC Charlotte and a past president of the Marlowe Society of America. His research interests range from sixteenth-century British Literature and Culture, to Shakespeare in Performance, to Book History. His essays have appeared in a number of journals and books, and he is the author of Elizabethan Book Trade Publishing and the Makings of Literary Culture (U Toronto P, 2018). He has also edited four essay collections, most recently Christopher Marlowe, Theatrical Commerce, and the Book Trade (Cambridge UP, 2018), and published an edition of Robert Greene’s James IV in 2020. He is currently co-editing a collection of early modern book-trade wills which will be published by Manchester UP, editing Marlowe’s Edward II for the Oxford Marlowe: Collected Works project, and working on a monograph on bookselling in early modern England.

Laura Estill

Laura Estill is a Canada Research Chair in Digital Humanities and Associate Professor of English at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia, Canada, where she directs the digital humanities centre. Her monograph (Dramatic Extracts in Seventeenth-Century English Manuscripts: Watching, Reading, Changing Plays, 2015) and co-edited collections (Early Modern Studies after the Digital Turn, 2016 and Early British Drama in Manuscript, 2019) explore the reception history of drama by Shakespeare and his contemporaries from their initial circulation in print, manuscript, and on stage to how we mediate and understand these texts and performances online today. Her work has appeared in journals including Shakespeare Quarterly, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, Digital Humanities Quarterly, Humanities, and The Seventeenth Century, as well as in collections such as Shakespeare’s Theatrical Documents, Shakespeare and Textual Studies, and The Shakespeare User. She is co-editor of Early Modern Digital Review.

Line Cottegnies

Line Cottegnies teaches early-modern literature at Sorbonne Université. She is the author of a monograph on the politics of wonder in Caroline poetry, L’Éclipse du regard: la poésie anglais du baroque au classicisme (Droz, 1997), and has co-edited several collections of essays, including Authorial Conquests: Essays on Genre in the Writings of Margaret Cavendish (AUP, 2003, with Nancy Weitz), Women and Curiosity in the Early Modern Period (Brill, 2016), with Sandring Parageau, or Henry V: A Critical Guide (Bloomsbury, 2018), with Karen Britland. She has published on seventeenth-century literature, from Shakespeare and Raleigh to Ahpra Behn and Mary Astell. Her research interests are: early-modern drama and poetry, the politics of translation (between France and England), and women authors of the period. She has also developed a particular interest in editing: she had edited half of Shakespeare’s plays for the Gallimard bilingual complete works (alone and in collaboration), and, also, Henry IV, Part 2, for The Norton Shakespeare 3 (2016). With Marie-Alice Belle, she has co-edited two Elizabethan translations of Robert Garnier (by Mary Sidney Herbert and Thomas Kyd), published in 2017 in the MHRA Tudor and Stuart Translation Series as Robert Garnier in Elizabethan England. She is currently working on an edition of three Behn’s translations from the French for the Cambridge edition of Behn’s Complete Works

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.

Melissa Walter

Melissa Walter is Associate Professor of English at the University of the Fraser Valley. Her research focuses on early modern English drama and English and European prose fiction. She is the author of The Italian Novella and Shakespeare’s Comic Heroines (U of Toronto, 2019), and co-editor, with Dennis Britton, of Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study: Authors, Audiences, Digital Technologies (Routledge, 2018). Her work on English theatre and the European novella has appeared in several edited collections, including Transnational Exchange in Early Modern Theater (Ashgate, 2008), and Transnational Mobility in Early Modern Theater (Ashgate, 2012). She has also written about Translation and Identity in the Dialogues in English and Malaiane Languages (Indographies, ed. Jonathan Gil Harris. Palgrave 2012). At the University of the Fraser Valley, she is a lead coordinator of UFV’s Shakespeare and Reconciliation Garden.

Molly Rothwell

MoEML Project Manager, 2022–2023. Research Assistant, 2020–2022. Molly Rothwell was an undergraduate student at the University of Victoria, with a double major in English and History. During her time at LEMDO, Molly primarily worked on encoding the MoEML Mayoral Shows.

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.

Oluwaseun Akintola

Oluwaseun Akintola is a student pursuing an English major and Psychology minor at the University of Victoria. She has had the opportunity of working for LEMDO as the recipient of the Undergraduate Student Research Award (USRA) from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) for the summers of 2024 and 2025. Her research primarily focuses on premodern critical race theory in early modern drama, researching racial representation, and constructions of identity in Shakespeare’s plays Othello and The Merchant of Venice.

Patrick Szpak

Patrick Szpak is a Programmer Consultant and Web Designer in the Humanities Computing and Media Centre at the University of Victoria.

Peter Cockett

Peter Cockett is an associate professor in the Theatre and Film Studies at McMaster University. He is the general editor (performance), and technical co-ordinating editor of Queen’s Men Editions. He was the stage director for the Shakespeare and the Queen’s Men project (SQM), directing King Leir, The Famous Victories of Henry V, and Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (2006) and he is the performance editor for our editions of those plays. The process behind those productions is documented in depth on his website Performing the Queen’s Men. Also featured on this site are his PAR productions of Clyomon and Clamydes (2009) and Three Ladies of London (2014). For the PLS, the University of Toronto’s Medieval and Renaissance Players, he has directed the Digby Mary Magdalene (2003) and the double bill of George Peele’s The Old Wives Tale and the Chester Antichrist (2004). He also directed An Experiment in Elizabethan Comedy (2005) for the SQM project and Inside Out: The Persistence of Allegory (2008) in collaboration with Alan Dessen. Peter is a professional actor and director with numerous stage and screen credits. He can be contacted at cockett@mcmaster.ca.

Rowan Grayson

Rowan is a BA and MA student in English and Latin American Studies at UNC Charlotte working on his master’s thesis, a comparative study of the intersections of gender, sexuality, and race in Brazilian and Dominican science fiction novels. He was a Mitacs Research Intern with LEMDO at UVic in 2023.

Rylyn Christensen

Rylyn Christensen is an English major at the University of Victoria.

Sam 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.

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.

Sofia Spiteri

Sofia Spiteri is currently completing her Bachelor of Arts in History at the University of Victoria. During the summer of 2023, she had the opportunity to work with LEMDO as a recipient of the Valerie Kuehne Undergraduate Research Award (VKURA). Her work with LEMDO primarily includes semi-diplomatic transcriptions for The Winter’s Tale and Mucedorus.

Tom Bishop

Tom Bishop is Professor and former Head of English at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, where he teaches Shakespeare, Renaissance literature, and Drama. He is the author of Shakespeare and the Theatre of Wonder (Cambridge, 1996), translator of Ovid’s Amores (Carcanet, 2003), editor of Pericles, Prince of Tyre (New Internet Shakespeare Editions), and a general editor of The Shakespearean International Yearbook (Routledge). He has published work on Elizabethan music, Shakespeare, Jonson, court masques, early modern religion, and other topics. He is currently editing As You Like It for the Arden Shakespeare (fourth series) and writing a book called Shakespeare’s Theatre Games.

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.

Glossary

lemdo.odd or emODDern
“ lemdo.odd is the TEI file that LEMDO uses to capture our documentation and publish it on the site. The .odd file extension stands for “one document does it all” or “ ODD file ”. We call our ODD file emODDern. We use an ODD processor to generate a RelaxNG schema, against which editors and encoders validate their XML files. Many projects are entirely documented in their ODD file. Because LEMDO has so much documentation that is written by editors, encoders, and technical writers, we write a lot of our documentation in discrete .xml files that are later included in the ODD file. You can find the ODD file in the repository (lemdo/data/sch/lemdo.odd) and see how documentation files are organized there, but only certain members of the LEMDO team have permission to commit changes to this file. The LEMDO schema and all of our editorial and encoding documentation HTML pages are generated from the ODD file. (Read more about ODD files in the TEI Guidelines.)”

Metadata

Authority title Preface
Type of text Documentation
Publisher Linked Early Modern Drama
Series
Source
Editorial declaration
Edition
Encoding description
Document status prgGenerated
License/availability