LEMDO: Principles, Practices, and Caveats of Linking

Principles, Practices, and Caveats of Linking

Rationale

LEMDO prefers a series of densely interlinked pages over a single linear document. We have established best practices for the many types of linking that you may do during your work on the LEMDO project: linking within an a single document, linking within an edition, linking within the LEMDO project, and linking from one edition to an external source. We follow these best practices in order to create stable links that follow the principles for Endings compliance.

Principles

Links must be processable for both the digital edition and the print edition. LEMDO uses single-source publishing, which means that our encoding will be handled by processing to build HTML digital editions and PDF print editions that are generated using LaTeX, a standard application in the publishing industry.

Links should help users find what they need within an edition.

In practice, we ask you to use xml:ids and anchors to point to the things you want to link to in your edition.

In practice, we convert the pointers within your digital edition into canonical reference citations (A.S.Sp. for modernized texts, Sp. for semi-diplomatic transcriptions) and links at build time. Although the rendered citation gives A.S.Sp. numbers, clicking on the citation takes a user directly to the cited part of the speech.

In practice, we convert the pointers within your print edition into local reference citations (A.S.Sp. and page numbers) at build time.

Links must give credit where credit is due in ways that are human-readable.

In practice, you provide the human-readable citation using the


                                                   <ref>

element in cases where LEMDO cannot generate a canonical citation.

In practice, LEMDO will turn your


                                                   <ref>

elements into hyperlinks in the digital editions that will point to the entity or source you cite.

In practice, LEMDO trusts that you will provide adequate information in the text node of your


                                                   <ref>

element to allow readers of the print edition to find the source you are citing.

In practice, LEMDO will check to see if all the external links work before every anthology release.

Links should point from the less stable entity to the more stable entity.

Links must only be to published editions. LEMDO does not cite or link to unpublished editions, which are by their nature in flux.

In practice, we cite from LEMDO editions only when they are complete, peer-reviewed, and published.¹

In practice, we cite other published editions in those cases where a LEMDO edition is not yet published.

LEMDO editions are designed to be published in multiple anthologies, and those anthologies are designed to be independent static sites.

In practice, an edition can only use the


                                                   <ptr>

element when linking within its own edition directory.

In practice, editions treat materials outside their anthology as any other source on the internet and use the


                                                   <ref>

tag and target URL to link to them.

Caveats

The digital edition is more capacious than the print edition.

In practice, we must be especially careful in how we encode the components of the digital edition that will be turned into PDFs.

In practice, we can be more flexible with the components of the digital edition that will only ever be part of the digital edition.

We cannot render line editions in either the print or the digital edition.

In practice, we use the A.S.Sp. canonical reference system for both print and digital editions.

Only pointers can be converted to precise citations.

In practice, you can use a


                                                   <ref>

to point within an edition directory, but it is always safest to use a


                                                   <ptr>

to link within your edition.

In practice, use the


                                                   <ptr>

element for anything that needs to have a calculated reference that you cannot know until the PDF is produced (i.e., page numbers).

Notes

1.To be published, a document has to have three things: (1) it must have the value of published for the


                                 @status

attribute on the


                                    <revisionDesc>

element, (2) it has to be included in an anthology, and (3) it has to have been released in a static release of that anthology.↑

Prosopography

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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	Principles, Practices, and Caveats of Linking
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.