LEMDO: Encode Performances

Encode Performances

Prior Reading

Practice: Add Files to the Repository

Use LEMDO’s Oxygen Templates

Introduction

Editors may choose to include performances of various texts in their editions. By performance, the LEMDO project refers not to a performance on which the text is based (i.e., not a recording that subsequently serves as the basis for the encoded text), but rather a recorded version that in some way derives itself from or comments upon the encoded text. That is, a performance is not subordinate to the encoded text, but instead can be understood as a form of standoff annotation; it is a commentary on the text itself.¹ While the TEI Guidelines provide instructions for encoding recordings as the source material for an encoded text, they do not (at the time of writing) offer an explicit set of rules for encoding performance editions.

Step-by-Step: Workflow for Encoding Performance Files

The following workflow gives an overview of the process of encoding a performance for your edition. The practice for completing each step is explained further on in this documentation page.

Name your videos according to LEMDO practice for naming media.

Send your videos to the LEMDO team to be saved on an HCMC server.

Create a perf folder inside of your edition directory.

Create a video landing page using a LEMDO template.

Create a file for each video of your performance (typically one file for each scene).

Link to a video from each file.

Add your commentary (if you wish to comment on the content of the video).

Update navigational links at the end of each file.

Practice: Name and Store Video Files

As with images, LEMDO has a specific naming protocol for naming the video files that are saved on HCMC’s server. All performance video file names must be prefixed by the edition ID and an underscore and then followed by the scene number. All video file names must end with a period followed by the video file extension (i.e., .mp4).

You must add leading zeros to the scene numbers to ensure that the number of digits is consistent in each file name. For example, in a play with twelve scenes, two digits are needed for all scene numbers (i.e., 01, 02, 03, … 10, 11, 12).

For example, the video for the first scene of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (play ID = FBFB) would be FBFB_01.mp4.

Once you have named all of your image files, you can send them to the LEMDO team to be added to the HCMC server that we use for video storage. Send a zipped folder of videos or send a link to location from which we can download them (e.g., OneDrive, GoogleDrive, a university server).

Practice: Create Your Performance Folder

You must have a folder in your edition directory in which you can save performance pages. To create a new performance folder in your edition directory:

Right click on your edition directory in Oxygen.

Hover over the “New” option in the drop-down menu.

Select “Folder”.

Name the folder perf.

Once you have created the folder in Oxygen, you need to add it to the LEMDO repository. The practice for doing so is the same as for adding any new file:

In Terminal, run svn status. You will see the added folder listed with a question mark (?) to its left. This question mark indicates that the file exists in your local copy of the repo, but that it is not yet queued up to be added to the shared repository.

Navigate into your edition directory using cd plus the path of your edition (e.g., cd data/texts/FBFB).

Run svn add perf.

svn commit the added folder.

For more detailed instructions on svn add, see Practice: Add Files to the Repository.

Practice: Create a Video Landing Page

In most cases, you will want a landing page for your edition’s performances. This page is typically the one linked from your edition page. The video landing page hosts your full production video, links out to contextual information about your methodology, offers information about the performance (or links to information), and links to the video pages for each individual scene.

To create a video landing page for QME, use the LEMDO template file named qme_videoLandingPage_template. This template will work for editions in other anthologies but check with your anthology lead to see what information is required for your anthology. LEMDO will make a new template if necessary. See Use LEMDO’s Oxygen Templates for detailed information about creating a file using a template.

Name the file emdABBR_video.xml (replacing “ABBR” with your edition ID) and save it to your perf folder. Note that you will need to update the file’s xml:id to match the file name.

Once your file is created and saved with the correct name to your local copy of the repo, follow the commented out instructions in it to update your file’s metadata and content. You will need to:

Update the title of the file.

Give yourself credit if you have written annotations for the performance.

Give yourself credit as encoder of the file.

Update the xml:id for each div in the file so that it begins with the xml:id of the file (e.g., "emdABBR_video_introduction" for the introductory section).

Update the video link for the full production.

Add the name of your play as instructed by the template.

Add links to your edition’s production credits and performance introduction as instructed by the template.

Update the table with links to each scene’s video page as your create the pages.

Once your file is valid, you can add it to the shared LEMDO repository using svn add in Terminal. See Practice: Add Files to the Repository for detailed instructions.

Practice: Create Files for Scene Videos

You will make an XML file for each scene in the production. For QME, use the template called qme_videoScene_template to create these files. This template will work to encode videos of scenes for other anthologies but check with your anthology lead to see what information is required for your anthology. See Use LEMDO’s Oxygen Templates for more information about using LEMDO templates.

Name each scene video file following the pattern emdABBR, followed by an underscore, video, and the scene number. Add leading zeros to the scene number in the file name so that there is a consistent number of digits in all of the file names. In most cases, there will be two digits in your scene numbers (e.g., 01, 02, 03, … 09, 10, 11). Put together, the basic format for scene video file names is emdABBR_video_01.xml. Save each scene video file to your perf folder. Note that you will also need to change the file’s xml:id to match the file name.

Once you have named and saved your scene video file to your local copy of the LEMDO repository, follow the commented out instructions in the file to update it. You will need to:

Update the title of the file.

Give yourself credit if you have written annotations for the performance.

Give yourself credit as encoder of the file.

Update the xml:id for each div in the file so that it begins with the xml:id of the file (i.e., "emdABBR_video_01_introduction" for a section containing introductory text).

Update the link to the scene video in the


                                                <media>

element.

Add commentary about the scene in paragraphs that are children of the


                                                <note>

element.

Update the navigational links at the end of the file.

Notes

1.See the QME page on Performance as Research for a broader theoretical discussion on the nature of performance editions.↑

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.

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	Encode Performances
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.