Introduction to Style in Semi-Diplomatic Transcriptions

LEMDO uses the language of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to describe the features of semi-diplomatic transcriptions. CSS is a primarily prescriptive output language and its renditions govern how your playbook looks in the LEMDO interface.

Rationale

Our objective for CSS encoding is to define a set of general rules for representing the text of our semi-diplomatic transcriptions. At the same time, we allow transcribers and encoders to capture the peculiarities of the printed book, both across the entire printed book and at the local level of the line or word. Some knowledge of CSS will help you (the transcriber or encoder), but you do not have to know CSS to have relatively easy control over the way your transcription captures key bibliographical codes and the way it will eventually be rendered.

Principles

We follow the principle of minimal tagging for semi-diplomatic transcriptions; LEMDO normally includes links to facsimiles of the books, where people interested in the mise-en-page can see how the page is laid out. We are not interested in exactly recreating the layout of early printed playbooks. We do, however, capture some bibliographical features of the playbook.
LEMDO uses three levels of CSS to capture these bibliographical features:
Default styling.
File-wide styling using the <tagsDecl> element.
Inline CSS using the @rendition and @style attributes.

Practice: Decide Which Level of CSS to Use

LEMDO foresees the following scenarios which will determine which level(s) of CSS you will use in your semi-diplomatic transcription:
Your playbook is similar to many other playbooks in its composition and mise-en-page or your anthology is not interested in capturing these features. If this is the case for you, use our default stylesheet. See Practice: Use Default Style.
Your playbook has consistent deviations from our default styling. If this is the case for you, use the <tagsDecl> element to adjust the CSS that applies to specific elements across your file. See Practice: Encode File-Wide Style.
Your playbook has sporadic deviations. If this is the case for you, use the @rendition and @style attributes to capture specific features. See Practice: Encode Inline Style.

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.

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.

Rowan Grayson

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

Rylyn Christensen

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

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 Introduction to Style in Semi-Diplomatic Transcriptions
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.