Encode Witness List

Prior Reading

This documentation assumes that you are familiar with the basic of collations. See Introduction to Collations.

Disambiguation

This section of the documentation assumes that you are preparing your vertical collation of edition variants and that the collation is linked to the file that you will modernize (or have modernized). We have separate documentation (forthcoming) for collating press variants.

Rationale

Editions conventionally offer a list of witnesses collated, with their edition-specific sigla. The LEMDO witness list gives full details for each of the witnesses and publications you collate, in order to give credit where credit is due. It also defines an abbreviation (or siglum) for each publication; LEMDO reproduces this siglum (plural sigla) in the collation pop-up note and hyperlinks it to the full bibliographical details of the publication indicated by the siglum. Finally, it allows you to create a unique xml:id for each witness and publication you collate. You will use these xml:ids in your collation to indicate the source of each reading.

Practice: Basics

LEMDO uses the TEI <listWit> element to capture the witness list in the <teiHeader> of the collation file. Each witness is listed in a <witness> element inside the <listWit> element.
The <witness> element has two required attributes: @xml:id and @n. There is one optional attribute, @corresp.

Practice: Create the List of Witnesses

Before you begin collating, you will want to create a list of the editions and witnesses you wish to include in your stemma. Consult with your anthology lead about the number and nature of the editions and witnesses in your list. Some projects may wish to have an exhaustive collation of substantive variants (useful for texts with limited editorial history). Other projects may be more selective (appropriate for texts with lengthy editorial histories, such as Shakespeare’s texts, which have seen hundreds of editions).
To find early editions: Consult DEEP.
To find copies of early editions: Consult the ESTC.

Practice: Get xml:ids for Editions and Witnesses

The xml:ids for editions and witnesses—if they are already in the LEMDO ecosystem—can be found in LEMDO’s bibliographic database (BIBL1). We include the xml:id of the entry on the BIBL1 page, in the column on the right. Each entry for early editions (i.e., those published up to about 1700—Q1, Q2, F1, F2, etc.) includes the DEEP number, which will help you cross-reference and ensure that you are selecting the right edition from BIBL1.
If you were working on an edition of The Honest Whore, you would want to collate the first edition. The Honest Whore Q1 is listed in BIBL1 as
Dekker, Thomas and Thomas Middleton. The Converted Courtesan. London: Valentine Simmes, 1604. STC 6501. DEEP 362. BIBL1
The xml:id of this edition in LEMDO is DEKK5.
If the edition you want to collate is not yet in BIBL1, send all the bibliographical information for the edition (including the DEEP number) to the LEMDO team at UVic (lemdo@uvic.ca). See Prepare Edition Bibliography for more about what information to include for bibliography entries.
LEMDO does not list specific copies of playbooks or manuscripts in BIBL1. If your collation includes such unique witnesses, you will list all the bibliographic details and assign an xml:id in your own collation file in the witness list.

Step-by-Step

Make a list of all the witnesses and publications you wish to collate.
If the publications are already listed in BIBL1 make a note of the xml:id of the publication. If they are not already in BIBL1 , send your list to the LEMDO Team. A team member will add the items to the sitewide databases and tell you what the xml:ids are.
If your edition directory does not already contain a collation file in the app folder, create your own file from the LEMDO template called collation_template. See Use LEMDO’s Oxygen Templates for instructions on how to create a new file using one of the LEMDO templates. The template contains instructions that complement the documentation on this page. You may also ask the LEMDO Team to make a collation file for you.
Following the instructions in the template, give your file a filename and save it in your edition directory. See Advanced Subversion Commands to learn how to add files to the repository.
Find the <listWit> element in the template. There are two sample <witness> elements in the template.
For each witness and publication, create a <witness> element.
Add an @xml:id attribute to the <witness> element. Follow the instructions in the template to construct a unique ID to use in your collation.
Add an @n attribute. The value of @n is your preferred siglum for the witness. Consult your anthology lead about preferred sigla patterns (F or F1, for example). The sigla for your witnesses do not have to be unique across LEMDO, but they do need to be unique in the context of your edition.
Link your witness to the corresponding entry in BIBL1 by adding a @corresp attribute. The value of the @corresp attribute is the prefix bibl: followed by the xml:id of the item in BIBL1 . Do not put anything in the text node of the <witness> element. The <witness> element will be a self-closing or empty element. At processing time, we will pull in the citation from BIBL1 .

Quick Reference

Attribute Value Example
@xml:id Must be unique to the LEMDO project. Make sure it is unique by using the already-unique name of the file, then adding your siglum. emd1HW_M_collation_Q1
@corresp If the entry is in BIBL1 , use the bibl: prefix plus the unique xml:id of the entry in BIBL1 . bibl:DEKK14 (to point to an entry in the LEMDO bibliography)
@n Your siglum, which must be unique to your edition but not to the whole project. Q1; Dodsley

Special Case: Providing Your Own Citation

If there is no entry in BIBL1 and you do not want to add an entry to BIBL1 (which would be the case for manuscript witnesses or for individual copies of an edition), do not add a @corresp attribute to the <witness> element. Add your own citation in the text node of the <witness> element.
If you add content to the text node, the LEMDO processor will not pull in the data from BIBL1 ; instead, your own content will be displayed in the citation.
In some cases, you may want to provide a more detailed explanation of a witness which is somehow more complex or problematic. In this case, do not use @corresp; instead, provide your explanation inside the <witness> element, making sure to include links to any relevant items in BIBL1 using the <ref> element, as shown below:
<witness xml:id="emd1HW_M_collation_Q2S" n="Q2S">
  <ref type="bibl" target="bibl:DEKK4">The second quarto of <title level="m">The Honest Whore</title>
  </ref> was partially set from <soCalled>standing type</soCalled> that was never distributed back into the cases after Q1 was printed. Q2S refers to the pages that were printed from the standing type.</witness>

Special Case: Your Own Edition

You want to be able to give yourself credit for readings that are created by you (usually with the siglum This edition). Add an entry to the witness list for yourself. In this case, you will almost certainly want to override your own biography with a simple phrase, either the word editor or, in cases where there are two or more editors working collaboratively, your surnames:
<witness xml:id="emdMV_M_collation_thisEd" n="This edition">Edited by <persName ref="pers:JENS1">Janelle Jenstad</persName> and <persName ref="pers:WITT1">Stephen Wittek</persName>.</witness>
If you want to give credit to individual editors of the present edition, which might be the case if you have divided the work of modernizing by acts or scenes, make two witness entries, one for each editor. You will need to create a unique xml:id and a unique siglum for each editor.
<listWit>
  <witness xml:id="emdMV_M_collation_thisEdJJ" n="This edition (Jenstad)">
    <name ref="pers:JENS1">Janelle Jenstad</name>, co-editor of this edition.</witness>
  <witness xml:id="emdMV_M_collation_thisEdSW" n="This edition (Wittek)">
    <name ref="pers:WITT1">Stephen Wittek</name>, co-editor of this edition.</witness>
</listWit>

Examples

<listWit>
  <witness xml:id="emdFV_M_collation_thisEd" n="This edition">Edited by <name ref="pers:MART1">Mathew Martin</name>.</witness>
  <witness xml:id="emdFV_M_collation_Q1" n="First Quarto" corresp="bibl:THEF1"/>
  <witness xml:id="emdFV_M_collation_Q2" n="Second Quarto" corresp="bibl:THEF2"/>
  <witness xml:id="emdFV_M_collation_Bullough" n="Bullough" corresp="bibl:BULL4"/>
</listWit>

Rendering Note

For empty <witness> elements with a @corresp attribute, LEMDO processing will pull in the information from BIBL1 to populate the element.

Further Reading

Now that you have created your witness list, you will want to move on to creating your collations. See Encode Collations.

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.

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.

Mathew Martin

Dr. Mathew R. Martin is Full Professor at Brock University, Canada. He is the author of Between Theatre and Philosophy (2001), Tragedy and Trauma in the Plays of Christopher Marlowe (2015) and Psychoanalysis and Literary Theory (2023), and co-editor, with his colleague James Allard, of Staging Pain, 1500–1800: Violence and Trauma in British Theatre (2009). For Broadview Press he has edited Christopher Marlowe’s Edward the Second (2010), Jew of Malta (2012), Doctor Faustus: The B-Text (2013) and Tamburlaine the Great Part One and Part Two (2014), and Robert Greene’s Selimus (2022). For Revels Editions he has edited George Peele’s David and Bathsheba (2018) and Marlowe’s The Massacre at Paris (2021). For Queen’s Men Editions he has edited The Famous Victories of Henry V (2016). He has published two articles of textual criticism on the printed texts of Marlowe’s plays: Inferior Readings: The Transmigration of Material in Tamburlaine the Great (Early Theatre 17.2 [December 2014]), and (on the political inflections of the shifts in punctuation in the early editions of the play) Accidents Happen: Roger Barnes’s 1612 Edition of Marlowe’s Edward the Second (Early Theatre 16.1 [June 2013]). His latest editing projects are a double-play Revels edition of Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and John of Bordeaux and a Digital Renaissance Editions edition of Dido, Queen of Carthage.

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.

Stephen Wittek

Stephen Wittek is Assistant Professor of Literature at Carnegie Mellon University and co-editor with Janelle Jenstad for the ISE edition of The Merchant of Venice. He is the author of The Media Players: Shakespeare, Middleton, Jonson, and the Idea of News (University of Michigan Press, 2015), and has also written for journals including Studies in English Literature, Digital Humanities Quarterly, and Journal of Cognitive History. In 2014, the CBC Radio One program Ideas produced an hour-long episode showcasing Dr. Wittek’s research on the co-evolution of English theatre and news culture (available for streaming or download).
Dr. Wittek holds a PhD in literature from McGill University and a Master’s degree in Shakespeare Studies from the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-Upon-Avon, England. From 2013 to 2017, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow for McGill’s Early Modern Conversions project, a five-year research endeavor that brought together an interdisciplinary team of humanities scholars to study the multiform proliferation of conversion and conversional representation in early modernity (see http://www.earlymodernconversions.com). His continuing work for the project includes the essay collection Performing Conversion: Urbanism, Theatre, and the Transformation of the Early Modern World, which he is co-editing with José R. Jouve-Martin for the Early Modern Conversions book series (University of Edinburgh Press).
On the digital humanities front, Dr. Wittek is co-developer with Stéfan Sinclair and Matthew Milner for DREaM (Distant Reading Early Modernity), a database that will index 44,000+ early modern texts, thus making long-neglected material more amenable for use with tools for large-scale textual analysis.

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.

Bibliography

Bullough, Geoffrey, ed. Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare. Volume IV: Later English History Plays: King John, Henry IV, Henry V, Henry VIII. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; New York: Columbia University Press, 1962.
Dekker, Thomas, and Thomas Middleton. The converted curtezan with, the humours of the patient man, and the longing wife. London: Valentine Simmes for John Hodgets, 1604. STC 6501.5. DEEP 363. ESTC S120001. Greg 204b.
Dekker, Thomas, and Thomas Middleton. The honest whore, with, the humours of the patient man, and the longing wife. London: Valentine Simmes for John Hodgets, 1604. STC 6501. DEEP 362. ESTC S105233. Greg 204a.
The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth: Containing the Honourable Battell of Agin-Court. As it was Acted by the Kinges Maiesties Servants. London: Barnard Alsop, 1617. STC 13073. ESTC S4698. DEEP 253.
The Famous Victories of Henry the fifth: Containing the Honourable Battell of Agin-court: As it was plaide by the Queenes Maiesties Players. London: Thomas Creed, 1598. STC 13072. ESTC S106379.

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

empty element
“Empty elements are also called milestone or self-closing elements, but LEMDO uses the term empty element. Empty elements do not have child text or element nodes.”

Metadata

Authority title Encode Witness List
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.