Quickstart for Developers

This documentation is for developers working on a specific LEMDO anthology. It will introduce you to the development side of the LEMDO project, list LEMDO’s technical requirements specific to developers, and direct you towards further helpful documentation.

Introduction

Although all LEMDO anthology websites have full functionality and a standard style without any intervention, all anthology’s are required to make some customizations such as updating their top navigation bar and adding a logo. Additionally, some may choose to further customize their look and feel by customizing their anthology-specific HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. As an anthology’s developer, you will be doing this front-end work. Discuss with your anthology lead which aspects of your anthology you will be customizing. LEMDO’s programmers do the back-end work for all anthologies.

Developing with Endings Principles

LEMDO is an Endings-compliant project, meaning that our websites are designed to be stable and to last. Your customization of your anthology’s site must follow the Endings Principles for Digital Longevity. We recommend reading through the principles before you start work.

Technical Requirements for Anthology Developers

All people working in the LEMDO Subversion repository require:
A Subversion client (see documentation for installing Subversion on Mac, Windows, and Linux).
As an anthology developer, you require the following:
A Linux or Mac operating system (Windows is not able to run some required scripts)

Workflow to Get Started with LEMDO

Before you can begin your work developing, you must get set up to work in the LEMDO repository. You should also complete some additional training tasks. To get started working as a LEMDO developer:
Read this page.
Email the LEMDO team to get more detailed instructions for getting started and to set up an initial training meeting.
Apply for a UVic affiliate ID and a NetLink ID if you are not at UVic. For information on how to do so, see Get a NetLink ID.
Send us your NetLink ID. (UVic students, staff, and faculty: your NetLink ID is your UVic email handle.)
Send us a bio-bibliographical note for our list of contributors. At this point, we will create an xml:id for you and send it to you.
Familiarize yourself with the LEMDO repository. Read The LEMDO Platform and Repository and Repository Structure, and watch our Repository Tour on YouTube.
Install a Subversion (SVN) client if you do not already have one. Read Install a Subversion Client: Mac, Install a Subversion Client: Windows, or Install a Subversion Client: Linux as appropriate for your OS.
Check out the LEMDO repository. Read Check Out the LEMDO Repository.
If you will be working on any of your anthology’s XML files, install Oxygen (the application that we use to edit XML). Read Install Oxygen.
Do a test commit with a LEMDO team member.
Familiarize yourself with the standard workflow in your command line that you will follow each work session. Read Workflow for Working in the Command Line (Terminal). We recommend bookmarking that documentation page, as encoders refer to it frequently.
You can find additional documentation for beginning work with LEMDO in Chapter 2. Getting Started with LEMDO.

Further Reading

All documentation specific to developers is in Chapter 22. Programming. All anthology developers should read:
If you will be working on your anthology’s CSS, you should also read:
Additionally, we have some internal documentation that we can share with you. Write to the LEMDO team to ask for an email introduction to an experienced LEMDO developer or designer.
You can quickly search for all documentation that has been written specifically for developers by going to the search page and selecting Documentation from the Document Types menu and Developer from the LEMDO Target Audience menu.

Prosopography

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.

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.

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

xml:id
“A unique value that we use to tag an entity. Strictly speaking, @xml:id is an attribute that can be added to any XML element. We use it as a shorthand for “value of the xml:id”. Every person, role, glyph, ligature, bibliographical entry, act, scene, speech, paragraph, page beginning, XML file, division within XML files, and anchor has a unique xml:id value, some of which are assigned automatically during the processing of our XML files.”

Metadata

Authority title Quickstart for Developers
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.