Quickstart for Editors

Introduction

This page is for new LEMDO editors. You may be editing a play for the general LEMDO anthology (e.g., as a graduate student preparing a LEMDO edition for your thesis) or you may be editing a play for one of the anthologies that uses LEMDO as a publishing platform (i.e., DRE, ISE, or QME). You may be an experienced editor who is encoding a play for the first time. You may be a new editor who has knowledge of text encoding. Or you may be new both to editing and to encoding. This page is designed to give you a list of things you need to read and do to start editing your play in the LEMDO repository, and links to more advanced information.
We refers to the LEMDO team based at the University of Victoria. You refers to you, the reader of this page. You are welcome to email us at any time with questions. We also welcome suggestions that will improve this documentation for future readers.
If you have a Research Assistant or Editorial Assistant working with you to encode the play, we have special documentation to get them started. You will want to point them to this page: Quickstart for Encoders. We recommend that you familiarize yourself with the type of information that we are giving them. Note that the LEMDO Team at UVic is normally happy to include your RA in any of our training sessions and to give them a virtual space to connect with our local RAs.
If you are encoding the play yourself as well as editing it, then you will want to read the Quickstart for Encoders carefully for your own edification. It is written to be comprehensible to students and people with no experience of encoding or no experience encoding for LEMDO.
If you are contributing to a LEMDO Anthology (such as DRE, ISE, or QME), please direct questions about your play, copytext, and editorial principles to your anthology lead. The LEMDO team is not ignorant of such matters, being editors and encoders ourselves; indeed, we advise anthology leads on many matters. However, we take direction from anthology leads when it comes to your edition and progress. We do not interfere with the editorial process or governance of the anthology projects.1

Housekeeping

Once your proposal to edit a work has been approved, you’ll need to contact the LEMDO team at UVic. Normally, your anthology lead will facilitate an introduction. You and/or your RA will need to get set up to work in the LEMDO repository. Be ready to answer the following questions:
What is your operating system? (Mac, PC, Linux)
Which version of the OS are you running?
Do you have an RA whom you want to have trained? If yes, what is their name and email address?
To work on the LEMDO platform, you need to have:
UVic affiliate identity and a NetLink ID. Apply for your UVic affiliate identity by following our instructions in Get a NetLink ID. Once you have chosen your NetLink ID, send it to lemdo@uvic.ca so that we can give you write privileges on your edition portfolio.
A LEMDO xml:id, which is your personal, unique id across the entire LEMDO project. We will create this for you and tell you what it is. At the same time, we can add your bio-bibliographical note to the development site if you are ready to submit one. Sample bios are here. We can update your bio any time at your request.
To set up your own workstation, you need to:
Find the Terminal (command line) on your computer.
Install a Subversion client so that you can interact with our Subversion repository (check out, commit, and update your local copy of the LEMDO repository).

Workflow for Editors who are Encoding

Read this page.
If you have an RA, introduce them to us via email.
Email us to indicate that you are ready to begin encoding your work on the LEMDO platform.
Apply for UVic affiliate identity if you are not at UVic. See Get a NetLink ID.
When your affiliate identity is approved, make a NetLink ID and password for yourself.
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.)
Read what LEMDO has to say about Editorial Guidelines. See Introduction to Editorial Guidelines.
Confer with your Anthology Lead about which guidelines your anthology follows.
Set up your XML editor (Oxygen). See Install Oxygen.
Install Subversion commands. See Access the Repository and follow the links to precise instructions for your operating system. Ask the LEMDO team for help on this step if necessary.
Reach out to the LEMDO team for additional training on how to check out the LEMDO repository, open the project file, and navigate to your portfolio.
Check out the repository:
Read up on best practices for committing your local work to the shared repository: Work in Subversion.
Open the LEMDO Oxygen project. See LEMDO Oxygen Project.
Navigate to the edition portfolio on which you have write privileges.
Begin encoding. Follow the relevant instructions in the LEMDO documentation for the type of file you are encoding. See Further Reading.
Remember to update your local copy of the repo and commit your files often! See Practice: Use Subversion Commands and Commit Files.

Workflow for Editors who are not Encoding

Read this page.
Introduce your RA to us via email (unless you are paying LEMDO to have a UVic RA do your encoding).
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.)
Learn about TEI. Even if you are not doing the encoding yourself, you will want to understand what is happening to your text in the encoding stage. See Introduction to Markup, XML, and TEI.
Read what LEMDO has to say about Editorial Guidelines. See Introduction to Editorial Guidelines.
Confer with your Anthology Lead about which guidelines your anthology follows.

Editorial Workflow

The normal editorial workflow is as follows, with links to the sections of the documentation that you will need:
Prepare the semi-diplomatic text(s) of your play (i.e., semi-diplomatic texts). See the Semi-Diplomatic Transcriptions: Print chapter for printed playbooks. See the Semi-Diplomatic Transcriptions: Manuscript chapter for manuscript playbooks.
Collate the early editions. See the Collation chapter.
Prepare the modern-spelling text and character list. See the Modern Texts chapter.
Collate scholarly editions. See the Collation chapter.
Write annotations and begin bibliography. See Write Annotations and Prepare Edition Bibliography.
Write critical paratexts (textual and contextual introductions, critical and performance histories) and complete the bibliography. See the Critical Paratexts chapter.

Notes

1.Admittedly, it gets a bit murky for ISE, NISE, and DRE because Janelle Jenstad (Director of LEMDO and PI on LEMDO’s SSHRC grant) is also the UVic-appointed Technical Adviser to the ISE (i.e., to editors who worked on the old ISE platform) and is sharing the Coordinating role of the NISE and DRE anthologies with Brett Greatley-Hirsch, James Mardock, and Sarah Neville. Generally Janelle focuses on technical and encoding matters for NISE and DRE. For the ISE and NISE, she also maintains the records.↑

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.

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.

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 womenʼs 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.

Glossary

Anthology Lead
“A person responsible for the creation of an anthology of editions created via the LEMDO Platform. Anthologies may use their own internal terminology for this role, such as General Editor or Coordinating Editor.”
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 Editors
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.