Quickstart for Editors

This documentation 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 will introduce you to the typical workflow for editing a LEMDO edition and will direct you towards further helpful documentation.

Prior Reading

Introduction

All LEMDO editions must be marked up using the TEI-XML encoding language. This encoding captures your editorial decisions and allows your work to be processed for publication online, in PDF form, and, in some cases, as part of the printed LEMDO Hornbooks series. As a LEMDO editor, you will edit your edition according to your anthology’s editorial guidelines and you will either encode your own work or will hire somebody else to encode it for you according to LEMDO’s encoding guidelines.
If you are encoding your own edition as well as editing it, 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 have a research assistant or editorial assistant working with you to encode the play, point them to Quickstart for Encoders. Even if you are not encoding your edition yourself, we recommend that you familiarize yourself with the type of information that we are giving them as well. 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 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

Workflow to Get Started with LEMDO

Before you can begin your work editing, you must get set up to work with LEMDO:
Read this page.
Email the LEMDO team to get more detailed instructions for getting started and to set up an initial training meeting. If you have an RA who is not a member of the LEMDO team (i.e., not at UVic), introduce them to us via email.
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. If you have an RA, ensure that they also send us a bio-bibliographical note to add to our list of contributors. We will also assign them an xml:id.
Additionally, if you are encoding your own edition, you should complete the following training tasks:
Familiarize yourself with the LEMDO repository. Read The LEMDO Platform and Repository and Repository Structure, and watch our Repository Tour on YouTube.
Learn how to work in your command line. Read Work in the Command Line (Terminal).
Install a Subversion (SVN) client. 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.
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 encoding editors refer to it frequently.
You can find additional documentation for beginning work with LEMDO in Chapter 2. Getting Started with LEMDO.

Typical Workflow for Editors

Once you are set up to work in the repository, you will likely follow this workflow:
Confer with your anthology lead about which editorial guidelines your anthology follows.2
Complete a semi-diplomatic transcription of an early edition of your play. In many cases, you will check a pre-existing transcription is correct. In other cases, you will need to prepare a full transcription yourself. Contact the LEMDO team to see if there is a pre-existing semi-diplomatic transcription for your play, or if we are able to convert an EEBO-TCP transcription for use in your edition.
If you are encoding your own edition, generate a basic modernized text from your semi-diplomatic transcription. If you are not encoding your own edition, ask the LEMDO team to generate a basic modernized text for you.
Collate necessary editions for your play as required by your anthology and write textual notes. You may also start work on your textual introduction if you are writing one for your edition.
Create your edition bibliography from a template, add your collation witnesses, and begin adding sources from your critical paratexts.
Emend the modernized text of your play and check in with your anthology lead.
Modernize your play.
Write the remainder of your annotations.
Write your critical paratexts as required by your anthology.
Ensure your bibliography is complete.
Ensure that your edition landing page contains all of the content that you want to appear for readers.

Further Reading

In addition to the getting started documentation pages, editors typically find the following pages useful when beginning their editorial work:
You will find documentation chapters on encoding each piece of an edition in our documentation index. The chapters are laid out to reflect the typcial encoding workflow described in Typical Workflow for Editors, starting with semi-diplomatic transcriptions and ending with critical paratexts.
You can quickly search for all documentation that has been written specifically for editors by going to the search page and selecting Documentation from the Document Types menu and Editor from the LEMDO Target Audience menu.

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 PDG, Connection, and Insight grants) 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.
2.LEMDO has worked closely with the Coordinating Editors of Digital Renaissance Editions on the preparation of the DRE Editorial Guidelines. LEMDO’s encoding guidelines are designed to realize the editorial principles of those guidelines. LEMDO strongly encourages new anthologies to adopt the DRE Editorial Guidelines. Any editor using the LEMDO platform to prepare an edition that has not yet been accepted by an anthology must follow the DRE Editorial Guidelines.

Prosopography

Brett Greatley-Hirsch

Brett Greatley-Hirsch is Professor of Renaissance Literature and Textual Studies at the University of Leeds. He is a coordinating editor of Digital Renaissance Editions, co-editor of the Routledge journal Shakespeare, and a Trustee of the British Shakespeare Association. He is the author (with Hugh Craig) of Style, Computers, and Early Modern Drama: Beyond Authorship (Cambridge, 2017), which brings together his interests in early modern drama, computational stylistics, and literary history. His current projects include editions of Hyde Park for the Oxford Shirley (with Mark Houlahan) and Fair Em for DRE, a history of the editing and publishing of Renaissance drama from the eighteenth century to the present day, and several computational studies of early modern dramatic authorship and genre. For more details, see notwithoutmustard.net.

James D. Mardock

James Mardock is Associate Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Associate General Editor for the Internet Shakespeare Editions, and a dramaturge for the Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival and Reno Little Theater. In addition to editing quarto and folio Henry V for the ISE, he has published essays on Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and other Renaissance literature in The Seventeenth Century, Ben Jonson Journal, Borrowers and Lenders, and contributed to the collections Representing the Plague in Early Modern England (Routledge 2010) and Shakespeare Beyond Doubt (Cambridge 2013). His book Our Scene is London (Routledge 2008) examines Jonson’s representation of urban space as an element in his strategy of self-definition. With Kathryn McPherson, he edited Stages of Engagement (Duquesne 2013), a collection of essays on drama in post-Reformation England, and he is currently at work on a monograph on Calvinism and metatheatrical awareness in early modern English drama.

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.

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 women’s writing in the modernist period.

Sarah Neville

Sarah Neville is an associate professor of English and Theatre, Film and Media Arts at the Ohio State University. She specializes in early modern English literature, bibliography, theories of textuality and Shakespeare in performance, chiefly examining the ways that authority is negotiated in print, digital and live media. She is an assistant editor of the New Oxford Shakespeare (2016-17), for which she edited five plays in both old and modern-spelling editions, as well as an associate coordinating editor of the Digital Renaissance Editions. She regularly publishes on textual theory, digital humanities, pedagogy, and scholarly editing. Neville’s book, Early Modern Herbals and the Book Trade: English Stationers and the Commodification of Botany (Cambridge, 2022), demonstrates the ways that printers and booksellers of herbals enabled the construction of scientific and medical authority in early modern England. A theatre director and film artist who is a great believer in experiential learning, Neville is the founder and creative director of Ohio State’s Lord Denney’s Players, an academic theatre company that enables students to see how technologies of textual transmission have shaped the reception of Shakespeare’s plays.

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