Quickstart for Encoders

Introduction

This page is for new encoders. You may be an Editor who is encoding a play for the first time. You may be a Research Assistant or Editorial Assistant who is helping an Editor encode a play. This page is designed to give you an overview of what it means to be an encoder, a list of things you need to do to start encoding, 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.
Note: If you are a Research Assistant or Editorial Assistant, you will want to direct questions about the play to the Editor of the play, who may in turn consult the Anthology Lead. LEMDO defers to anthology leads on textual or editorial matters.

The Work of Encoding

You will be adding special computer-readable tags to texts in order to say things about the texts. This work is called encoding, tagging, or marking up a text. (See Terminology.) LEMDO uses tags devised by the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), a widely used standard for marking up historical and literary texts. (See What is TEI?.) When you have finished reading this page, you will want to read LEMDO’s Introduction to Markup, XML, and TEI in order to learn more about TEI and LEMDO’s tagset.
All of the files you will need to encode your play are in a repository stored on a server at the University of Victoria. Anyone can look at the repository, but you need special permission to create and change files in the repository. We will give you write-permission on the portfolio that contains the files for the play you are encoding. (RAs: If you are a Research Assistant or Editorial Assistant anywhere other than at UVic, the Editor of your play will need to contact us to confirm your role. Ask your Editor to contact us so that we can approve your request for a UVic affiliate identity (a V00- number) and grant you portfolio-level permissions. To request a UVic affiliate identity, see Get a NetLink ID.)
Your portfolio, along with all of LEMDO’s project files and code, is stored in a Subversion (SVN) repository. This repository keeps a copy of every version of every file so that, if needed, we can retrieve a previous version of a file, directory (i.e., folder), portfolio, or even the entire project. The SVN repository is like the cloud. See Work in Subversion.
Initially, you will probably work entirely in the main directory in your portfolio. The main directory is where the semi-diplomatic and modern texts of the play are stored. You will probably start by checking, correcting, and encoding an semi-diplomatic early version of the play: a quarto, octavo, or folio text of a play from the early modern period. (RAs: If you do not know what these terms mean, ask the Editor of your play.)

Workflow

We recommend that you work through these tasks in the order listed:
Read this page.
If you are an RA who is not a member of the LEMDO Team (i.e., not at UVic), ask your Editor to introduce you to us via email. If you are an Editor, 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.
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, following the instructions for your operating system:
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.

Further Reading

In addition to the pages linked from this QuickStart, you will need to read one or more of the following pages:
If you are encoding a semi-diplomatic transcription of a printed text, see Semi-Diplomatic Transcriptions: Print chapter.
If you are encoding a semi-diplomatic transcription of a manuscript, see Semi-Diplomatic Transcriptions: Manuscript chapter.
If you are encoding a modern text, see the Modern Texts chapter.
If you are encoding annotations, see the Annotations chapter.
If you are encoding critical paratexts, see the Critical Paratexts chapter.
If you are encoding collations, see the Collation chapter.
You will also need to be aware of the general encoding guidelines that pertain to various types of texts, including but not limited to:
You will find all documentation that has been written specifically for encoders by going to the Search page and selecting “Documentation” from the “Document Types” menu and “Encoder” from the “LEMDO Target Audience” menu.

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.

Kate LeBere

Project Manager, 2020–2021. Assistant Project Manager, 2019–2020. Textual Remediator and Encoder, 2019–2021. Kate LeBere completed her BA (Hons.) in History and English at the University of Victoria in 2020. During her degree she published papers in The Corvette (2018), The Albatross (2019), and PLVS VLTRA (2020) and presented at the English Undergraduate Conference (2019), Qualicum History Conference (2020), and the Digital Humanities Summer Institute’s Project Management in the Humanities Conference (2021). While her primary research focus was sixteenth and seventeenth century England, she completed her honours thesis on Soviet ballet during the Russian Cultural Revolution. She is currently a student at the University of British Columbia’s iSchool, working on her masters in library and information science.

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.

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.

Glossary

Portfolio
“A directory (i.e., folder) in the LEMDO repository containing all the files for an edition. The name of each portfolio is the abbreviation for the edition, such as AYL for As You Like It.”
repository or repo
“The repository contains all the files in the LEMDO project. The LEMDO repository is saved to a server in the basement of the Clearihue Building at UVic. All LEMDO files are under version control through Subversion, a repository maintenance tool that keeps a complete history of every change ever made to every LEMDO file.”
Subversion
“An open-source version control system that allows us to keep, track, and restore every version of every file in the repository.”
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 Encoders
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.