Quickstart for HCMC RAs

Introduction

This document presupposes that you are working on a Linux operating system (e.g., Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora). All workstations in HCMC use Ubuntu, an open-source Linux distribution.
This document contains instructions for getting set up to work in the Subversion repository. It is meant primarily for new LEMDO team members at UVic, but may also be useful to RAs and editors elsewhere.

Prior Reading

The document also presupposes that you have read:

Scenarios: Accessing the Repository

First Checkout

If you have never checked out the LEMDO repository to the computer you are working on, follow these steps:
Open Terminal
Type mkdir lemdo and press Enter
Type cd lemdo and press Enter
Type svn checkout https://hcmc.uvic.ca/svn/lemdo . (make sure to include the space and the period after lemdo and the s in https) and press Enter
In Terminal, you should see many files scrolling by, and after a while, the message checked out revision followed by the revision number. This means you have now downloaded, or checked out, the LEMDO repository to your computer. Go to Scenarios: Working in Oxygen XML Editor for instructions on how to begin working in Oxygen.

Unsure of checkout?

If you are unsure whether or not you have checked out the repository on the computer you are working on (and it is common to be unsure if you are in HCMC working on various machines), follow these steps:
Open Terminal
Type cd lemdo into Terminal and press Enter. Terminal should now do one of two things:
Show that you are now in the lemdo directory. If Terminal shows that you are in the lemdo directory, go to How to SVN update and follow the steps there.
Tell you that there is No such file or directory . If Terminal tells you there is no such file or directory, you need to check out the repository to your computer. Go to First Checkout and follow the steps.

Already Checked Out

If you have already checked out the repository on the computer you are working on:
Open Terminal
Type cd lemdo into Terminal and press Enter. Terminal should now show that you are in the lemdo directory. If it says No such file or directory (which may be the case if HCMC has wiped the computers, which they do from time to time), go to First Checkout and follow the steps. Once you are in the lemdo directory, follow these steps:
Type svn up and press Enter
You should see one of two messages:
Updated to revision followed by the number of the revision (this message will appear if files in the repository have been modified since you last did an svn update)
At revision followed by the number of the revision (this message will appear if no files have been modified since you last did an svn update)
If you see either of these messages, you have successfully updated your copy of the LEMDO repository. Go to Scenarios: Working in Oxygen XML Editor for instructions on how to begin working in Oxygen.

Scenarios: Working in Oxygen XML Editor

How to save your file in Oxygen:
There are three ways to save a file in Oxygen:
In the top left corner of your Oxygen window, there is an icon that looks like a blue floppy disk. This is the save button. Click it to save your work.
Select File → Save.
Use the CTRL + S keyboard shortcut.
How to validate your file in Oxygen:
Validating your file against the LEMDO schema determines whether your file has any errors that need to be corrected before you commit the file to the repository. If Oxygen shows that your file has errors, you must fix them before committing the file. There are three ways to validate your file:
In the Oxygen toolbar, there is an icon that looks like a piece of paper with a red check mark on it. This the validate button. Click it to validate your file.
Select Document → Validate → Validate
Use the CTRL + Shift + V keyboard shortcut.
TIP: Always save and validate the file you are working on before closing it in Oxygen.
If you have never opened the LEMDO project in Oxygen on this computer before:
Open Oxygen
Click Project, then Open Project
In the window that pops up, navigate the lemdo folder and open it (if it is not already open)
Click lemdo-all.xpr and then click Open to open the project file
On the left of your Oxygen window, you should now see the lemdo folder. You can click to open it and view the sub-folders within it.
If you would like to enable line wrap so lines of text do not stretch outside of the Oxygen window, follow these instructions:
Click Options, then Preferences
In the window that pops up, click Appearance
Click Text
Check the box next to Line wrap
Click OK
If you have opened the LEMDO project in Oxygen on this computer before:
Make sure the LEMDO project file (lemdo-all.xpr) is open in Oxygen. If you open Oxygen and the lemdo folder and sub-folders are visible on the left side of the Oxygen window, then lemdo-all.xpr is already open. You can begin working.

How to SVN update

Open Terminal
Type svn up and press Enter

How to SVN commit

Open Terminal
Type svn status and press Enter
Using the cd command in Terminal, navigate to the directory that contains the file you were working on
Once you are in the correct directory, type svn commit –m followed by a quotation mark, then type a short message describing the work you did in the file (e.g., “remediated quotations”, “tagged titles”), followed by a period and a closing quotation mark.
Press Enter
Example of an SVN commit message:
svn commit –m "remediated quotations."

Ending Your Work Session

The first step to ending your work session is saving the file you are working on. See How to save your file in Oxygen: for instructions on how to save files.
The second step is to validate the file. See How to validate your file in Oxygen: for instructions on how to validate files.
If you have been working on more than one file, do the following:
Open Terminal
Type svn status and press Enter
This command will show you which files you have modified. It is handy for cases where you have worked on several files and cannot remember exactly which files you modified.
Once all the files you have worked on have been saved and validated successfully, you can close Oxygen.
The next step is to commit the files:
Open Terminal
Type svn status and press Enter
You should now see the file path indicating the directory that your file is in (and the directories containing that directory). To commit the file, you will need to move into the directory that contains the file you are trying to commit.
It is helpful to think of directories like Russian nesting dolls. There is the outermost doll (the lemdo directory) that contains all the others. Within that doll are smaller dolls that contain even smaller dolls. Our hierarchy of directories works much the same, although we often have several directories that are at the same level in the hierarchy (which would be like having two nesting dolls that are the same size, each of which contains smaller dolls). File paths visualize this nesting by having the outermost directory on the far left. Each step down in the hierarchy is shown by a / and the name of the directory.
For example, if we have the file path lemdo/data/texts then the directory called “texts” is at the third level of the hierarchy. Using Terminal, you can move into and out of directories by using the cd command. If you are in the lemdo directory and you enter cd data into Terminal, Terminal will show that you are now in the data directory. If you enter cd ../ into Terminal, it will show that you have moved back into the lemdo directory. Entering cd ../ into Terminal moves you out of the current directory and into the directory one level back in the hierarchy.
Using the cd command in Terminal, navigate to the directory that contains the file you were working on
Once you are in the correct directory, type svn commit –m followed by a quotation mark, then type a short message describing the work you did in the file (e.g., “remediated quotations”, “tagged titles”), followed by a period and a closing quotation mark.
Press Enter
Example of an SVN commit message:
svn commit –m "remediated quotations."
Terminal should say Committed revision followed by the number of the revision. This means that you have successfully committed your file. Above that message you can see the files that were committed, so you can confirm that the correct file was committed.
Once you commit all the files you worked on, you can close Terminal and log off or shut down the computer. At the start of your next work session, go to Scenarios: Accessing the Repository to get started again.

Ask Questions

Remember when you are reading through documentation that you need to ask questions and draw attention to aspects you don’t understand. You are not supposed to know and understand everything in this documentation. Ask questions about TEI, XML, and encoding, and also ask questions about Shakespeare, early modern bookmaking, and early modern texts generally. When you ask questions, you are clarifying for yourself and helping to make the documentation clearer for future RAs.

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.

Kim Shortreed

Kim is a PhD Candidate in Media Studies and Digital Humanities, through UVicʼs English Department. Kim has worked for years in TEI and XML, mostly through the Colonial Despatches website, and in a number of roles, including technical editor, research and markup, writing and editing, documentation, and project management. Recently, Kim worked with a team of Indigenous students to find ways to decolonize the Despatches projectʼs content and encoding practices. Part of Kimʼs dissertation project, Contracolonial Practices in Salish Sea Namescapes, is to prototype a haptic map, a motion-activated topography installation that plays audio clips of spoken toponyms, in SENĆOŦEN and English, of the W̱SÁNEĆ Territory/Saanich Peninsula, respectively.

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

directory
“Another word for folder.”
file path
“A list of nested directory names separated by slashes. It is a way of showing directories nested within other directories (e.g., lemdo/data/texts).”
Oxygen
“The application that we use to encode and edit LEMDO’s XML files.”
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.”
revision number
“A number that indicates the most recent version of the repository. The revision number goes up by 1 with every SVN commit.”
svn checkout
“A Terminal command used to download a copy of the entire LEMDO repository to your local computer.”
svn update
“A Terminal command used to sync your local copy (the one on your workstation’s computer) of any LEMDO files on the LEMDO repo.”
Terminal or command line
“The program on your computer that allows you to navigate through your directories and make changes to the files therein.”
validate
“The process you run in Oxygen to check files for errors.”

Metadata

Authority title Quickstart for HCMC RAs
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.