LEMDO’s TEI Customization

Principles

The TEI standard contains far more elements, attributes, and suggested values than any one project needs. LEMDO has constrained the tagset by choosing only the elements and attributes that we need for encoding the types of texts within the LEMDO project and answering the research questions that LEMDO aims to enable. We are fully compliant with TEI in that we have not introduced any boutique elements.
All of our current elements are in the TEI namespace. If we need other elements, we will draw from other standards. For example, if we need to encode music in our editions, we will draw elements from the Music Encoding Initiative; MEI elements belong to the MEI namespace. Should our project needs not be met by the TEI or a cognate XML standard with a declarable namespace, we will work with the TEI to introduce new elements to the entire community rather than deviate from community practice.

Practice

We draw our tagset from the following chapters (also known as modules) of the TEI Guidelines:
Default Text Structure (the Textstructure Module).
Performance Texts (because we focus on early modern drama).
The TEI Header (because metadata is how we give credit where credit is due).
Verse (because drama contains verse).
Representation of Primary Sources (because we have semi-diplomatic transcriptions of playbooks).
In addition, we use the Elements Available in All TEI Documents, mechanisms for encoding Characters, Glyphs, and Writing Modes (digraphs and ligatures), Manuscript Description (for those plays that survive in manuscript), and other sections as needed.
The elements, attributes, and allowed values for LEMDO are captured in the LEMDO RelaxiNG schema (lemdo.rng). If you are able to read the XML schema, you are welcome to download it and have a look. The link will always point to the most recent version of our schema.
We have further constrained our schema by limiting the use of some elements to particular types of documents. For example, the <pb> element that captures page beginnings is allowed only in texts that have been given the semi-diplomatic editorial treatment (i.e., files that have an @target value of "cat:letSemiDiplomatic" on a <catDesc> element).

Feature Requests

If you would like to suggest that we introduce a TEI element or attribute that is currently not in the LEMDO schema, you may send a feature request to lemdo@uvic.ca. We will not add non-TEI elements or attributes. We can add project-specific values for some attributes, provided they will be useful to a sufficient number of editions to justify writing the necessary processing.

Further Reading

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.

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.

Metadata