This documentation assumes that you know how to work in Terminal, have checked out
the LEMDO repository to your computer, and know how to open the LEMDO project file
(lemdo-all.xpr:
It is very important that the lemdo-all.xpr file is open when you work. This file contains the schema that your files will be validated against.
Put simply, the schema is the rule-set that catches your mistakes and makes sure you
do not commit broken files to the repository. See LEMDO Oxygen Project.
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.
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+Alt+V keyboard shortcut.
You must always save and validate the file you are working on before committing to
the centralized repository.
If you would like to enable line wrap so lines of text do not stretch outside of the
Oxygen window, you can either use the Ctrl+Shift+Y keyboard shortcut or follow these
instructions:
Go to Options at the top of your Oxygen window, then Preferences.
Oxygen is highly configurable; you can easily change the layout to suit your working
methods and preferences. It also means it is very complicated and full of features
and panels whose purpose is not obvious.
If you have a big screen, you can use the default Oxygen layout, which looks like
this:
The Project panel shows all of the files in lemdo-all.xpr. If you accidentally close this panel
and want it back, navigate to Project in the toolbar and click Show Project View. You can pin the Project panel by clicking the small pin icon on Windows and Linux computers or the yellow
minimize button on Mac computers.
Beside the Project panel is the Outline panel, which shows the file that you are currently editing as a tree, expanding downwards
and to the right, like a traditional file manager.
In the middle is the editing area. This screenshot shows one file open (learn_oxygen.xml, the file you are currently reading), but you can have multiple files open at the
same time.
On the right are the Attributes and Elements panels. Like the Outline panel, these are dynamic; they will change as you move your cursor from one place
to another in the document. The Attributes panel shows you the list of attributes which are available for the element where
your cursor is currently located. Similarly, the Elements panel shows you the list of elements which are allowed in the current cursor position.
Generally, new encoders to not need either of these two panels to be open.
If you are working on a smaller screen, the default layout for Oxygen can often be
too much—you end up with not enough space to actually work on your files. Feel free
to close the panels you do not need to see at the moment:
Note that you can re-open panels by navigating to Window in the toolbar and clicking Show View.
Also note that even without the Attributes and Elements panels, you can still see information about elements and attributes while you are
editing. If you type an open bracket in your document, Oxygen recognizes that you
have started to type an element. It will show you a list of all the elements available
at that position:
Similarly, if you put your cursor inside an opening tag, after the end of the element
name, and type a space, Oxygen will give you information about all the attributes
available:
You can alter the appearance of Oxygen by navigating to Options in the toolbar and clicking on Preferences. From here, navigate to Appearance to change Oxygenʼs theme:
Those spending a lot of time editing files in Oxygen may prefer the Graphite theme to reduce eye strain:
Navigate to Document in the toolbar and click Edit. You will see three options:
Toggle Line Wrap (Ctrl+Shift+Y).
Toggle Comment (Ctrl+Shift+Comma).
Insert new line after (Ctrl+Alt+Enter).
Toggle Line Wrap takes all of the text that runs off the side of your screen and formats it so it
is contained within your editing window. For example, see the General Introduction of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay:
If you click Toggle Line Wrap (or Ctrl+Shift+Y), the texts formats itself so you can read it without scrolling
to the right:
Toggle Line Wrap is especially helpful when working on texts with a lot of prose.
Toggle Comment takes highlighted text and turns it into an XML comment. XML comments look like this:
<p><!-- This is a comment. --></p>
Note that XML comments are green and begin with an angle bracket, exclamation mark,
two hyphens, and a space. Everything written inside of an XML comment is ignored by
the processor. XML comments are how we as encoders and editors can leave notes in
the file for ourselves or other editors.
To add an XML comment, type an angle bracket and an exclamation mark. Oxygen will
create the rest of the comment for you automatically. You can also comment out entire
paragraphs of text by highlighting the text and clicking Toggle Comma (or Ctrl+Shift+Comma/Cmd+Shift+M on Mac):
Insert new line after (or Ctrl+Alt+Enter) does as its name suggests: it adds a new line.
Oxygen comes with a built-in character map, giving you full access to most of the
symbols and characters in the Unicode database. You can access the character map by
navigating to Edit in the toolbar and clicking Insert from Character Map:
Once you have opened the character map, you can search for the special character you
want and press Insert:
The character map is a simple way to insert vowel digraphs (i.e, æ, œ), nasal tildes
over vowels (i.e., ã, ẽ, ĩ, õ, ũ), macrons over vowels (i.e., ā, ē, ī, ō, ū), and
more. See Special Characters: Encode Characters from the Character Map for more information.
One of the most helpful features of Oxygen is Find All. Navigate to Find in the toolbar and click Find Replace (or Ctrl+F) to see the find/replace box:
Use the find/replace box to find words or pieces of encoding in your document. Clicking
Find All in the find/replace box will generate a list of hits in a window at the bottom of
your screen:
Clicking on a hit will take you to the place in the document where it appears. Be
careful using the Replace All button. Only use it when you are positive that it will not create any errors in your
file.
Search through multiple files at once by right clicking on the folder you want to
search in the Project panel and clicking Find/Replace in Files:
You will see a find/replace box for cross-file searching:
This find/replace box allows you to search entire folders. It also generates list
of hits, but groups them by file:
Double-click on a hit to open the file and jump to the location of that hit in the
file.
Now that you have an idea of how to use Oxygen, it is time to try some encoding. See
Introduction to Markup, XML, and TEI if you need a refresher on elements, attributes, and values.
Open Oxygen and follow these steps:
Click File in the toolbar and click New
Choose XML Document and click Create
Now you should have an empty XML document. The first thing you will need to do is
create a root element, the element that all the content of your file will be nested within. At LEMDO, we
often use
<TEI>
as the root element for our files. In your empty document, type
<TEI>
. Notice that once you type the opening tag, Oxygen will automatically supply the
closing tag:
<TEI/>
Now nest a
<name>
element in the
<TEI>
element:
<TEI> <name/> </TEI>
Notice that when you delete the closing
<name>
element, the squiggly red line tells you that there is an error in your encoding.
Oxygen also shows you an error message: element type
<name>
must be terminated by the matching end-tag </name>
.
Once you add back the closing </name> element, type your full name within the
<name>
element:
<TEI> <name>Kathryn Reese LeBere</name> </TEI>
You can also tag each part of your name seperately. If you highlight your first name
and press Ctrl+E, a textbox will appear. Type the
<firstName>
element in the text field and click Ok or press Enter and Oxygen will wrap your name in the
<firstName>
element. You can do the same with the other parts of your name and the relevant elements:
The Ctrl+E keyboard shortcut will save you a lot of time when encoding.
Now let’s try adding attributes and values. Write a sentence and tag the parts of
the sentence with different elements of your choosing:
<TEI>The <adjective>new</adjective> <noun>Research Assistant</noun> <verb>encoded</verb> the <noun>text</noun>.</TEI>
Now try specifying an element with an attribute and value. Remember that attributes
are like categories, and values specify the categories:
<TEI>The <adjective>new</adjective> <noun type="person">Research Assistant</noun> <verb>encoded</verb> the <noun type="thing">text</noun>.</TEI>
Using Oxygen takes practice. The more you encode, the faster and more precise you
will become.
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
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.”
validate
“The process you run in Oxygen to check files for errors.”
Metadata
Authority title
Work in Oxygen
Type of text
Documentation
Short title
Publisher
University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform
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.
![Screenshot of a less-than angle bracket with a scrollable dropdown menu that reads: ab; anchor; app; bibl; biblFull; biblStruct; byline. ab is selected. A pop-up window beside it reads: (anonymous block) contains any arbitrary component-level unit of text, acting as an anonymous container for phrase or inter level elements analogous to, but without the semantic baggage of, a paragraph. [16.3. Blocks, Segments, and Anchors]](images/lemdo_oxygen_element.jpg)
