Para1Our repository will be divided into shared resources (databases of names, dates, places, DEEP ids for playbooks, and BEEED ids for editions), an XML database of editions (where edition components can be incrementally built), and anthologies (where DRE, ISE, QME, and any new projects will include editions). Work spaces can be as small as a single text folder (for an individual editor), as capacious as the entire repository (for programmers), or customized (for anthology leads, markup editors, or RA-Encoders). Our rule sets will be enforced by diagnostics, validation reports, schema, and pop-ups with tips, warnings, and links to the guidelines. The publishing mechanism by which we will produce static HTML websites will involve our own Jenkins build server, which is the leading open source automation server.

Para2We will follow the Endings Principles for Digital Longevity, which conform to minimalist computing standards. All of our data will be created using open standards; it will not require boutique software to read or process. Our data will be versioned to protect and preserve our work.The products of that data will be output only in HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, the founding languages of the web. We will build link-making into the processing so that the resulting websites are self-contained, archivable, and fully functional without servers or even internet access.

Para3All of our files will be encoded in the XML dialect created by the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). This open, community-based standard, now in its fifth release (TEI P5), always supports earlier releases, has been in use for over 30 years, and is used by over 1000 projects in and beyond academia. We will consult the TEI community and put in feature requests to the TEI Technical Council if we need new tags. Thus we will contribute to the advancement of the standard, particularly the Performance Chapter. An early part of our work has involved remediating published and in-progress DRE, ISE, and QME editions, which were encoded in a boutique language. We have been using programmatic transformations followed by careful work by RA-Encoders to turn them into LEMDO TEI; we will refine these transformations and workflows early in Y1. For new editions of printed plays, we will transform EEBO-TCP’s TEI-P4-encoded texts for our editors to take as a starting point. LEMDO’s Encoding Guidelines will adapt the best features of the praxis documentation of the Map of Early Modern London, the Women Writers’ Project guidelines,the forthcoming Winnifred Eaton Archive documentation, and the TEI Guidelines; they aim to set new standards for linking, searchability, embedded examples, usability, and accessibility.

Para4Our digital editions will provide all the potential components of a critical edition and thereby serve multiple constituencies (scholars, theatre practitioners,and students). We will work with libraries to digitize manuscripts and early playbooks; the resulting facsimiles will be embedded within old-spelling transcriptions and readable within a facsimile viewer interface designed by the interface team and built by the programmers. Anthology leads will commission experienced editors (and train RAs and new editors) to check transcriptions and produce modernized texts, principled collations (keyed to the ids that BEEED will create), annotations(textual and critical), and critical paratexts. The DRE leads and the Encoding Working Group will preparea new set of Editorial Guidelines to govern this work.

Para5We will adopt PAR (performance-as-research) methodologies to learn about the play by staging it. Using LEMDO’s capacity for multiple annotation tracks, editions will provide rich annotations about performance discoveries. We will embed video into the editions, and (under Moncrief’s leadership) seek out research-informed productions and experiments by companies like the American Shakespeare Center and Bard on the Beach.

Para6 To make our editions maximally teachable and accessible to students, we will offer thorough glosses on words and make links to and from the student-friendly (and often student-edited) entries in EMEE.Using the asynchronous collaboration model and using the affordances of stand-off markup, we will republish pedagogical annotations (e.g., the American Shakespeare Center Study Guides) and commission new ones from expert teachers to help teachers work with LEMDO resources inthe classroom. Our products will be combinable, thus facilitating in Y3 a custom anthology builder that will allow users to put together their own combinations of primary and critical materials from LEMDO’s anthology of the whole. LEMDO’s extensive editorial and encoding guidelines will make it possible for graduate students to create their own editions. Building on the successful MoEML model of pedagogical partnerships,LEMDO will invite faculty members elsewhere to make the encoding and editorial tools available to their advisees. The first born-LEMDO edition, Rhodon and Iris, is currently in preparation under Jenstad’s supervision as an MA thesis, modelling how LEMDO will support student users and invite student engagement at all levels (via pedagogical partnerships and via the 71 RA positions on this grant).

Para7The richness of LEMDO editions will invite multiple user groups and thus will demand different interfaces todeliver the right materials to the user. Interface and UX experts at MRU will assess, design, test (calling upon the student RAs across the LEMDO Partners), and implement (with the programmers) performance edition interfaces, classroom interfaces, and textual-critical interfaces. Thus LEMDO willhost polyvocal editions that serve scholars, theatre practitioners, and students at the same time.

Para8We will use the emerging technologies of the semantic web to turn our names, dates, playbook copies, bibliographical entries, and characters into entities that can be linked in meaningful ways among our projects using unique ids and beyond LEMDO using linked data protocols. We will surface these often-latent project taxonomies and ontologies, publish them on LEMDO, and deposit our entities and semantic triples (subject-predicate-object expressions, such as “falstaff isACharacterIn merryWives”) into the LINCS triple-store (being built at UVic with CFI funds). Doing so will make LEMDO data queryable in a much larger cultural knowledge graph.