Thesis Projects

Para1LEMDO welcomes editorial thesis projects as a way of supporting the next generation of editors. We recommend that new editors follow the Digital Renaissance Editions Editorial Guidelines. LEMDO’s documentation, designed to teach new editors how to encode, presupposes basic knowledge of the DRE Editorial Guidelines.

Process to Propose a Thesis Project with LEMDO

Para2The process for proposing a LEMDO editorial thesis project is as follows:
Supervisor and student choose a play to edit.
Supervisor contacts LEMDO Director.
LEMDO Director contacts relevant Anthology Lead(s) to see if text is unassigned. In the absence of an author-centric, playhouse-centric, or company-centric anthology, the default anthology is Digital Renaissance Editions.
LEMDO Director confirms assignment, with cc to Anthology Lead(s). At this point, the Anthology Lead normallydrops out of the discussion until after the thesis is completed.
LEMDO Director supplies supervisor with links to the appropriate LEMDO documentation.
LEMDO Director helps student (and possibly supervisor) get set up to work in the LEMDO repository.
Student works on the edition, with intellectual support from supervisor. LEMDO cannot perform a supervisory function but will play a technical advisory function to the supervisor and/or student. While the editor is a student, LEMDO will be guided in all matters by the supervisor. The nature of LEMDO’s communication with the student and supervisor must be determined by the supervisor. Here are two possibilities:
LEMDO offers technical support directly to the student, copying the supervisor on emails.
LEMDO offers technical support to the supervisor, who in turn passes advice to the student.
Whether or not the student reaches out to the anthology lead before the completion of their degree is at the supervisor’s discretion.
Once the degree is complete, LEMDO can work directly with the former student as they prepare an edition proposal for one of the anthologies.
Para3If the supervisor or student makes contact with an anthology lead first, the anthology lead will confirm with LEMDO that LEMDO may go ahead and set up a portfolio for the play in question.

Suggested Project Plan (PhD)

Para4For a doctoral project, LEMDO suggests that the student prepare a full LEMDO edition, which includes the following components. The asterisked components are optional in a LEMDO edition:
Old-spelling transcription of one copy of one early publication. The starting point for printed plays can be the EEBO-TCP transcription, which LEMDO can convert to LEMDO TEI and save to your portfolio as a starting point for you to correct. You will want to find a digital surrogate of one copy and bring the EEBO-TCP transcription into line with that copy. If there are multiple early publications (Q1, Q2, etc), the student and supervisor should decide together which one to transcribe, keeping in mind that this transcription will likely serve as the starting point for the modern text.
* Collation of press variants (optional).
Collation of publication and editorial history.
Modernized text.
Character list.
* Additional modernized texts and character lists, based on alternate copy-texts, at the discretion of the student and supervisor (optional).
Annotations. LEMDO supports the following types of annotations, from which the student and supervisor will choose the ones most appropriate to the editorial approach:
gloss
commentary
textual
performance (good for performance-as-research methodologies and for capturing production histories)
lexical (good for explaining usage and citing OED and LEME)
pedagogical (probably not suitable for a PhD project)
Notes on character list.
Critical Paratexts, such as:
General introduction (authorship, date)
Critical introduction (a survey of criticism)
Textual introduction
* Performance introduction, which might discuss stage history and/or performance issues (optional )
Bibliography
Para5Note that LEMDO does not encourage the inclusion of supplementary primary texts. Some remediated LEMDO editions include them simply because the earlier publication had included such texts.

Suggested Project Plan (MA)

Para6You will want to select only some of the components from the list for the PhD project plan. In LEMDO’s experience, the digital documentary edition of one early witness is the logical starting point. Other components can be added as the supervisor advises.

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.

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.

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

Authority title Thesis Projects
Type of text About
Short title Thesis Projects
Publisher University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform
Series Linked Early Modern Drama Online
Source
Written by Janelle Jenstad for publication in the LEMDO 1.0 anthology
Editorial declaration n/a
Edition Released with Linked Early Modern Drama Online 1.0
Sponsor(s)

LEMDO Team

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.
Encoding description Encoded in TEI P5 according to the LEMDO Customization and Encoding Guidelines
Document status TEI_proofing
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.