Cite Stage Directions Technical Writer Janelle Jenstad Proofreader Mahayla Galliford Project Director Janelle Jenstad Project Manager Mahayla Galliford Training and Documentation Lead Navarra Houldin Assistant Project Manager Samuel Seaberg Programmer Martin Holmes Programmer Illya Nokhrin Programmer Joey Takeda Junior Programmer Tracey El Hajj Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada

Released with Linked Early Modern Drama Online 1.0

 University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform

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.

Linked Early Modern Drama Online

TEI Customization created by Martin Holmes, Joey Takeda, and Janelle Jenstad; documentation written by members of the LEMDO Team

Encoded in TEI P5 according to the LEMDO Customization and Encoding Guidelines

n/a

 Document Types All documents in LEMDO are either born-digital documents or primary documents. Within those two general categories, LEMDO offers additional ways to categorize a file. Born-digital Born-digital documents are anything other than primary texts Documentation Encoding and editorial guidelines; programming, processing, and rendering instructions; how-to instructions; element descriptions; and records of remediation. Responsibilities Responsibilities Project Manager A person responsible for managing the LEMDO project or a project within the LEMDO suite of anthologies. Project Director MARC Code List for Relators definition: A person or organization with primary responsibility for all essential aspects of a project, has overall responsibility for managing projects, or provides overall direction to a project manager. LEMDO uses the term project director for the person who directs the LEMDO project. For anthology leads, use pbd. Proofreader MARC Code List for Relators definition: A person who corrects printed matter. LEMDO uses the term proofreader for the person who performs minor corrections to a finalized document, which usually include typographical or rendering fixes. For copy-editing, use resp:edt_cpy. Programmer MARC Code List for Relators definition: A person, family, or organization responsible for creating a computer program. LEMDO usage aligns with that of MARC. Technical Writer MARC Code List for Relators definition: Writer of Technical Material: A person responsible for writing or compiling documentation of the project’s editorial, encoding, and programming practices. LEMDO usage aligns with that of MARC. Automatically generated this file by extracting its content from lemdo.lite.odd. Tracey El Hajj 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.

 Mahayla Galliford Mahayla Galliford

Project Manager, 2025-present; Assistant Project Manager, 2024-2025; Research Assistant, 2021-present. Mahayla Galliford (she/her) graduated from the University of Victoria with a BA (honours with distinction) in 2024, and an MA English in 2026. Mahayla’s undergraduate research explored early modern stage directions and civic water pageantry. Her SSHRC-funded MA thesis project focuses on transcribing, editing, and encoding early modern girls’ manuscripts, specifically Lady Rachel Fane’s May Masque in collaboration with LEMDO.

 Martin Holmes Martin Holmes

Martin Holmes has worked as a developer in the UVic’s 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 Navarra Houldin

Training and Documentation Lead 2025–present. LEMDO project manager 2022–2025. Textual remediator 2021–present. Navarra Houldin (they/them) completed their BA with a major in history and minor in Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. Their primary research was on gender and sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America. They are continuing their education through an MA program in Gender and Social Justice Studies at the University of Alberta where they will specialize in Digital Humanities.

 Janelle Jenstad 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 Beatrice 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.

 Illya Nokhrin

Illya has a BA in English and Sociocultural Anthropology and an MA in English. Prior to joining the HCMC, he was a PhD candidate in English and Book History at the University of Toronto and worked on Records of Early English Drama and on the Modernist Archives Publishing Project. His work at the HCMC focuses on creating web-based applications for research projects led by members of the faculty of Humanities at the University of Victoria. This involves creating schemas for new and existing datasets, writing XSLT and build files to transform datasets into structured TEI and HTML formats, implementing staticSearch, and ensuring that new projects are Endings Principles compliant.

Samuel Seaberg Samuel Seaberg

Samuel Seaberg, a University of Victoria English undergrad, enjoys riding his bike. During the summer of 2025, he began working with LEMDO as a recipient of the Valerie Kuehne Undergraduate Research Award (VKURA). Unfortunately, due to his summer being spent primarily in working to establish an edition of Thomas Heywood’s If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody, Part 2 and consequently working out how to represent multi-text works in a digital space, his bike has suffered severely of sheltered seclusion from the sun. Note: Samuel now works for LEMDO as the Assistant Project Manager, much to his bike’s chagrin.

 Joey Takeda 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.

 Hibbard, G.R. Hamlet. The Oxford Shakespeare. Oxford University Press, 1987. WSB ah389. 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.
Rationale

Most print editions do not number stage directions. Stage directions (SD) normally sit outside the act-scene-line (ASL) numbering system that is conventional in modern print editions. However, LEMDO gives xml:ids and independent numbers to stage directions, which means that editors can cite their own stage directions with great precision. To cite from other published LEMDO editions, follow the guidelines for print editions (at least until we surface the SD numbers in our HTML interface).

Practice: Cite from Print Editions

If a stage direction is embedded in a line (within the dialogue) or typeset on a line that also contains dialogue, we can use the ASL (or scene-lines) to point to the stage direction. If the stage direction is before or after a speech, it is standard practice to identify stage directions by the nearest line. Use your judgement to decide whether the line before or after the stage direction is the most appropriate hook for the stage direction. A good general practice is to think about blocks of action; keep the stage direction with the line that belongs to the same block of action. The first stage direction in a scene will necessarily be cited by the subsequent line, just as the last stage direction in a scene will necessarily be cited by the preceding line. In a play with acts and scenes, the first stage direction might thus be cited 1.1.1SD.

If the edition has an established system for numbering stage directions, cite by the edition’s system. For example, the New Oxford Shakespeare Complete Works (NOS CW) adds .1 to the preceding ASL or scene-line. The stage direction after 1.1.112 is thus 1.1.112.1.

To cite an editor’s note on a stage direction, add .n to the number of the stage direction. A note on 1.1.1SD would be cited 1.1.1SD.n. A note on 1.1.112.1 would be cited 1.1.112.1.n

Examples

Citing a stage direction from G.R. Hibbard’s edition of Hamlet:

Hibbard unnecessarily expands Exeunt (Q2, F) to Exit Hamlet hurriedly, pursued by the rest 4.2.28SD.

Practice: Cite from Your Own Edition

To cite from a semi-diplomatic text in your own edition, our current protocol gives you two options: Add anchors to the semi-diplomatic file and point to the anchors. See <ref target="learn_anchorsPointers.xml">Create Anchors</ref> to learn how to add anchors, and <ref target="learn_linkPtr.xml">Encode Pointer Links</ref> to learn how to point to those anchors. Point to the xml:id of the closest speech. All speeches in semi-diplomatic transcriptions have canonical speech numbers, so we can use the localCit protocol described here: <ref target="learn_linkPtr.xml#learn_linkPtr_specialASSp">Special Case: Linking to Canonical References</ref>. We will soon have a third way for you to point to places in your semi-diplomatic text. We will be giving xml:ids to witness line numbers (WLNs) in the xml; currently (as of July 2026), WLNs have n values from which HTML ids are generated in the processing. We will update this document when xml:ids are in place and can be pointed to using the localCit protocol.

To cite from your modern text, take advantage of the fact that stage directions have their own xml:id in the modern text. (See <ref target="learn_numberStageDirections.xml">Number Stage Directions</ref> for an explanation of how stage directions are numbered.) Follow the protocol for using a ptr element with a type value of localCit to point to the xml:id of the stage direction. See <ref target="learn_linkPtr.xml#learn_linkPtr_specialASSp">Special Case: Linking to Canonical References</ref>. Example:

it is clear that Labervele cannot hear Lemot and Florila’s discussion, and speaks in asides overheard only by the audience until , when he addresses Lemot directly.