1. Encoding Early Modern English Drama
Linked Early Modern Drama Online (LEMDO) is a major SSHRC-funded digital editorial project that hosts open-access digital critical editions of 500+ plays by Shakespeare, Jonson, and their contemporaries. The principal deliverable of LEMDO’s first phase of development was a TEI encoding, editing, and anthology-building platform for English printed and manuscript plays, 1500 to 1700. The platform is designed to produce individual editions, editorial projects, collections, a custom anthology builder, and an open-access print series, all from a single-source publishing model. The first anthology was released in 2022 (lemdo.uvic.ca/moms), with four subsequent anthologies released in 2023 (lemdo.uvic.ca/qme), 2024 (lemdo.uvic.ca/douai), and 2026 (lemdo.uvic.ca/emee; lemdo.uvic.ca/dre). Further anthologies, encoding documentation, editorial guidelines, and print editions continue to be published. LEMDO follows the principles of The Endings Project, and uses a Jenkins Continuous Integration Server and the Static Search Appliance to produce static outputs with no server-side dependencies. LEMDO makes regular contributions to the Text Encoding Initiative and liaises with other digital editorial projects around the world. LEMDO is partnered with the Database of Early English Playbooks (DEEP), the Bibliography of Editions of Early English Drama (BEEED), the Map of Early Modern London (MoEML), and several other projects. LEMDO supports the editors and anthology leads of the Early Modern England Encyclopedia (EMEE), Digital Renaissance Editions (DRE), the Douai Shakespeare Manuscript Project (DSMP), Early Modern Dramatic Paratexts (EMDP), the New Internet Shakespeare Editions (NISE), the MoEML Mayoral Shows anthology (MoMS), the Queen’s Men Editions (QME), and other projects coming onstream. Contributors and team members are located around the globe, principally in the US, the UK, France, Spain, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. In Summer 2027, we will be remediating the plays of Ben Jonson and supporting editors who are editing plays for the NISE, DRE, and Beaumont and Fletcher anthologies.
Research area, student roles & skills
Research area: My current research focusses on (1) building robust digital editions/interfaces for the semantic web via TEI, Linked Open Data, UX data, and minimalist computing techniques, and (2) simultaneously building equitable editorial communities and developing new editorial methodologies that support new and early career editors. My general research areas are Shakespeare and his contemporaries; early modern London culture and toponymy; the geohumanities; book history; textual editing (history, theory, and practice); text encoding (XML and TEI-XML); history of markup; remediation of texts; performance and adaptation of early modern drama; performance as research; digital humanities and text analysis as practices; and digital sustainability.
Student roles:
You will undergo 5 days of initial training with Dr. Jenstad and the LEMDO Project Manager on: the scope and objectives of the project, early printed books, our versioned repository, documentation, markup and XML, the Text Encoding Initiative’s TEI-XML, editorial theory and practice, descriptive and enumerative bibliography, entities and linked data, our static build process, and print and digital reference works for the study of early modern drama. You will then remediate these components of one or more digital editions: semi-diplomatic transcriptions of early texts, modern texts, annotations, collations, and critical paratexts. This process will give you broad knowledge of the LEMDO editorial and encoding process. You will then work on encoding your editor’s (or editors’) submission right through to camera-ready copy generated from XML. You will be consulting digital surrogates of the early printed texts, conferring with the editor(s) of the play, liaising between your editor(s) and the LEMDO team at UVic, finding and checking citations, adding scene and speech ids to the primary texts, linking annotations and collations to the primary texts, bringing the edition into line with LEMDO’s editorial and encoding standards, and building capacity for linked-data applications by adding authority names and ids to entities across the project. You will join a team of editors, encoders, remediators, developers, and documentation-writers at UVic. Editions to be remediated in Summer 2027 include Ben Jonson's plays. Training opportunities will be drawn from those plays. Over the course of the internship, we will offer additional training in CSS, regular expressions, and XPath. If you have an aptitude for XML (or prior experience therein), you will have the additional opportunity to undertake advanced encoding work (Schema and Schematron creation), learn to style documents with SCSS and Flex, and to use XSLT to write diagnostics.
Skills required:
Ideally, you are a Humanities student working with an editor who is preparing a digital edition for LEMDO. You must have excellent communication skills and the ability to learn new technical skills. You will work independently and with a team in the context of a digital humanities lab. Experience with copyediting, reading or performing early modern drama, and/or XML is desirable but not required. We will provide on-the-job training in TEI-XML, transcription principles and practices, book history, enumerative and descriptive bibliography, digital research skills, and the use of the LEMDO repository and platform.