HCMC Journal

LEMDO 2026-04-27 to 2026-05-01

27 April 2026 to 01 May 2026: Martin Holmes
Minutes: 335

On Monday, worked on some broken links from the diagnostics, and clarified some instructions on the link-checking pages. Then raised and completed two issues, one being the elimination of note[@type='pedagogical'], and the other being making @status mandatory on <revisionDesc>. There was a fair amount of fallout and cleanup to do for these.

On Tuesday, fixed a multiple-gloss case from the diagnostics.

On Wednesday, worked on a new diagnostic to catch all cases of links to placeholder entity entries. There are quite a few of those lurking. Then wrote a script to back up the facsimile files to Squash, and ran that script, so we now have a proper backup of the facsimiles.

On Thursday, debugged a build error caused by a missing anchor; we must find a better way to catch these errors.

On Friday, added a new diagnostic to catch abuses of the <supplied> tag. Then met with IN and JJ to talk about literary divisions, and the identifying, numbering, and referencing thereof. The plan we came up with looks like this:

• For texts such as the Mayoral Shows, there are narrative sections which should probably be encoded as <ab type="narrative">. These could have @xml:ids which signify numbered blocks: ...blk5.
• When these blocks are interleaved with speeches, the speeches could also be identified as part of the same system: <sp xml:id="...blk6">. Findable citation descriptors could then be generated from these ids as e.g. Block 5, Block 6, with an optional addendum: Block 5 (narrative), Block 6 (speech).
• There are things which are naturally sequenced, and whose location in the text can easily be determined from their identifier and any referencing descriptor generated from it; for example, ..._a2_s3 = Act 2 Scene 3 and is findable sequentially.
• There are other things which are numberable in sequence, but their sequence interleaves with the overall sequence such that simply generating reference text based on their identifier is inadequate; for example, ...dumbshow_4 happens to come between Act 3 and Act 4, but that is not deducible from its identifier. In those cases, we need a more sophisticated mechanism for generating referencing text, which not only generates Dumbshow 4, but also looks around for the nearest findable unit and appends it: Dumbshow 4 (before Act 4).
• The existence of such a mechanism solves the problem of what to do with stage directions; they are either inside or beside locatable units, so we can simply look up for a container, or back/forward for a sibling which is locatable.

At the end of the day, released a new edition of the LEMDO anthology.