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Mission Statement

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Introduction

Shakespeare and his contemporaries traversed London on foot. Early modern plays, pamphlets, histories, and poems assume intimate knowledge of the streets, alleys, and topography of the city. At Map of Early Modern London (MoEML), our ongoing project is to map the spatial imaginary of Shakespeare’s city; we ask how London’s spaces and places were named, traversed, used, repurposed, and contested by various practitioners (Michel de Certeau’s term), writers, and civic officials. MoEML’s maps allow us to plot people, historical documents, literary works, and recent critical research onto topography and the built environment.
At the same time, we experiment with new digital modes of answering GeoHumanities questions. An early contributor to the spatial turn and literary geographic information systems (GIS), MoEML provides a virtual space for exploring the meaning and representation of cultural space in the London of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. We also experiment with new ways of working collaboratively as teams and across institutions and disciplines.

Our Audience and Contributors

MoEML is committed to providing complete, current, and reliable information that is both suitable for scholarly citation and accessible to students, teachers, and community members outside the university. We provide scholars, community experts, and senior students with a venue to publish peer-reviewed articles, encyclopedia entries, annotated bibliographies, finding aids, transcriptions, and editions.

Our Content

Agas Map

Our edition of the Agas map offers a carefully edited map-like visualization of the city and environs onto which we have plotted many urban locations and topographic features. The built-in drawing tools allow users to generate custom maps and draw their own points, lines, and polygons on the map. Customized maps may be bookmarked and/or downloaded for non-commercial use in classrooms and scholarly presentations.

Encyclopedia

The Encyclopedia provides a number of interoperable resources: Placeography, Gazetteer, Personography, Orgography, Topics, Glossary, and Bibliography. The location essays in the Placeography, the heart of the Encyclopedia, call upon evidence from history, literature, geography, and archaeology to give a thick description of location, etymology, history, literary significance, archaeology, afterlife, and other issues as befits the location.

Library

The Library offers diplomatic transcriptions and page images of texts that are crucial to our understanding of early modern literary London but are rarely anthologized or have never been edited at all.

Mayoral Shows

We offer the world’s first complete anthology of the Elizabethan and Jacobean mayoral shows. The in-text facsimile transcriptions are finished. Modern editions are forthcoming.

John Stow’s Survey of London

We are working on the world’s first scholarly editions of the 1618 and 1633 Survey of London, and the first versioned edition of all four editions of the Survey (1598, 1603, 1618, and 1633).

Our Commitment to Open Scholarship and Open Access

Open Peer Review

MoEML is committed to new forms of peer review, including cross-reviewing (our own innovation) and research apprenticeships. We monitor developments in scholarly peer assessment techniques (such as peer-to-peer review and open peer review). We currently give our reviewers the choice of anonymity or full credit. All contributions go through a refereeing process. The MoEML team regularly makes links to new research, to extend the shelf life of our contributors’ work.1

Open-Access

All of our pages are freely available to anyone with an internet connection and a web browser. We do not charge fees for access or restrict any aspect of our site’s functionality. We link to other open-access resources preferentially. Whenever possible, we supplement what is available from subscription databases by obtaining fresh scans of materials from institutions willing to share their resources with the world and making these scans freely available.

Open-Source

The MoEML team proudly makes all of its back-end data and markup available to the public. Curious readers can see any page in extensible markup language (XML) by clicking the See XML link in the top left-hand corner. With an extensive editorial style guide, detailed technical instructions in our Praxis documentation, and a unique refereeing process, the MoEML team strives to be the makers of manners (Shakespeare, Henry V 5.2.3259) when it comes to web citation, text encoding, and online scholarship.

Open-Code

We are an open-code project. Some of our code is deposited in GitHub.

Open Documentation

We aim to be fully transparent about all MoEML work practices. Our extensive Praxis documentation gives detailed instructions to our team members. These instructions are openly published as a guide to how we work.

Open Planning

We share our project plans and selections from our successful grant applications openly. If we are working on a multi-step deliverable, we publish a progress chart where users can follow our step-by-step progress. We share these plans for four reasons: (1) to be accountable to our funders; (2) to be accountable to our users; (3) to help meet our goal of giving credit where credit is due; and (4) to provide exemplary project plans as a model for others.

Open Use

All of our content is licensed under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license, which gives anyone the right to download and repurpose our content and/or associated mark-up, provided the use is non-commercial and gives full credit to MoEML and its contributors.

Our Commitment to Giving Credit

We give credit where credit is due, in keeping with the Collaborators’ Bill of Rights and A Student Collaborators’ Bill of Rights. We do not distinguish between paid and unpaid labour. In our view, all paid research assistants deserve credit for their critical input; by the same token, our paid RAs take intellectual responsibility for their work. We do not consider any labour to be mechanical; all labour is critical and worthy of acknowledgement. (See also MoEML’s Project Ethos for details of how we put this principle into practice.

Our Commitment to Preservation and Sustainability

We adhere to the principles of the Endings Project. See (Endings Compliance).
In practice, adhering to these principles means that:
  • All code (XML, CSS, HTML, etc.) has been thoroughly validated.
  • All internal links have been tested and targets confirmed to exist.
  • All internal links are relative, so the site can be hosted anywhere.
  • No server-side scripting (PHP, JSP, Python etc.) support is required
  • No backend database software is required
  • Every page on the site carries the same clear edition and date information, so that it can be cited effectively.
  • There are no external dependencies; or if there are, then they are peripheral to the main functionality, and when they fail, the results will not be significant.

Our Commitment to Equity

See our Project Ethos document (new in v.6.6).

Notes

  1. See our documents under peer review here. (KL)↑

References

Cite this page

MLA citation

Jenstad, Janelle, and The MoEML Team The MoEML Team. Mission Statement. The Map of Early Modern London, Edition 7.0, edited by Janelle Jenstad, U of Victoria, 05 May 2022, mapoflondon.uvic.ca/edition/7.0/mission_statement.htm.

Chicago citation

Jenstad, Janelle, and The MoEML Team The MoEML Team. Mission Statement. The Map of Early Modern London, Edition 7.0. Ed. Janelle Jenstad. Victoria: University of Victoria. Accessed May 05, 2022. mapoflondon.uvic.ca/edition/7.0/mission_statement.htm.

APA citation

Jenstad, J., & The MoEML Team The MoEML Team. 2022. Mission Statement. In J. Jenstad (Ed), The Map of Early Modern London (Edition 7.0). Victoria: University of Victoria. Retrieved from https://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/editions/7.0/mission_statement.htm.

RIS file (for RefMan, RefWorks, EndNote etc.)

Provider: University of Victoria
Database: The Map of Early Modern London
Content: text/plain; charset="utf-8"

TY  - ELEC
A1  - Jenstad, Janelle
A1  - The MoEML Team The MoEML Team
ED  - Jenstad, Janelle
T1  - Mission Statement
T2  - The Map of Early Modern London
ET  - 7.0
PY  - 2022
DA  - 2022/05/05
CY  - Victoria
PB  - University of Victoria
LA  - English
UR  - https://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/edition/7.0/mission_statement.htm
UR  - https://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/edition/7.0/xml/standalone/mission_statement.xml
ER  -

TEI citation

<bibl type="mla"><author><name ref="#JENS1"><surname>Jenstad</surname>, <forename>Janelle</forename></name></author>, and <author><name ref="#TEAM1" type="org">The MoEML Team <reg>The MoEML Team</reg></name></author>. <title level="a">Mission Statement</title>. <title level="m">The Map of Early Modern London</title>, Edition <edition>7.0</edition>, edited by <editor><name ref="#JENS1"><forename>Janelle</forename> <surname>Jenstad</surname></name></editor>, <publisher>U of Victoria</publisher>, <date when="2022-05-05">05 May 2022</date>, <ref target="https://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/edition/7.0/mission_statement.htm">mapoflondon.uvic.ca/edition/7.0/mission_statement.htm</ref>.</bibl>

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