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Release Notes for MoEML v.6.6

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Fourth Static Release

v.6.6 is the fourth release of a static version of our site.

Past MoEML Releases

A signficant advantage of the static-release model is that we can now archive past MoEML releases for posterity. Just as old editions of books often remain in library collections, we are choosing to retain past editions of the MoEML project. You will find all previous releases at https://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/editions/.

Statistics

To see a complete list of statistics, go to Statistics.
We added:
We tagged:
  • 6184 toponyms (place names) in texts across the site
  • 8055 person names across the site

New! Project Ethos Statement

In response to a requirement that all campus units and projects have an equity statement, we decided to codify our attitudes, values, and aspirations as a project. Research Associate Tracey El Hajj took on the responsibility of gathering together our various documents and putting into words our unwritten practices. Building on the collective experience of past and present teams and many open discussions about how we can work collaboratively and respectfully in community, this document outlines the principles that guide us and how they manifest in our daily practice. If our Praxis documentation captures how we encode and process our research into a website, and our Mission Statement describes how we envision that website contributing long-term to scholarship and public humanities, the new Project Ethos document is the blueprint for how we aspire to work together on a daily, weekly, and yearly basis to make the MoEML website possible. The launch of our Project Ethos comes with some tweaks to the Mission Statement so that the two documents coordinate more clearly.

Interface Changes

v.6.6 introduces some changes to the menu bar. The previous top menu consisted of six (6) tabs (Map, Encyclopedia, Library, Stow, Tools, and About). v.6.6 introduces a sixth tab—Shows—which we will explain more fully below.
We have also added three new sections under About: Documentation, Ethos, and Statistics.
Documentation contains links to all of our project documentation, grouped by intended audience: contributors, encoders, programmers, editors, and release technicians.
Ethos links to our Project Ethos (see above).
Statistics links to our Statistics page.

Progress on the MoEML Anthology of Mayoral Shows

The SSHRC-funded anthology of modern editions all of the Elizabethan and Stuart mayoral shows will be published by MoEML on the LEMDO platform. Expect MoMS (MoEML Mayoral Shows anthology) to be released in the next six months with at least one completed modern edition. The old-spelling transcriptions will remain on the MoEML site and eventually be duplicated and slightly retagged for republication in the MoMS anthology.
We have augmented the contextual information for mayoral shows on the MoEML site. The Shows menu contains:

Progress on Stow’s Survey

In our last release, we announced the completion of our 1598 edition of the Survey of London, pending proofing and peer review (see v.6.5 Release Notes). The 1598 text has now been fully proofed by MoEML’s research assistants (see the Stow (1598) Progress Chart for a detailed breakdown of our workflow). Project Manager Kate LeBere oversaw the final stages of proofing undertaken by Molly Rothwell, Jamie Zabel, and herself.
We continue to make good progress on the much longer and more complex 1633 Survey. Jamie Zabel is overseeing this workflow (see the Stow (1633) Progress Chart).

Primary Source Tidying

Since the previous release, we have updated the encoding of the primary source texts housed in our Library (see the Library: Progress Chart for a detailed breakdown of our workflow). For each text, we have (1) tagged all entities (people, toponyms, dates), (2) re-proofed the transcription, (3) standardized the in-line CSS to better reflect the layout of the early printed page, (4) added a full source description with information about the copytext (housed in the <sourceDesc> element), (5) added signature numbers to <pb> elements to be processed into a table of contents, and (6) added links from each page to its corresponding digital surrogate on EEBO.
During this process we updated our documentation on semi-diplomatic transcriptions (Conventions for Semi-Diplomatic Transcriptions) and composed new documentation to help guide research assistants as they transcribe, tag, and style library texts (Encode a Library Text). Kate LeBere updated our transcriptions of early modern dramatic extracts to reflect digital surrogates from EEBO rather than modern editions of the plays. These dramatic extracts are rich in London toponyms that feed into our Gazetteer.

Gazetteer Proofing

Our research assistants, led by Jamie Zabel and Lucas Simpson, are in the process of proofing the contents of our Gazetteer. This process has helped us identify and correct minor entity tagging errors across the site. The Gazetteer will continue to be proofed as our team tags the 1633 edition of Survey of London. This process has required much consultation with Lucas Simpson about the possible merging and splitting of locations, disambiguations, authority name changes, and clarification about dates.

Clarity on our Scope

Until this release, MoEML has had a fuzzy starting date. Articles often mention medieval uses of space because early modern Londoners retained a memory of those uses, places, and placenames. In conversation with Lucas Simpson, who has been working on temporal encoding practices for the v.6.7 release, we have decided to make the Dissolutation of the Monasteries in 1536 our firm starting point for the Gazetteer and for placetypes. The Dissolution saw a marked change in the ownership, names, and functions of many London places, especially hospitals, religious houses, palaces, and great houses. Pre-1536 history will always be a key part of MoEMLs encyclopedia entries, but we will be guided by this more precise project scope when deciding whether or not to include a location and what to call it.

Changes to Location Ontology

Over time, the original category of Sites has been refined and subdivided. With this release, MoEML has added a new category of Hospitals. We have also added a topics page on Hospitals in Early Modern London.

Goodbye KML, hello GeoJSON!

Previous versions of MoEML have depended on Google Maps to provide modern maps displaying locations from early modern London. However, the Google Maps API is known to be fluid, and we wanted to aim for more long-term stability for our maps. The Agas Map has always used code from the OpenLayers project, so we rebuilt our modern mapping to use GeoJSON data rather than Google’s KML file format, and we now use OpenLayers and OpenStreetMaps data for our modern maps.
Consequently, we also rewrote our own mapping tools and their documentation. Martin Holmes wrote the new processing code and converted the old data, and we thank Greg Newton for the new implementation of his Vertexer tool, which we use for identifying and outlining locations.

Updates to Praxis

We have created a new page, Praxis Updates, to track all substantial changes made by our team to our Praxis documentation. Since the v.6.5 release, we have added extensive quickstart documentation to support new hires and encoders (Quickstart: Getting Started, Quickstart: Introduction to Markup, Quickstart: Tagging Survey of London, Quickstart: Adding Organizations, Quickstart: Adding Places, and Quickstart: Adding People); added documentation on encoding primary source library texts (Encode a Library Text; see above); added documentation on how to use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to style primary source texts, including our editions of Survey of London (Encode Style); updated our documentation on linking to a MoEML page as a bibliographic item within another MoEML page (Link Content to Pages and Databases); and updated our documentation on how to add responsibility statements to born digital and primary-source documents (Create a MoEML TEI Header).
Much of this new Praxis documentation, the Quickstarts in particular, was the product of the training manual that Kate LeBere wrote for our incoming RAs in Spring 2020. It was the first time that we had had to train a new team remotely. This documentation is a wonderful gift to future team members, continuing the tradition whereby team members improve the project and leave it in better shape for the next team.

Leadership Changes

The Team page reflects a change to the leadership of MoEML. After many years of celebrating MoEML, teaching with MoEML, and running pedagogical partnerships, Kristen Abbott Bennett joins the project leadership team in the role of Assistant Director, Pedagogy. Erica Zimmer has taken on responsibility for adding all the bookshops in London, a project that requires us to rethink our ontology of placetypes and our base map; in addition to creating her own project on bookstalls in St. Paul’s Churchyard, she is taking on the role of Assistant Director, Bookshops. Christopher Highley is Project Coordinator of the London Parishes Project that will see the publication on MoEML of encyclopedia entries on all the parishes. Janelle Jenstad remains the Project Director, Martin Holmes continues to be the Lead Programmer, and Ian MacInnes is still the US Agent for Pedagogical Partnerships. MoEML former Associate Director and former Director of Pedagogy and Outreach Kim McLean-Fiander now rejoins MoEML as a member of the Editorial Board.

News of Team Members

Since v.6.5 was released, MoEML has had the privilege of hosting three HUMA 295 practicum students: Maya Linsley, Kiri Powell, and Alexandra Fleetham. Maya Linsley took up an RAship with MoEML in January 2021.
This will be the last static release under the watch of two long-term team members. Project Manager Kate LeBere is leaving us this summer, after working in various capacities for MoEML and LEMDO for over three years. Join us in wishing Kate well as she embarks on an MLIS at UBC’s iSchool. Nicole Vatcher will be taking over as Project Manager some time in August 2021.
Tracey El Hajj, Junior Programmer since 2018, successfully defended her doctoral dissertation in December 2020. Dr. El Hajj stayed on with MoEML as a Research Associate until the end of June 2021 and now begins the next stage of her career by teaching in the English Department at UVic and coaching students in the Centre for Academic Communication. MoEML will miss Kate and Tracey very much!

Cite this page

MLA citation

Jenstad, Janelle, Kate LeBere, and Martin D. Holmes. Release Notes for MoEML v.6.6 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/release_notes_066.htm.

Chicago citation

Jenstad, Janelle, Kate LeBere, and Martin D. Holmes. Release Notes for MoEML v.6.6 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/release_notes_066.htm.

APA citation

Jenstad, J., LeBere, K., & Holmes, M. D. 2022. Release Notes for MoEML v.6.6 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/release_notes_066.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  - LeBere, Kate
A1  - Holmes, Martin
ED  - Jenstad, Janelle
T1  - Release Notes for MoEML v.6.6
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/release_notes_066.htm
UR  - https://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/edition/7.0/xml/standalone/release_notes_066.xml
ER  -

TEI citation

<bibl type="mla"><author><name ref="#JENS1"><surname>Jenstad</surname>, <forename>Janelle</forename></name></author>, <author><name ref="#LEBE1"><forename>Kate</forename> <surname>LeBere</surname></name></author>, and <author><name ref="#HOLM3"><forename>Martin</forename> <forename>D.</forename> <surname>Holmes</surname></name></author>. <title level="a">Release Notes for MoEML v.6.6</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/release_notes_066.htm">mapoflondon.uvic.ca/edition/7.0/release_notes_066.htm</ref>.</bibl>

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