Copyright held by
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Further details of licences are available from our
Licences page. For more
information, contact the project director,
Born digital.
Most MoEML documents, or significant fragments with mol:
prefix and accessed through the web application
with their id + .xml
.
The molagas prefix points to the shape representation of a location on MoEML’s OpenLayers3-based rendering of the Agas Map.
Links to page-images in the Chadwyck-Healey
Links to page-images in the
The mdt (MoEML Document Type) prefix used on
The mdtlist (MoEML Document Type listing) prefix used in linking attributes points to a listings page constructed from a category in the central MDT taxonomy in the includes file. There are two variants, one with the plain _subcategories
, meaning all subcategories of the category.
The molgls (MoEML gloss) prefix used on
This molvariant prefix is used on
This molajax prefix is used on
The molstow prefix is used on
Our editorial and encoding practices are documented in detail in the Praxis section of our website.
The following sources have reviewed MoEML at different stages in its development. Please see the
Beyond public crowdsourcing projects, a number of DH projects open up opportunities for student contributions to support open knowledge production. For example, the
Map of Early Modern London (MOEML ) project offers a pedagogical partnership program whereby an instructor can act as a guest editor on the project while students act as contributors, providing entries into the project’s encyclopedia (Jenstad & McLeanFiander, n.d.).A sixth challenge for open digital projects comes in ensuring project quality. The aforementioned MOEML project tackles this challenge by providing extensive documentation of their standards, including an editorial style guide, typographical conventions, a checklist for submissions, as well as advice for students on research, writing for the web, and using disciplinary sources (Jenstad & McLean-Fiander, n.d.). As a final safety net, they have the instructor act as guest editor to vet the work of student contributors. Students who participate in this program take on the identity of a professional scholar developing a sense of efficacy as they are able to transfer their knowledge to a professional setting, write for the standards of the project rather than a grade, and write for the general public rather than their instructor (Davis, 2017).
The
Map of Early Modern London (moeml), directed by Janelle Jenstad, is a project twenty years in the making. This project started out as a scanned version of the 1564 Agas Map, taped to a classroom wall, and has grown to be a fully immersive digital map, complete with details on places, people, pageants, and texts, that allows users to immerse themselves into the world of Elizabethan London. Every page that is added to this map is marked up in XML, coded by the project team and by contributors who wish to learn the ins and outs of the Text-Encoding Initiative (tei). Students who wish to contribute to this project must follow moeml’s generously documented process, complete with Rights and Responsibilities of Contributors, so they know what is expected of them from the start. For Jenstad, this project has always been a way to engage students in literary history, so she and her team have been dedicated to ensuring this process is both smooth and rewarding. They list every single contributor on their site, so students and researchers alike can point to their research on the web. moeml also created an entire Pedagogical Partnership program, that allows educators to act as liaisons between their students and moeml, encouraging further collaboration, on a national and international scale. So, why teach with moeml? Those of us with a passion for the early modern have no problem using it as a place to trace what happened in the past, but any historian or literary scholar can use this project to demonstrate how many seemingly small contributions can add up to a wide-ranging and sophisticated digital project. Having a student write a short entry on a single street or person for moeml and learning some basic tei to encode their submission is a great way of piquing their curiosity, and Jenstad and her team have made the process foolproof.
In the past 15 years, early modern animal studies has explored animal bodies largely through individual details and a close attention to living animals. But the large numbers of living domestic animals in England were part of a system, a vast assemblage of creatures and things. This phenomenon can be addressed by what anthropologists have called
multispecies ethnography, an approach that takesthe human as a kind of corporeality that comes into being relative to multispecies assemblages, rather than as a biocultural given. In the case of early modern England, animal networks came to shape the country and particularly its capital city, not only economically and materially but imaginatively as well. This process can be demonstrated by combining the work of historians with layers of geographical content such as those created by Janelle Jenstad and others in theMap of Early Modern London project (MoEML). These multiple layers make it possible to demonstrate the interrelationship between different stages in animal-encounters throughout the country, from generation through transportation, processing, and consumption.
The
Agas Map of Early Modern London is invaluable for anyone who wants to take a walk through Elizabethan or Jacobean London. No copies of the original woodblock print from 1561 are known to have survived but a slightly different version was printed in 1633. This has now been digitised and put online in an annotated, searchable and zoomable form by the University of Victoria in Canada. It is a beautiful thing.
The MoEML Gazetteer of Early Modern London is the first digital gazetteer for place names in early modern London, circa 1550–1650, with categories comprising Variant Toponym, Authority Name, @xml:id, Agas Map Reference, Other Variant Names and Spellings, and Location Type. The aforementioned resources are notable examples of community-driven platforms and gazetteers that provide valuable information and enable research questions.
Projects like the
Map of Early Modern London fill a much-needed gap for both faculty and students who wish to work digitally. For faculty, they constitute a ready-made, turnkey suite of features with which to impart digital research and writing skills to their students. Such projects are particularly welcome for educators who either lack the necessary digital resources to get started or would rather have their students gain such skills while collaborating on a bona fide, public-facing digital humanities project. For students, these projects offer the opportunity to develop digital writing skills, gain experience with the peer and editorial review process, and acquire a publication credit with a known project.
One of the most impressive resources is the Map of Early Modern London (MoEML), which recently received a complete upgrade. A friend of mine describes this site as a
why didn’t I think of that?project. I am fond of the way it addresses novice users and advanced digital humanists alike with respect, clarity, and enthusiasm. Expertly run, MoEML has four basic features, each of which works alongside the others. First, a high-resolution, encoded version of theAgas map of London (1561) offers a basic orientation to early modern London. Second, an enormous encyclopedia with several categories includes a completeGazetteer , the data for which is available for download. For example, the entry forAldgate Street features a short descriptive article, scholarly citations, and links to the Agas map—where Aldgate Street is highlighted—and to documents mentioning Aldgate Street. Third, the site’sLibrary features marked-up texts that make reference to lots of London places. One of these texts, a collection of TEI-encoded extracts of Jonson’sBartholomew Fair , contains links to entries, and map locations, about the dozens of place names in the play. Finally, the site features an edition of the 1598 edition of John Stow’sA Survey of London , to be supplemented in the future by editions of three subsequent revisions (1603, 1618, and 1633). One hopes the MoEML folks realize this last ambition, because Stow’s revisions to theSurvey constitute the best evidence we have of how geospatial relations changed in early modern London. It is almost impossible to spend less than an hour on this site at a time.
Twelfth Nightin Its Sources
The Map of Early Modern London and the Lost Plays Database are exemplary instances where digitization opens out new sources, traces, allusions.
MoEML allows modern readers of
Richard III , for example, to visualize the movements of the titular character around London, and to piece together the geographical components to his shrewd political maneuvers and social transgressions.
The
Map of Early Modern London (MoEML) began as a classroom tool for helping students understand Shakespeare’s London and has evolved into an open-access, open peer review, open source, collaborative nexus of four related digital projects that provide cultural context for understanding Renaissance London aimed at both a scholarly and a more general audience.By contributing to open digital projects like MoEML, students get to practice transferring their classroom learning to real-world, ill-defined problems.
[MoEML] is thoroughly committed to establishing and propagating best practices within digital humanities, as laid out in Elena Pierzaao’s article
Textual Scholarship and Text Encoding . They even go so far as to quote Shakespeare as theystrive to be the. In following best practices this digital project has ensured a clear editorial trail is maintained. There are extensive lists of Praxis documents, some code has been made available on GitHub, andmakers of mannersMartin Holmes (the team’s programming guru) maintains a CodeSharing Service where elements and attributes can be easily searched.Kim McLean-Fiander , the Director of Pedagogy and Outreach for MoEML, presented a workshop at the Folger Institute over the summer.I found getting to know the MoEML project helpful in understanding how TEI can be used to supplement and enrich engagement with a graphic interface.
[MoEML] is a link that forms the basis of several seminars I teach on Early Modern London, on space, on urban geography, on sociological readings of space.
[C]an I admit that I sometimes look at the map when reading, say, C.J. Sansom’s Shardlake novels, just so that I know where something takes place? Trust me, the map is invaluable for that.
[W]hat makes this so invaluable as a teaching link is that the entire project’s research and bibliography is made available online too.
Venturing from the twenty-first century into the streets of early modern England hasn’t always been easy, but thanks to this intricately detailed interactive Map, that is no longer the case. Users can search by street name or category of location, and by clicking on a particular building or street, the user is linked to a series of documents detailing its history and role in society. We appreciate the work that went into each component of this project, including the detailed Encyclopedia and the Library of primary sources that helped recreate this glimpse into the world of William Shakespeare, Queen Elizabeth, and London’s many lesser-known inhabitants.
The XML and versions of the XML are freely available and searchable to any user. The documentation available is presented in such as way as to invite others to learn how to encode. Encoding instructions are provided, including OS specific information, guidelines for using oXygen, etc. From what I observed, XML is available for every single element published on their website.
This is a fascinating project.
Having perused its website, the MoEML is a unique digital repository that not only gives public access to its content and collections, but also to its open codes and markups for users and researchers to learn and practice. As a user with limited experience with coding, the MoEML is a perfect study and guide to how an overall website functions.
[N]ot only does the site provide an XML version of the map, but it provides several versions, all of which are explained in some detail. Even more surprisingly, the link to the XML is displayed very prominently (no digging required).
If you have only minor experience in using XML, or are starting a project and wondering how to use modify TEI
just enough without becoming incomprehensible, I think that these multiple versions would be such a wonderful resource to start with. I also think that it is a wonderful example of a more visual resources that can also be encoded (several times!) using XML.
MoEML captures the best of digital humanities in its commitment to open access and open source technologies, producing an online resource that, thus far, is both scholarly and engaging to all levels of users.
The project relies on open content—for articles, entries, and for transcriptions—to be created and contributed by qualified users and students, and this pedagogical aim, as much as the resource it will lead to, seems to be at the heart of the project.
[T]he volume and quality of information about the project history, future plans and directions for development, and research and presentations is remarkable, revealing an impressive infrastructure and a firm grasp of the standards, technologies, and aims of digital humanities projects.
Understanding the connection between historical context, text, place and space has led to several digital projects which are grounded in humanities understanding of history, geography and literature but also utilize GIS and other digital technologies to generate new ideas. One exemplary example is Janelle Jenstad’s
Map of Early Modern London . She has united texts from early modern London with historic maps from the same period. Using primarily GIS approaches for spatial and XML tools for textual analysis, the digital map linked to the text allows for her examine across texts and places in the attempt to recreate the space of Elizabethan London.
Readers will find [MoEML] an invaluable resource which allows them to zoom in to particular areas of the famous Agas map of the city from the 1560s. The project provides a searchable placeography, personography, bibliography, glossary and orgography (of organisations), as well as much other information. An overall effect of perusing a map of this kind is to be reminded of how close together the various communities and places were, a valuable insight into the geographical aspects of Shakespeare’s London circles.
MoEML is actually four combined and related projects, which means browsing the site is a rich, interactive experience that rarely progresses in a linear fashion.
MoEML is rough in parts—it is a work in progress, which partially grew out of student projects—but it is ambitious, it integrates its various features effectively, and it offers an entertaining method of scholarly immersion in early modern London and its culture.
MoEML is the supremely accomplished Jenstad’s brainchild and, spoiler alert: it’s a wunderkind.
This team of scholars keeps reworking the entire website to adapt with the scholarly needs of the times, using the latest technology in the Digital Humanities. They perform the painstaking coding of layers upon layers of data to keep this 400 year old map so digitally current it’s on its way to being integrated with the coordinates on Google Maps.
Using the Map of Early Modern London is fun for curious history fanatics, London tourists figuring out which theatres once stood in terms of today’s ultra-hip Shoreditch, and for teachers on a never-ending search for the best visual aids to bring history to life. Choosing your own search terms, building type, or route through London, the website visualizes the material, but also allows you to bookmark and save these images for personal and pedagogical use.
Unlike the revelers of Twelfth Night, the MoEML team doesn’t look to discern between insiders and outsiders. In an act of generosity not always seen in the academy, this site is entirely open access.
A wonderful resource, if you are interested in Elizabethan London – and a great toy even if you are not.
Following the example set by the Map of Early Modern London project (mapoflondon.uvic.ca/), [The Dutch Courtesan website’s] aim is to encourage students to engage actively with the resource and contribute themselves to the growing assemblage of materials, thereby continuing to shape the website and make further interventions in and discoveries about Marston’s play.
The project definitely addresses a growing interest in the role of space, which, as David Bodenhamer mentions in his article
Creating a Landscape of Memory: The Potential of Humanities GIS , was largely overlooked by humanists until the last few decades.
Visitors to the project website can search learn digital methods and tools, especially if one is in an academic environment lacking supportive infrastructure for digital humanities training and research.
These sites have earned their place and demonstrate the potential of publishing georeferenced historical information on the web. They represent an important area of innovation in the dissemination of scientific data. What distinguishes them from other sites is the provision of information by simultaneous references to time and space.
If you need a visual representation of early modern London to assist you with your research, this map interface is a handy tool. This may be particularly useful if you are unsure of a research topic and want to
explore 16th-century London.
This database provides a very unique way to research early modern London. The
Agas map interface allows you to explore the city in a visual, interactive way and links you to encyclopedia articles where textual information can be found. The four interconnected projects on this site work function together to clearly represent and describe the London of 1581.
On the Map of Early Modern London website http://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/map.htm you can choose a section of the Agas Map and zoom in to see street names, church names, trade companies’ halls and more. It’s an invaluable resource.
Officially launched in 1999 as an effort to create a digital atlas of 16th and 17th century London, the Map of Early Modern London project, based out of the Humanities Computing Media Centre at the University of Victoria, has leveraged technological advances to create a unique, multi-faceted archive and historical resource.
The MoEML has a wonderfully thorough section of resources for using the project both in and out of the classroom. Faculty working on the project have generously shared syllabi from prior graduate seminars, sample assignments, and additional database links. Those interested in partnering more directly with the project in the classroom are invited to explore their Pedagogical Partnership Project as well.
The greatest achievement of The Map of Early Modern London is the way it offers two entries to the imaginative spaces of an early modern city: through its physical geography, and its renderings in the cultural imagination.
The project’s framework is also well conceived, because it allows for future expansion. No map or text could hope to account for every entity, imaginative or real, in its bounds, but the editors have undertaken to expand their complement of 650 sites on the Agas Map to 1000, and to expand their library of primary texts to complete editions of local chronicles like John Stow’s encyclopedic
Survey of London (1598) and John Taylor’sWorks (1630).
MoEML, The Grub Street Project, and Digital Literary Atlas of Ireland 1922-1949 incorporate digital historical maps that allow for another level of interpretation and, thereby, produce new knowledge through the textuality of the map itself in relation to intersecting literary texts.
The project invents a new way for us to study literature as it maps the places in literature and it is also a great tool to learn more about culture and history as literature is always based on some reality of that time.
Jenstad (2011) and her colleagues have digitized and georectified the Agas map to create an interactive Map of Early Modern London (mapoflondon.uvic.ca). The website offers descriptions, transcriptions of primary texts, and other resources, all linked to highresolution map images covering London from 1550 to 1650. By recreating the urban world in which Shakespeare and his contemporaries lived and worked, Jenstad (2011) maintains that literary character movements, social transgressions, marriage options, and financial limitations are now more apparent and revealing. Although not a wiki and, thus, not accessible to anyone, the site uses an open source platform that allows for dynamic editions of topographical and peripatetic texts, a publication venue for scholarly research, teaching, bibliographic materials and more. One can only imagine that the British Library’s recent audio recordings of the Bard’s most famous scenes, speeches, and sonnets – all performed in the original pronunciation of Shakespeare’s time – will soon make their way to this fantastic website.
When considering Janelle Jenstad’s ambitious and ongoing online project, The Map of Early Modern London, it is tempting to get carried away by the novelty. To re-create a certain place of a certain time, to play time-traveler as it were, has an inevitably romantic flavor, and that flavor can be all the more potent when the time and place in question is the culturally and historically rich landscape of Early Modern London.
One should not succumb to the novelty though, as Jenstad’s work serves a very practical scholarly purpose. As she outlines in her essay
Using Early Modern Maps in Literary Studies gaining a thorough understanding of the landscape of early modern London can enable a student to better comprehend references to location, and the dramatic significance of location, in contemporaneous literary texts.Such a tool encourages students to embrace a unique sort of intertextuality—a consideration of the relationship between complex literary texts and more
practical , utilitarian texts like maps.The textuality of maps is not something I was inclined to consider before I read about Jenstad’s project.
I encourage you to check out the MoEML project. Not only is it technically engaging, but Dr. Jenstad and her team are committed to making the work as transparent as possible. And this open access only furthers the potential value of the project.
If you want to know what it was like to walk through a city around the turn of the seventeenth century, you could hardly do better than the Map of Early Modern London. Compiled from contemporary sources, I’ve used it to locate inns, fencing-schools, and even individual houses. It’s a fantastic piece of work and one I’d suggest you get your hands dirty with.
Jenstad designed the project as a pedagogical tool, and I think it would work really well for the classroom. It allows students to find information while also exploring the city and being able to observe geographical patterns or relationships. Interesting assignments could be looking for patterns in establishments, comparing and contrasting different wards and their contents, or designing a
walking tour based on a theme of their choosing.I admire the project and the way it was carried out. It is immensely collaborative, with a long list of student contributors, and general guidelines for contributing information and plans to create an editorial board that will use a
refereeing process of evaluation.
The Map of Early Modern London is a good resource from Dr. Janelle Jenstad at the University of Victoria. You can look at London through the eyes of Shakespeare through use of quotes, and there is a good listing of sources.
The Map of Early Modern London site is like Google Maps for Shakespeare’s time. But instead incorporating traffic patterns, restaurants, and shortest routes, this experimental map shows wards, churches, and livery companies.
Insgesamt vermag dieses aus der universitären Lehre hervorgegangene Webangebot durch ansprechende Gestaltung und durchdachte Konzeption zu überzeugen, so dass sich hoffentlich noch viele Studierende und Wissenschaftler für den wünschenswerten Ausbau dieser Online-Ressource begeistern lassen.
Wow. I love this site and its interactive Agas map.
And also in the magnificient achievement category is the Map of Early Modern London.
The following news articles, blog posts, and broadcasts feature MoEML.
Map of Early Modern LondonProject Brings Ancient City to Life
The following sites and articles direct users to MoEML. We offer these lists because sites and articles that refer to MoEML are likely to be of interest to our readers. Additions are welcome; please send details to london@uvic.ca.
Consuming means, soon preys upon itself: Political Expedience and Environmental Degradation in Richard II
Every Contact Leaves a Trace
Mingled Yarn: The State of Computing in Shakespeare 2.0
The Blessed Spirit: An Analysis of the Pneumatology of Benjamin Beddome as an Early Evangelical