REED London: Inns of Court is a select presentation of documentary, editorial, and bibliographical materials originally published as the print collection REED: Inns of Court (2010), Alan H. Nelson and John R. Elliott, Jr., eds.

REED London offers dynamic new ways to view, read, and use the records for textual and data analysis. The Inns of Court records provide us with a prototype for future work on London-centric REED research, including material from REED: Ecclesiastical London and REED: Civic London to 1558; ultimately, we hope to be able to produce more and different kinds of editorial and thematic materials related to performance and music in London and its environs. 

We began our work prototyping this kind of complex documentary colllection by focusing on the Inns of Court because the collection edited by Nelson and Elliott is so rich with contextual information about the politics of performance in pre-modern London. The Inns served as both 'schools' for training in law and fraternities to which graduates as well as influential members of society were admitted and could then remain members (and even keep living quarters) of an Inn for the rest of their lives. It is not unusual to find the names of king- and queen-makers, aristocrats, and power-brokers, amongst the members of the Inns. Sometimes surprisingly, we will find a poet like John Donne or a designer like Inigo Jones being admitted to one of the Inns. Certainly playwrights, musicians, and players of note appear within the records themselves. Therefore, the Inns of Court seemed to be a good place to start as we began to think thorugh how to create a rich digital learning and research environment.

As a proof of concept, REED London experiments with concepts of hypermediacy and transposition that are required of us as we honour the print referent while moving away from earlier digital edition forms that served as incunabula as we waited for new digital tools and methods to transform the idea of an edition in digital space. The work presented here is very much in progress, and we will continue to experiment with different ways in which readers can access and negotiate materials to support their own research and learning. To begin your journey learning about the Inns of Court and their importance to our understanding of performance, click on one of the named inns at the right side of the screen. Each tab will take you to a web page that explains a bit of that inn's history as well as links to the individual records within the documentary categories (admittance books, ledgers, correspondence, etc.) Please note that it is not our intention to provide an exhaustive history of these Inns - there are many who are more capable and have the authority to do that work. Ours is to explore the excerpted documents that tell the stories of the Inns as places and their members as performers and patrons.

We are now in the second round of production funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. During the first planning phase (2018), we  accomplished the following:

  • * Tagged a cross-section of records in TEI, focusing on structure and ciritical annotation, but with increasing focus on semantic markup. These records will be made publicly available through CWRC's CWRC-Writer interface. Users will also be able to access, read, and undertake analysis of the records as a corpus or discreet corpora through CWRC's built-in Voyant, DToC, and HuViz tools.
  • * Compiled entity lists of people, places, and organizations listed in the printed REED: Inns of Court index - these entities will be disambiguated against existing authority lists produced by VIAF, Wikidata, DBPedia, and Geonames. Where an authority has not yet been identified, but that is important to REED's work, an authority identifier will be minted in CWRC. 
  • * Created, edited and/or adapted taxonomies and ontologies of occupations, objects, forms of entertainment, and other information within the REED records that informs research.
  • * Established tagging protocols, a responsive schema, and comprehensive documentation in GitHub.
  • * Gathered the bibliographical materials (modern and antiquarian) that have underscored REED's London research across collections and projects.
  • * Integrated the original editorial essays, notes and glosses, and translations from the three Inns of Court print volumes with the digital forms of the records.

In the second round (2020-22), we are thinking more about the semantic value within the records - how do we reveal the meaning of holidays, entertainments, and even the objects that are at the heart of these snippets of information? How can we pursue relationships between and among London people and places? How can we create new ways for REED London readers to make these connections and dig deeper into the treasure trove of information that tells us so much about the 500 years before the Restoration. We also hope, during this phase, to expand the scope of the materials - in particular, to find new ways to collaborate with other early modern studies scholars and to establish intersections with other digital archival research related to London in the pre-modern era.