How might expanding the range of material formats encoded within a project help draw students’ attention to features of the underlying media in question? Here, collaboration with The Map of Early Modern London (MoEML) holds the potential to shed light. Historically, MoEML’s guidance for encoding primary source transcriptions has been calibrated to parameters of print, as the majority of documents within its project database were initially produced in that medium.[1] Yet the project’s ability to make early modern London’s broader document-based environment accessible and available raises the question of how a range of manuscript texts might best be encoded in relation to the current corpus.

To reflect upon parameters by which students might contribute to work along these lines, as is being envisioned for a Spring 2027 pedagogical partnership with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, this short paper will focus upon the encoding of indentures as case study, given these manuscript documents’ capacity to serve as both legal and technical infrastructure. Understanding the challenges that this deceptively simple document type may present requires simultaneously considering its early modern significance alongside its potential for facilitating project-specific connections—a dual function that likewise makes the genre crucial for a developing MoEML micro-site, Browsing the Bookshops in St. Paul’s Churchyard, of which students’ encoded documents are planned to become part.

Building upon existing and emerging guidance, including that of the Women Writers’ Project (WWP) and Linked Early Modern Drama Online (LEMDO), the paper will consider both the nature of key challenges currently envisioned and strategies for engaging students as collaborators in the wider endeavor.

[1] For MoEML’s “Encode a Primary Source Transcription” guidance, see https://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/encoding_primary_sources.htm. MoEML also contains a number of born-digital documents, as its project documentation notes.