Introduction to Bibliographies and Citations

The documentation in this chapter is for editors, encoders, and anthology leads. Its contents are relevant to those who are encoding bibliography entries for an edition, an anthology, or for our shared bibliography. It is also relevant to those adding citations to their editions, to their anthology About pages, and to documentation.

Prior Reading

You will want to have a general understanding of how our centralized databases work. See Introduction to Sitewide Data Files and Bibliography (BIBL1). Note that you are not responsible for adding things to our centralized databases. We will do that work for you and assign an xml:id to each item.

Introduction

This chapter covers how to format, encode, and cite sources.
LEMDO maintains centralized databases of sources. In general, we will add your sources to those centralized databases and then you can include them in your edition or anthology using the xml:id that LEMDO assigns to the source. In the linked data environment in which we work, we generally want to create single entities to which we can all point. The advantage is that any corrections we make will proliferate across all anthologies. For example, if a DOI becomes available or a link changes, we will change it in the centralized database.
LEMDO offers full guidelines for how to format and encode items (entities) for their addition to the various project databases so that the entities can then be cited in documentation, editions, and anthologies. For the format of bibliography entries and citations thereof, LEMDO uses our own modified version of the eighth edition of the MLA Handbook (MLA 8), with reference to the 17th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS 17) where MLA 8 is silent.

Learning Outcomes

The Bibliography and Citation documentation is designed to support you through encoding sources and citations. By the time you have worked through this chapter, you will:
Be able to encode your edition or anthology bibliography.
Know which sitewide database each of your sources should be saved in.
Know how to encode a source entry to be added to one of LEMDO’s sitewide databases.
Be comfortable following LEMDO’s citation practices.

Contents

Section Description
Prepare Edition Bibliography Learn which information LEMDO requires for bibliography entries and the format that you should follow when preparing entries to be added to our shared bibliography
Prepare Production Database Entries Learn which information LEMDO requires for production database entries and the format that you should follow when preparing entries to be added to PROD1.xml.
Curate Edition Bibliography Learn how to encode the structure and entries for your edition bibliography
Encode Bibliography Learn how to tag each element of a bibliography entry
Encode Productions Learn how to tag each element of a production entry
Encoded Bibliography Entry Examples Read through a set of examples of fully encoded bibliography entries
Encode Citations Learn how to format and encode in-text citations
Cite Shakespeare Read about LEMDO’s specific practices for citing Shakespeare
Cite OED Read about LEMDO’s specific practices for citing the Oxford English Dictionary
Cite ODNB Read about LEMDO’s specific practices for citing the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
Cite LEME Read about LEMDO’s specific practices for citing entries from Lexicons of Early Modern English
Cite Bullough’s Narrative and Dramatic Sources Read about LEMDO’s specific practices for citing Bullough’s eight-volume Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare

Further Reading

Most editors and encoders who are encoding citations will also benefit from reading our documentation chapter on encoding quotations and quotation marks. For information on those topics, read Chapter 9. Quotations.

Prosopography

Isabella Seales

Isabella Seales is a fourth year undergraduate completing her Bachelor of Arts in English at the University of Victoria. She has a special interest in Renaissance and Metaphysical Literature. She is assisting Dr. Jenstad with the MoEML Mayoral Shows anthology as part of the Undergraduate Student Research Award program.

Janelle Jenstad

Janelle Jenstad is a Professor of English at the University of Victoria, Director of The Map of Early Modern London, and Director of Linked Early Modern Drama Online. With Jennifer Roberts-Smith and Mark Beatrice Kaethler, she co-edited Shakespeare’s Language in Digital Media: Old Words, New Tools (Routledge). She has edited John Stow’s A Survey of London (1598 text) for MoEML and is currently editing The Merchant of Venice (with Stephen Wittek) and Heywood’s 2 If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody for DRE. Her articles have appeared in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Elizabethan Theatre, Early Modern Literary Studies, Shakespeare Bulletin, Renaissance and Reformation, and The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. She contributed chapters to Approaches to Teaching Othello (MLA); Teaching Early Modern Literature from the Archives (MLA); Institutional Culture in Early Modern England (Brill); Shakespeare, Language, and the Stage (Arden); Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate); New Directions in the Geohumanities (Routledge); Early Modern Studies and the Digital Turn (Iter); Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers (Indiana); Making Things and Drawing Boundaries (Minnesota); Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study: Audiences, Authors, and Digital Technologies (Routledge); and Civic Performance: Pageantry and Entertainments in Early Modern London (Routledge). For more details, see janellejenstad.com.

Joey Takeda

Joey Takeda is LEMDO’s Consulting Programmer and Designer, a role he assumed in 2020 after three years as the Lead Developer on LEMDO.

Mahayla Galliford

Project manager, 2025-present; research assistant, 2021-present. Mahayla Galliford (she/her) graduated with a BA (Hons with distinction) from the University of Victoria in 2024. Mahayla’s undergraduate research explored early modern stage directions and civic water pageantry. Mahayla continues her studies through UVic’s English MA program and her SSHRC-funded thesis project focuses on editing and encoding girls’ manuscripts, specifically Lady Rachel Fane’s dramatic entertainments, in collaboration with LEMDO.

Martin Holmes

Martin Holmes has worked as a developer in the UVic’s Humanities Computing and Media Centre for over two decades, and has been involved with dozens of Digital Humanities projects. He has served on the TEI Technical Council and as Managing Editor of the Journal of the TEI. He took over from Joey Takeda as lead developer on LEMDO in 2020. He is a collaborator on the SSHRC Partnership Grant led by Janelle Jenstad.

Navarra Houldin

Training and Documentation Lead 2025–present. LEMDO project manager 2022–2025. Textual remediator 2021–present. Navarra Houldin (they/them) completed their BA with a major in history and minor in Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. Their primary research was on gender and sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America. They are continuing their education through an MA program in Gender and Social Justice Studies at the University of Alberta where they will specialize in Digital Humanities.

Oluwaseun Akintola

Oluwaseun Akintola is a student pursuing an English major and Psychology minor at the University of Victoria. She has had the opportunity of working for LEMDO as the recipient of the Undergraduate Student Research Award (USRA) from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) for the summers of 2024 and 2025. Her research primarily focuses on premodern critical race theory in early modern drama, researching racial representation, and constructions of identity in Shakespeare’s plays Othello and The Merchant of Venice.

Rylyn Christensen

Rylyn Christensen is an English major at the University of Victoria.

Tracey El Hajj

Junior Programmer 2019–2020. Research Associate 2020–2021. Tracey received her PhD from the Department of English at the University of Victoria in the field of Science and Technology Studies. Her research focuses on the algorhythmics of networked communications. She was a 2019–2020 President’s Fellow in Research-Enriched Teaching at UVic, where she taught an advanced course on Artificial Intelligence and Everyday Life. Tracey was also a member of the Map of Early Modern London team, between 2018 and 2021. Between 2020 and 2021, she was a fellow in residence at the Praxis Studio for Comparative Media Studies, where she investigated the relationships between artificial intelligence, creativity, health, and justice. As of July 2021, Tracey has moved into the alt-ac world for a term position, while also teaching in the English Department at the University of Victoria.

Orgography

LEMDO Team (LEMD1)

The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators, encoders, and remediating editors.

Glossary

xml:id
“A unique value that we use to tag an entity. Strictly speaking, @xml:id is an attribute that can be added to any XML element. We use it as a shorthand for “value of the xml:id”. Every person, role, glyph, ligature, bibliographical entry, act, scene, speech, paragraph, page beginning, XML file, division within XML files, and anchor has a unique xml:id value, some of which are assigned automatically during the processing of our XML files.”

Metadata