Add Notes and Citations to Critical Paratexts

Rationale

LEMDO uses a modified version of MLA 7 for citations and notes in critical paratext. Quotations from, paraphrases of, allusions to, and mentions of secondary sources are followed by parentheses containing the author’s name and the page number or range. These parenthetical reference are encoded in such a way that they link to entries on LEMDO’s site-wide bibliography and can be processed into pop-up citations.
We use notes for digressions, state-of-the-art summaries (i.e., quick overviews of the literature), and elaborations that would otherwise interrupt or delay the unfolding of an argument. Use parenthetical references inside notes to give credit to secondary sources.
Note that quotations from your own modern or semi-diplomatic transcriptions are handled via a different mechanism, as are links to other parts of your edition. See Encode Pointer Links and Encoding Links Between Parts of Your Edition.

Practice: Add Citations

Place the parenthetical reference at the end of the clause containing the quotation or mention or at the end of the sentence. Use your discretion about placement, following these two principles: (1) the reference must be unambiguous in its referent; and (2) it must be minimally disruptive to the prose. Consult with your anthology lead about anthology-specific practices.
If you include the author’s name in your prose and the parenthetical reference clearly refers back to the author, you may omit the author’s name from your parenthetical reference and simply give the page number(s). You may also choose to include the author’s name on the grounds that a longer string is easier for users to click on. Consult with your anthology lead about anthology-specific practices.
Use an en dash between numbers in a range (a practice on which MLA is silent and on which we have elected to follow Chicago). If you are working in LEMDO’s Oxygen project (lemdo-all.xpr), you will be able to add an en dash by typing Ctrl+Shift+Space (Cmd+Shift+Space on a Mac) and selecting the en dash from the drop-down menu.
Tag the contents of the parenthesis (but not the two parenthesis markers) with a <ref> element. Add the @type attribute with the value "bibl". Add a @target attribute with a value beginning with "bibl:". See Encode Citations for more detailed information on this practice.
If you refer in a general way to a publication and do not need to give page numbers, you may put your <ref> element on the author’s name in your running prose. See sample reference to Richmond Barbour in the Examples.

Practice: Add Notes in Critical Paratexts

If you want to add a note, open a <note> element at the point where you want the note marker to appear. Punctuation affects note placement; if you want to put a note at the end of a clause or subordinate clause, you will put the <note> element after a comma, period, question mark, or exclamation point but before a semi-colon or colon. Add the @type attribute with the value "editorial". These notes will be processed into numbers that the user can click on in the digital environment; in the printed Hornbooks, they will appear at the bottom of the page.
Notes may contain parenthetical citations in a <ref> element. Follow the same practices for references in notes as in running prose.

Examples

This example from Mark Beatrice Kaethler’s Critical Introduction to London’s Tempe shows a parenthetical citation at the end of a sentence:
<p><!-- paragraph begins --> Dekker’s entertainment still remains focused upon promoting the livery company, in this case the Ironmongers, which were facing diminishing prowess (<ref type="bibl" target="bibl:HILL6">Hill 17-18</ref>). <!-- paragraph continues --></p>
This example from Kirk Melnikoff’s Critical Introduction to Selimus shows a <ref> element placed in prose:
<p><!-- paragraph begins -->
  <ref type="bibl" target="bibl:BARB4">Richmond Barbour</ref> has similarly suggested that the early modern English represented the east in fictional plays, poems, prose using a variety of proto Orientalist tropes that together served to other their Muslim characters.<!-- paragraph continues --></p>
This example from Laurie Ellinghausen’s General Introduction to The Device of the Pageant shows an editorial note containing multiple parenthetical citations:
<p>Given that the speeches would have been difficult for many of the show’s attendees to hear,<note type="editorial">Audiences’ capacity to hear and absorb the speeches has been a subject of debate. Some scholars have assumed that the speeches, which directly address the lord mayor, would have been lost on the crowd (see for example <ref type="bibl" target="bibl:KLEI2">Klein 20</ref> and <ref type="bibl" target="bibl:ROBE8">Robertson and Gordon xlii</ref>). Others, however, argue that these shows were meant not solely for one <quote>noble visitor</quote> (<ref type="bibl" target="bibl:KIPL2">Kipling 42</ref>), but were written to resonate with a socially capacious audience; see for example Wickham, who proposes that the actors <quote>performed to two distinct audiences simultaneously</quote> (<ref type="bibl" target="bibl:WICK1">Wickham Vol. 1., 59</ref>). Kara Northway in particular contends that the speeches were written to stimulate general interest in the <quote>betterment of the country </quote> through the cultivation of virtues such as <quote>industry</quote> (<ref type="bibl" target="bibl:NORT4">176</ref>).</note> the visual elements of the production are important to piecing together a sense of the performance. <!-- paragraph continues --></p>

Other Resources

LEMDO YouTube video: Sources (Editorial)
LEMDO YouTube video: Collation (Technical): Linking

Prosopography

Illya

Illya has a BA in English and Sociocultural Anthropology and an MA in English. Prior to joining the HCMC, he was a PhD candidate in English and Book History at the University of Toronto and worked on Records of Early English Drama and on the Modernist Archives Publishing Project. His work at the HCMC focuses on creating web-based applications for research projects led by members of the faculty of Humanities at the University of Victoria. This involves creating schemas for new and existing datasets, writing XSLT and build files to transform datasets into structured TEI and HTML formats, implementing staticSearch, and ensuring that new projects are Endings Principles compliant.

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.

Kirk Melnikoff

Kirk Melnikoff is Professor of English at UNC Charlotte and a past president of the Marlowe Society of America. His research interests range from sixteenth-century British Literature and Culture, to Shakespeare in Performance, to Book History. His essays have appeared in a number of journals and books, and he is the author of Elizabethan Book Trade Publishing and the Makings of Literary Culture (U Toronto P, 2018). He has also edited four essay collections, most recently Christopher Marlowe, Theatrical Commerce, and the Book Trade (Cambridge UP, 2018), and published an edition of Robert Greene’s James IV in 2020. He is currently co-editing a collection of early modern book-trade wills which will be published by Manchester UP, editing Marlowe’s Edward II for the Oxford Marlowe: Collected Works project, and working on a monograph on bookselling in early modern England.

Laurie Ellinghausen

Laurie Ellinghausen is Professor of English at the University of Missouri—Kansas City, where she teaches courses on early modern English literature and drama. She is the author of Pirates, Traitors, and Apostates: Renegade Identities in Early Modern English Writing (U of Toronto P, 2018) and Labor and Writing in Early Modern England, 1567–1667 (Ashgate, 2008). She is also the editor of Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare’s Early Modern English History Plays (MLA Publications, 2017). Her current project is a monograph on representations of seafaring labour in proto-imperial British writing.

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.

Mark Beatrice Kaethler

Mark Beatrice Kaethler is Assistant Director, Mayoral Shows, with MoEML; Assistant Director for LEMDO; and Book Review Editor for Early Theatre. They are the author of Thomas Middleton and the Plural Politics of Jacobean Drama (De Gruyter, 2021), a co-editor with Jennifer Roberts-Smith and Janelle Jenstad of Shakespeare’s Language in Digital Media: Old Words, New Tools (Routledge, 2018), and co-editor with Grant Williams of Historicizing the Imagination in Early Modern English Literature (Palgrave, 2024). Their work has appeared in Borrowers and Lenders, Shakespeare, The London Journal, Early Theatre, Literature Compass, and Digital Studies/Le Champe Numérique as well as in several other journals and edited collections. Mark Beatrice’s research interests include early modern literature’s intersections with politics; textual editing; game studies; cognitive science; and early modern trans studies.

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.

Samuel Seaberg

Samuel Seaberg, a University of Victoria English undergrad, enjoys riding his bike. During the summer of 2025, he began working with LEMDO as a recipient of the Valerie Kuehne Undergraduate Research Award (VKURA). Unfortunately, due to his summer being spent primarily in working to establish an edition of Thomas Heywood’s If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody, Part 2 and consequently working out how to represent multi-text works in a digital space, his bike has suffered severely of sheltered seclusion from the sun. Note: Samuel now works for LEMDO as the Assistant Project Manager, much to his bike’s chagrin.

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.

Bibliography

Barbour, Richmond. Before Orientalism: London’s Theatre of the East, 1576–1626. Cambridge University Press, 2003. WSB aal241.
Hill, Tracey. “To the Honour of our Nation abroad”: The Merchant as Adventurer in Civic Pageantry. Civic Performance: Pageantry and Entertainments in Early Modern London. Ed. J. Caitlin Finlayson and Amrita Sen. New York: Routledge, 2020. 13–31.
Kipling, Gordon. Triumphal Drama: Form in English Civic Pageantry. Renaissance Drama, New Series 8 (1977): 37–56.
Klein, Bernhard. Between the Bums and Bellies of the Multitude: Civic Pageantry and the Problem of the Audience in Late Stuart London. London Journal 17.1 (1992): 18–26.
Northway, Kara. “To Kindle an Industrious Desire”: The Poetry of Work in Lord Mayors’ Shows. Comparative Drama 41.2 (2007): 167–192. DOI: 10.1353/cdr.2007.0021.
Robertson, Jean, and D.J. Gordon, eds. Collections, Vol. III: A Calendar of Dramatic Records in the Books of the Livery Companies of London, 1485–1640. Oxford: Malone Society, 1954.
Wickham, Glynne. Early English Stages 1300 to 1660. 3 vols. Routledge and Kegan Paul; rpt. Columbia University Press, 1959–1981.

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.

Metadata