LEMDO Style Guidelines

The LEMDO style guidelines are meant to govern the About pages of the LEMDO anthology, any promotional materials for LEMDO, social media posts, and correspondence between the LEMDO team and contributors. These guidelines cover matters like preferred spellings, punctuation placement, and preferred external style guides.

Authorities

The following authorities are listed in the order in which they should be consulted:
This present style guide.
MLA Handbook (7th edition). The new MLA Handbook (9th edition) was released in Fall 2021. We have not yet assessed the implications of any new protocols therein.
The Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition). CMOS is more verbose than MLA on matters of style, citation, and formatting.
The University of Victoria Style Guide.

Spelling

Use Canadian spellings. In the following table, the spellings in the first column are preferred over those in the second column1:
Preferred Non-Preferred
Acknowledgement Acknowledgment
Analogue Analog
Apparelled Appareled
Armour Armor
Behaviour Behavior
Centre Center
Checkbox Check box; check-box
Colour Color
Copy-text Copytext; copy text
Clamour Clamor
Defence Defense
Dialogue Dialog
Dropdown Drop-down
Enquiry (questioning) Inquiry (questioning)
Ensure (make certain) Ensure or insure (make certain)
Favour Favor
Fervour Fervor
Grey Gray
Harbour Harbor
Honour Honor
Judgement Judgment
License (noun and verb) Licence (noun); License (verb)
Mould Mold
Moustache Mustache
Manoeuvre Maneuver
Neighbour Neighbor
Offence Offense
Old-spelling (as an adjective)2 Old spelling (as an adjective)
Playtext Play text; play-text
Plough Plow
Practice (noun) Practise (verb) Practice (noun and verb)
Promptbook Prompt book, prompt-book
Rumour Rumor
Sceptre Scepter
Signalling Signaling
Skilful Skillful
Succour Succor
Theatre Theater
Tonne Ton
Totalled Totaled
Traveller Traveler
Tunnelled Tunneled
Unfavourable Unfavorable
Wilful Willful
Worshipped Worshiped
A.S.Sp. A.S.SP

Terminology

Use markup to refer to the tags you will add to your text, and reserve mark up for the action of adding markup.
Hyphenate born-digital when it is being used as an adjective to modify a noun (e.g., born-digital document).

Capitalization

A list of the kinds of words to be capitalized will be found in the MLA Handbook, 2.64-2.70.
In citing titles of articles and books, use initial capitals for the main words (title case).
Capitalize such words as Medieval, Renaissance, Reformation, Restoration, Protestant, Catholic (unless it is a matter of catholic taste), and the Church (as an institution).
Do not capitalize honorifics like your grace, your honour, my lord, etc.
Use lower case for references to god, and use lower case for pronouns referring to him or her.
Use lower case for the word sig in citations of signature numbers in references to early modern printed books: sig. A2r.

Punctuation

Use em dashes in the same way that you would use commas or parentheses, to offset subordinate or interrupting clauses.
Do not add a space on either side of em dashes.
Use en dashes in date ranges and page number ranges.
Use hyphens for words that are hyphenated.
MLA recommends that periods not be used with abbreviations composed of capitals. A period will normally follow an abbreviation that ends with a lower case letter: OED, MS (manuscript), references like SP and SD (speech prefix and stage direction), and plays like 2H4 (Henry IV, Part 2; compare Ham.), Mr., Ms., and St. (for Saint).
Use a serial comma before the final and in a series: Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.
Use a comma after both e.g. and i.e.

Abbreviate Titles

If you choose to abbreviate titles of periodicals and standard works of reference, do so without internal stops: RES, TLS, SQ, etc., not R.E.S., T.L.S., S.Q., etc. Use standard abbreviations found in the PMLA Bibliography, for example, and list in the Abbreviations.
We follow the CMOS and abbreviate circa as ca. for greater clarity.

Names of Authors

In referring to authors, editors, etc., use the full name, without any honorific on the first occurrence, and the surname only thereafter, thus: Muriel Bradbrook (first occurrence; not Prof.) and Bradbrook (thereafter). This rule need not apply to formal acknowledgments in the preliminary matter, etc.

Possessives

Use ʼs for the possessive, including words ending in -s. s, thus: Davisʼs (not Davisʼ) and Descartesʼs. In the play-text, meter may sometimes call for modification of this rule.

Plurals of Numbers and Abbreviations

Do not use an apostrophe for the plurals of numbers or abbreviations: the 1590s, PhDs.

Notes

1.When you are quoting, always quote the spellings as they appear in the source.
2.Note that we prefer to use semi-diplomatic rather than the depricated old-spelling.

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 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.

Kate LeBere

Project Manager, 2020–2021. Assistant Project Manager, 2019–2020. Textual Remediator and Encoder, 2019–2021. Kate LeBere completed her BA (Hons.) in History and English at the University of Victoria in 2020. During her degree she published papers in The Corvette (2018), The Albatross (2019), and PLVS VLTRA (2020) and presented at the English Undergraduate Conference (2019), Qualicum History Conference (2020), and the Digital Humanities Summer Institute’s Project Management in the Humanities Conference (2021). While her primary research focus was sixteenth and seventeenth century England, she completed her honours thesis on Soviet ballet during the Russian Cultural Revolution. She is currently a student at the University of British Columbia’s iSchool, working on her masters in library and information science.

Martin Holmes

Martin Holmes has worked as a developer in the UVicʼs 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

Project manager 2022–present. Textual remediator 2021–present. Navarra Houldin (they/them) completed their BA in History and Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. During their degree, they worked as a teaching assistant with the University of Victoriaʼs Department of Hispanic and Italian Studies. Their primary research was on gender and sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America.

Nicole Vatcher

Technical Documentation Writer, 2020–2022. Nicole Vatcher completed her BA (Hons.) in English at the University of Victoria in 2021. Her primary research focus was womenʼs writing in the modernist period.

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.

Metadata