Humanities and long-form: biblatex, footnotes, and chapter books

Humanities manuscripts care about citation shape as much as argument. A numeric IEEE style is wrong here. Footnotes, author-title, and archival sources are the norm.

Prefer biblatex for flexibility

biblatex handles footnotes, verbose styles, and shorthand better than classic BibTeX for most humanities workflows:

\usepackage[backend=biber,style=verbose-ibid]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{sources.bib}

Styles vary by field and publisher; match the department handbook first. Background: BibTeX or biblatex.

Archival and web sources

Letters, manuscripts, and websites need fields that journal @article entries do not care about. Use @unpublished, @misc, or biblatex’s @online with access dates. Incomplete entries fail quietly until the bibliography looks sparse.

Chapters and critical editions

Book-length projects want book or a university thesis class with \include per chapter. Cross-references to other chapters should use \ref / \cref, not hard-coded “see Chapter 4” strings that rot when you reorder.

Quotation and language

Use proper quotation marks for the language of the paper (csquotes helps). For multi-language projects, XeLaTeX or LuaLaTeX with fontspec and a language package is less painful than stacking 1990s inputenc hacks.

Local ownership of years of notes

A dissertation is a multi-year file tree. Keeping it only in a browser project tied to one account is a risk when students change institutions. Plain folders plus Git, compiled locally, age better. That is the problem local-first tools are built for.