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As with any image, how you cite a political cartoon depends on where you found it. Say, for example, you found it republished on a museum Web site. Using the MLA format template, include the artist’s name, the title of the work (or a description of the work if no title is given), the name of the publisher, and the work’s publication date. Then provide the name of the Web site and its publication details in a second container, as shown in the example below:
Gillray, James. The Plumb-Pudding in Danger; or, State Epicures Taking un Petit Souper.
Indicate in your caption that you have edited the image. For works that will be published, ensure that you have been granted the rights to do so by the rights holder.
Say, for example, that you have used this digital image of Berthe Morisot’s nineteenth-century painting Reading in your paper:
But instead of inserting the image as is, you have replaced the book in the painting with a picture of a twenty-first-century novel. Your caption might read as follows:
Adapted from Berthe Morisot; Reading; 1873; The Cleveland Museum of Art, www.clevelandart.org/art/1950.89.
For more on citing captions, . . .
Cite an image used in a PowerPoint presentation or Web project the same way you would cite it in a printed paper. See the example in our post on citing a screenshot or frame capture in a caption. As the post explains, if the image is merely illustrative, provide full publication details in a caption. But if you refer to the source of the image elsewhere, the caption should provide only enough detail needed to key to a works-cited-list entry. The list of works cited may be included as the final slide or as the last page of the Web project. . . .
To cite an infographic, follow the MLA format template. If the infographic does not have an official title, provide a description of it. If you link directly to a PDF of the infographic, it is usually sufficient to cite the PDF as a standalone work and not one contained by the Web site hosting the link:
Infographic. Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future, www.foodspanlearning.org/_pdf/lesson-plan/JohnHopkins_info_0714.pdf.
If the infographic is embedded in another work, such as a blog post, one option is to refer to the infographic in your text and create a works-cited-list entry for the work in which the infographic is included:
The 100 Most Popular Keywords on Google infographic shows that the term most searched for during the twelve-month period ending 1 June 2018 was weather (Brumberg). . . .
When citing an image reproduced in an article on a Web site, you can generally refer to it in your text and then key the reference to a works-cited-list entry for the article. In the example below, the image, reproduced in an article on a Web site, is described in prose, and the name of the article’s author is provided in a parenthetical citation that keys to the works-cited-list entry:
A recent article summarizing a study of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa shows a scan of the original Mona Lisa so that readers can judge for themselves whether or not the woman in the painting is smiling (Daley).
Cite each speech bubble individually. Do not use slashes to indicate quotations from separate speech bubbles. Use ellipses only to omit text from a single speech bubble.
In Fun Home the narrator recalls episodes in her parents’ troubled marriage. In one scene Alison and her brothers are shown sitting at the top of a staircase, listening to their parents argue below. They hear their mother say, “I’m warning you. You can’t keep doing this.” Their father retorts, “I can do whatever I want” (68), a declaration that is punctuated by a loud crash. “What was that?” asks Alison’s younger brother.
Published 5 September 2018
No. If you cite an image from a database, your works-cited-list entry should only provide the information you are given.
The caption usually appears beneath the image. If you discuss the work from which the screenshot or frame capture is taken, the caption should act much like an in-text reference and provide the information needed to key to a works-cited-list entry as well as the time stamp where the screenshot or frame capture appears in the work:
Fig. 1. Still from Berrow, See the Quiet Beauty (2:23).
Work Cited
Berrow, Joya, director. See the Quiet Beauty of Farm Life on the Scottish Isles: Short Film Showcase. YouTube, uploaded by National Geographic, 6 Feb.
In some cases, the unnumbered page is counted as a page but not numbered as such. If the unnumbered page is between 117 and 119, simply call it 118:
In book 4 of Paradise Lost, Satan observes Adam and Eve together in the garden. In William Blake’s illustration of this scene, the serpent is wrapped around Satan, who points suggestively at the first couple (Milton 118).
Work Cited
Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Edited by David Hawkes, Barnes and Noble Classics, 2004.
In some books, several images appear together. These are often printed on a different kind of paper from the surrounding text and not counted in the page numbering.
Here we refer to meme in its sense as “an amusing or interesting item (such as a captioned picture or video) or genre of items that is spread widely online especially through social media” (“Meme”).
Citing Particular Examples of Memes
You would cite a meme in MLA style just as you would any other work: follow the MLA format template. When citing a meme, you should cite the particular instance or instances of the meme you consult—not the entire genre, the examples of which are usually created by many different hands and published in various places and at various times.
Published 13 December 2017