Recogito Tutorial: Creating Place Annotations - pelagios/pelagios.github.io GitHub Wiki

While Recogito enables you to do different kinds of annotation (see below), it has been designed specifically for geo-annotation - annotating place references - using external authority lists called "gazetteers". If you want to know more about gazetteers and the unique identifiers they assign to contemporary and historical places, you can read our FAQ. To annotate places is a two-step process. The first step is to highlight the word or words you want to annotate, such asthe name “Rome”. When you highlight a word, a pop-up box will appear, prompting you to add more information about your target annotation—what kind of entity it is, whether you want to add any comments or tags to further define it. The pop-up has three category buttons: “place”, “person”, and “event”. You can use these buttons to, optionally, assign (one or more) categories to the annotation. We will talk more about annotations non related to places in the "Creating other annotations" section.

By selecting the “place” option, you start the next step of the process: Recogito tries to match the word that you have highlighted as a place with place-names drawn from its suite of gazetteers, and it shows you a preliminary list of relevant results, accompanied by a small map view and a “warning” sign to underline that you need to “verify” the match. If you want to know what are all the available gazetteers in Recogito, you can read the "Annotation Preferences" section.

After Recogito establishes a connection between the word(s) you have selected and a gazetteer, you have four options:

  1. The match is correct: In this case, Recogito has matched the word “Rome” to a gazetteer record which places its location at the centre of the Italian peninsula, and you are happy with the association. By clicking the “confirm” button, you verify the annotation, that now has an author (your username), and a time stamp. The word that you identified in the text as a place will now be in green highlight, showing that it is a place which has been successfully matched with a gazetteer record. Alternative colour codes available in Recogito will be discussed in the "Document View" section.

  1. The match is not correct, and you wish to change it: In this case, you click on the “change” button through which you will access a larger map view and a list of alternative matches for your place. If you find a better match among those suggested, first click on it, then confirm the match. As before, your verified annotation will now be in green highlight (see 1). If none of these options seem appropriate, you can try typing alternative spellings of the place-name in the search field to get different results. For example the name “Roma” in Italian instead of the English “Rome”.

  2. There is no match found: In this case, after you have exhausted all your options (under #2), and you still can’t seem to find the place you want from any of the gazetteer records in Recogito, you can click on the “flag this place” option. You will still be creating a geo-annotation, but it won’t be attached to any gazetteer and (thus) won’t show on Recogito’s Map view. It will appear in yellow highlight in the text.

  3. The match is not correct and you want to delete the annotation: In this case, simply click on the bin button and the annotation will disappear.