Recogito-in-a-Box: From Annotation to Digital Edition

Abstract

Through the combination of two popular approaches in the Digital Humanities – digital editions and semantic annotation – this tutorial will present simple ways to create, analyse and export semantic annotations from texts and images, and publish them online. It will introduce intuitive, user-friendly, open-source tools interwoven in an integrated workflow from Recogito – a free online semantic annotation tool developed by the Pelagios Network – to documents encoded according to the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) standard. With this tutorial, users interested in semantic annotation and digital editions will learn how to benefit from Recogito’s automatic recognition of named entities, and how to refine them manually, checking the place references against historical gazetteers. They will learn how to create annotations ex novo , check or modify annotations identified by Recogito, and discover how the geo-annotations produced on the text can then be plotted on a digital map. Finally, users will learn how to use Recogito’s export options and, in particular, the TEI format, which will become the starting point of a TEI-based simple minimal edition. As a case study, it will focus on the semantic and geographic annotation of an early Argentinian chronicle called Historia de la Conquista del Río de la Plata , better known as La Argentina Manuscrita , written by Ruy Diaz de Guzman in the early seventeenth century.