Recogito: Online OS Tool for Collaborative Document Annotation

Venue: Online
Dates:

1. Friday, 28 April 2023 – 12:00 to 14:00 CEST 
2. Friday, 12 May 2023 – 12:00 to 14:00 CEST 
3. Friday, 19 May 2023 – 12:00 to 14:00 CEST 

Instructors: Elton Barker (The Open University), Valeria Vitale (University of Sheffield), Rainer Simon (AIT – Austrian Institute of Technology)
Moderators: Isabella di Lenardo (EPFL, Local Time Machines Coordinator TMO), Ilaria Manzini (Local Time Machines Manager TMO)
Registration: Register via online form here (for TMO members only)

About Recogito

Document annotation is an established part of Humanities research practice, and is increasingly used as a teaching aide or for curating Cultural Heritage. Digital annotation facilitates research and learning and enables practitioners to share and exchange knowledge, while collaborating in the analysis and interpretation of source material on a global level.

In this Academy, we introduce Recogito, an online tool for the collaborative annotation of text and images. The three sessions are aimed at scholars, curators, Digital Humanists and technologists alike. In the first session we will introduce the tool and its features, focusing particularly on its capabilities for semantic geo-annotation: i.e. the matching of place names in documents to global gazetteers in order to produce maps from text, compare different map representations, and to link data.

In the second Academy session, we will present two case studies – one text-based, one image-based – drawn from different historical periods, to give a richer picture of the tool’s functionality. There will also be ample opportunity to experiment with the tool hands-on.

In the last session, we will introduce Annotorious and RecogitoJS, two JavaScript libraries that make the image- and text-annotation interface from Recogito embeddable into any website. This way, DH projects can create their own annotation environments easily, and customise them according to specific project needs. In this last session we will also showcase some recent developments and outline the community infrastructure supporting this work.

Background information on Recogito

Recogito was developed by Pelagios, the leading Humanities linked open data (LOD) initiative, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (as well as with funding from JISC, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Open Knowledge Foundation and DARIAH). Since 2019, Pelagios has been re-established as a formal Association, the Pelagios Network, comprised of equal and interdependent partners from around the world. Run by and for the wider community, Pelagios has achieved sustainability through each partner individually contributing their time and expertise, and in some cases funding, for continuing to develop the LOD ecosystem, and specifically tools and methods for geo-annotating and mapping cultural heritage data.