Annotations from Recogito

If you have read a text, a map or a table in Recogito or Recogito Studio and linked the places it mentions to a gazetteer, you have already done most of the work of organising that evidence in PLATO’s shape. Each link says: this passage, in this document, names this place. That is an attestation.

PLATO tools turns a Recogito download into a PLATO dataset, which you can then check, convert to the spreadsheet tables or to Linked Places Format, and add to.

How to do it

  1. In Recogito, download your document’s annotations in the W3C Web Annotation format (a JSON-LD file).

  2. Open PLATO tools, drop the file on it, and choose Convert, with the format you want.

  3. Read the report. It lists everything that was not carried over, and why.

Nothing leaves your computer: PLATO tools works entirely in your browser.

What each part of an annotation becomes

In Recogito

In PLATO

The place you linked the passage to (a Pleiades, GeoNames, Wikidata or WHG address)

What the attestation is about

The words you marked

The name the source uses, recorded as attested

For a map or image, your transcription of the label

The name

The document

The source

Where in the document: the characters, the paragraph of a TEI text, the region of an image, the page, the row of a table

The citation’s locator, written out in words (“characters 1083 to 1092”, “row 2”)

Who made the link, and when

The attestation’s contributor and dates

Comments, notes and free tags

The attestation’s notes

A tag from a vocabulary (an AAT or Wikidata concept)

A type

A passage linked to two places becomes two attestations, each with a note naming the other.

What is left out, and why

Links a person never confirmed. Recogito can suggest place links by itself, by recognising place names in a text. A suggestion is not anyone’s statement, so PLATO tools leaves it out rather than record it as evidence, and the report counts what was left out. Review the suggestions in Recogito before you download, and confirm or delete each one.

There is one case PLATO tools cannot detect. In Recogito’s first version, a place added with the automatic best match, and never checked, looks in the download exactly like a confirmed one. If you worked that way, check those links before you download; the report reminds you of this.

Mentions never linked. A passage marked as a place but not linked to any gazetteer has nothing to be evidence about. People and events are left out too: PLATO records evidence about places, routes and other things whose identity is bound up with space, not about people or events.

The gazetteer’s own coordinates and titles. A Recogito download can include coordinates or a title taken from the matched gazetteer. They are the gazetteer’s, not your document’s evidence, so they are not recorded as your attestation. The place’s own gazetteer still has them.

Shapes drawn on an image. A rectangle is kept as a region in the locator; a freely drawn shape is reported, and only its presence is noted.

Recogito Studio documents. Studio’s download names the project rather than the document, so annotations from several documents cannot be told apart. Download one document at a time.

Identifiers

Each attestation’s notes give the address of the annotation it came from (“From annotation …”), so you can always find your way back to Recogito. The annotation’s address is not used as the attestation’s own identifier: you may edit an annotation and download it again, but an attestation in a published dataset must never change. See PLATO and FAIR data.

The full mapping, for developers, is beside PLATO tools’ annotation test files.