Tool: Recogito

“Nouae Africae delineatio”by sjrankin is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

What Is Recogito?

Recogito, developed and maintained by the digital humanities initiative Pelagios Commons, is a tool for collaboratively annotating source text, tabular data, and images, and makes those sources more easily discoverable on the Web. In 2018, it won the DH Award for Best DH Tool.

How Can You Use Recogito?

Recogito allows you to upload both text and image files alike to create new documents in the platform. After uploading a textual document, Recogito is able to run Named Entity Recognition (NER) on the text: this automates the process of identifying and annotating places and persons in the text. Using automated identification and annotation can be a great way to start the process of identifying certain entities in a text, but automated work should always be checked for accuracy. You can enrich your identifications and annotations by assigning them manually and including Events, in addition to Person and Place. Images can also be annotated using Recogito: it offers two functions that are especially useful for the annotation of symbols and place name labels on digitized historic maps.

After annotating and identifying words and phrases in a document as Places, you can assign that reference to a gazetteer, or a list of places, so that it can be plotted on a map. Recogito has a list of supported gazetteers from which it can provide automated suggestions for places. Another automation feature is that Recogito can search the text for identical phrases so that the gazetteer assignment can be quickly applied to matches.

Recogito can be used collaboratively: documents can be shared with others, and allows for tiered levels of access. Read allows users to see the document, but not add any annotations or comments. Write allows users to annotate and comment on a document. Admin gives users the ability to annotate and comment, as well as edit metadata, invite other collaborators, and download backups of the data.

How Can You Access Recogito?

Recogito is web-based, so all you need to do is create a free account on their website. For more information on using Recogito, they offer a 10-minute tutorial on annotating text and image files.