[Tutorial] Exploring Recogito!

Recogito is a text annotation tool. It can be used to mark up readings in an efficient and detailed manner that allows for connection between ideas and analysis of themes. You can also view statistics on your own annotations. I can see this being especially useful in the DH field if someone downloaded a CSV file of their annotations and used a visualization tool to analyze common words in annotations in order to try and extract overarching themes of a text. I would have found this tool very helpful for organizing my thoughts in some of the readings we did in this class, as well as basically any other readings I have had to do for other classes.

Let’s learn how to use Recogito!

First, you’ll need to make a Recogito account at this page. Once you have your account set up, you can log in and get started!

Navigate to the My Documents tab and click on the blue button labeled “New” on the left hand side of the page. When you do this, you should see an option to upload a file. Click on that.

It is important to note here that Recogito only supports the following upload types:

1. Plaintext files (.txt) or TEI/XML encoded text (.xml)
2. JPEG/TIFF/PNG images, or images served via IIIF
3. Spreadsheet data (.csv)

If you want to upload a PDF to annotate, you’ll have to do the little extra step of copying and pasting the text into a .txt file or using a script to OCR the PDF. I won’t cover that here because that’s a separate process, but it’s important to know so that you are aware of what kinds of files Recogito’s services support.

Once you click on “File upload,” you should be prompted to select a file from your computer.

For this tutorial, I will be using a plaintext file of one of my readings from my Introduction to Educational Studies class this term about the education debt in American schools.

Once you have found the file you want to annotate, open it.

This should bring you into the Recogito annotation interface. Yay!

To annotate a word, phrase, or passage, simply highlight the desired text. As soon as you highlight something, a window should pop up that allows you to attach additional information to your annotation. You can make notes about the highlighted passage, attach tags to it, and associate it with a place, person, and/or event. Since the example I give below doesn’t reference a specific place, person, or event, I leave those fields alone and simply write a brief summary of the highlighted passage and tag it with “big ideas.”

When you are satisfied with your annotation, click OK and it should appear as a gray bar over your desired text!

Say I wanted to annotate something like the highlighted text below:

This would be a great opportunity to make use of the Person field that Recogito offers.

Once the text is highlighted, the metadata window should pop up again. Navigate to the Person tab. Here, you can add details you want to point out or remember about a given person. In this example, I give a brief summary of Kenneth B. Clark’s significance and tag the annotation with “important figures.” Click OK to finalize the annotation.

Recogito also allows you to annotate something associate with a specific place. For example, I could highlight “Lemon Grove” in the example below and click on the Place field.

Recogito will automatically recognize Lemon Grove as a place in California. To pinpoint the location on the map, click on the orange button labeled “Change” and a map should appear.

In this example, Recogito appears to have correctly identified where Lemon Grove, California is on a map. To confirm this spot, click on the blue pointer on the map. Something like this should show up:

To add the location to the map, click on the label (“Lemon Grove, United States”) to the right of the green box.

Now the pop up window associated with your annotation should look like this, with the location correctly identified and pinned on the map. Click OK to add the annotation to your document.

I’d like to point out the “Annotation Mode” toolbar at the top of the annotation interface.

Here there are a variety of options that make the annotation process more engaging and productive. “Normal” annotation mode is what we have been operating in for the duration of this tutorial. “Relations” mode, on the other hand, allows the user to make connections between established annotations. Click on “Relations” in the tool bar and select the origin annotation. Once you do that, a dotted line should appear that you can trace around the document. Find the annotation you want to connect the origin to and click on it. You can add a tag and then click the blue check mark to confirm the relationship.

This is a fun and effective tool for analyzing readings and finding patterns and relationships between ideas.

Also in the “Annotation Mode” toolbar are options to categorize annotations by type (normal, person, place, event, etc.), verification status (verified locations will show up green, unverified normal annotations will show up grey), and first tag.

Once you are done annotating your document, you can view and analyze your annotations in a few different ways.

First, you can see any Place annotations that you created by clicking on the map button on the toolbar at the very top of the page. From there, you can click on the green dots on the map to expand the window that presents the text that the specific annotation/location is associated with. See the Lemon Grove example below!

You can also view statistics about the annotations you made by clicking on the graph-looking button on the same toolbar at the very top of the page. This page will show you information like how many annotations, tags, comments, relations, and contributors your document has. It also shows your document’s activity over time. This isn’t necessarily super useful, but it’s interesting data to look at!

Lastly, you can click on the download button on the same toolbar and see a bunch of different options for downloading either all of your annotations or specific data points like Places and Relations.

I went ahead and downloaded a CSV file of all of the annotations I made for this tutorial and opened it in Google Sheets. Take a look below!

As you can see, things like type, highlighted text, verification status, tags, and comments (cut off in the picture but on the right) are included as columns in the table. This is a super cool feature of Recogito that is useful in a lot of different contexts!

Check out these further resources

• When you make an account, Recogito automatically gives you this welcome file that contains instructions for using the tool. I highly recommend reading through it.
• Recogito also has this “10 Minute Tutorial“ on using the tool on their website. This is another great resource!