Text Annotations

Sandra Schloen, October 2023

Annotating Documents and other Textual Content in OCHRE

Prerequisites

Users should already know how to:

Introduction

While it is common to add Properties and Links to OCHRE items, it is also possible to add them to highlighted character strings in text fields like Descriptions, Notes, or Resource "internal documents." This is a powerful tool to annotate textual content throughout your project data, creating marked up documents and hyperlinked text.

OCHRE provides a separate Annotation pane on the Linked Items panel that can be used to create and edit annotations. This Annotation pane is shared among all annotations and reflects the value of the "currently selected" annotation.

This article will use an example from the CLEMENT project (Commerce and Law in Early Modern England, Transcribed) led by Prof. Emily Kadens at Northwestern Law (Chicago, IL), which richly annotates transcribed legal documents from early modern England. A detailed Taxonomy, which includes many legal concepts, provides a comprehensive set of Properties to use in text annotations as described here. Such annotations also include links to items catalogued in extensive lists of relevant images, pdfs, persons, and places.

The Show/Hide properties and links toggle button controls the display of the Annotation pane. Other chevron buttons and a slider let you control the size of the panel components.

Adding and editing text annotations

To create a new text annotation, start by using your mouse cursor to select the character string to annotate. Click the property-tag-icon button at the end of the Annotation pane's toolbar to associate the shared Annotation pane with this selected string of text. The related text will be displayed in the header of the Annotation pane as confirmation. Proceed with applying a Predefinition, or by adding properties in any of the usual ways. Click Save when finished adding or editing the properties. 

To remove properties, simply delete them and Save. If there is no other information on the annotation (i.e. no links), the string-highlight will be removed when the document is loaded or refreshed.

Use the paperclip-minus button to remove a selected link.
 Edits to links are automatically saved.

To add Links instead of, or as well as, Properties, choose the item(s) to be linked from the desired category and hierarchy of the Link Manager.  Click the Links tab of the shared Annotation pane and use the paperclip-plus button in the usual way to create a link for the selected annotation. Multiple links can be added to the annotation. Once the annotation is established you can move between its Links and Properties freely.

Note that by adding links to text strings you can create relationships to items that would not other match simply by doing "string matching." That is, you might not find John Foxe based on "Ffoxe" or other alternate spellings of his name. Additionally, indirect references to a person ("the defendant") or place ("the court") can be tagged. The annotation makes the link specific, explicit, robust, and durable. 

An alternate way to insert a link is to use the paperclip-underline button which adds the text of the link itself to the document and creates a link to it. This avoids having to copy the label of the linked item into the document, and ensures that the label is the same in both contexts.

While in Edit mode, clicking on an existing annotation establishes a connection between the annotation and the shared Annotation pane, making the properties and links of the clicked-on annotation active in the shared pane. The label -- Annotation pane: Properties and links for -- displays the character string of the active annotation.  

If at any time you lose focus on the shared Annotation pane -- that is, the association between the selected text annotation and the shared pane is interrupted -- simply click the annotation in the text field or document again to re-establish the connection.

View of annotations, as an editor

If you are working as a editor, when you View an annotated document, or an item with annotated text fields, and click a highlighted link, the Annotation information will pop up in a resizable window.  Links in the annotation pop up are active and provide additional click-through potential.

Users can toggle from edit mode to view mode.

View of annotations, as an reader

Annotation View is provided for readers of an annotated document. This includes readers with view-only access, or for editors who turn on view-only mode by toggling the quill-icon (edit mode) to the eye-of-Horus icon (view mode).

In Annotation View the Linked items pane becomes a read-only panel that displays the Links and Properties of the annotation that is currently selected in the View pane. This view lets users read the document in the View pane while clicking on the annotations to see the related, linked descriptive content in the right-most pane. A slider lets the reader adjust the sizes of the Links and Properties panes, depending on the nature of the annotations.

Querying annotations

Querying annotations works as you would expect, selecting Criteria in the usual way. However, in this case, change the query Type to "Annotations." This tells OCHRE to looks for Properties on text annotations, rather than on items in any specified category.

In the example below, the Resources category is selected and the Type is set to Annotations. OCHRE finds all text annotations that describe the Profession of the tagged string as representing that of a Doctor. Query results of annotations are listed showing their string content followed by the document in which they were annotated:

 Hector Nonas doctor of Phisicke [REQ 2/246/60 Nunez v. Smyth Bill of Complaint]

Clicking on any of the results in the Query Results list pops up the same annotation window as shown above when viewing as an editor. 

From the Query Results list you also have the option of clicking the document-icon from the Quick-view menu to see the currently selected annotation highlighted in the context of its source document.

Other considerations