3. Textual Tags

Textual tags are an effective way to enhance your transcriptions by tagging specific words like abbreviations, places, and people, and adding additional attributes. These tags can also help in identifying uncertain words in your transcription, and you have the flexibility to export all or selected tags.

Textual tags are centrally managed at the collection level, making it easy for all collaborators within the collection to edit and utilise them.

Step 1: 

To add textual tags after you have automatically transcribed, or while manually transcribing a document, open the page and highlight the word(s) to tag in the text editor. The tagging window opens up: here, you can select the relevant tag and add its attributes, if necessary.

To choose which tags you want to see in this tagging window, simply click on "Tag settings". You can enable or disable the tagging window completely by clicking on the Edit Tags icon located in the menu on the upper right side of the screen.

It is possible to easily add the Wikidata ID as a tag attribute. After selecting a tag, simply click on the Wikidata ID button and a suggested entity related to the selected word will appear. You can select it if it's correct or use the search bar to find the appropriate Wikidata term.

Step 2:

If you want to add and change customised tags or modify the attributes, click on the Settings icon located in the menu on the right side of the screen and go to "Tags". Here you can choose between "Structural tags" and "Textual tags" and switch tag visibility on or off by clicking on the buttons. To see the changes made you will have to reload your webpage. 

To modify or add customised structural tags, simply click on "Edit tags in collection settings" and you will be redirected to the Tags page in the Transkribus Desk area. This is where you can make changes to all your tags.

You can also manage the textual tags of an entire collection, simply open the collection and click on Manage Tags in the menu located at the top right corner, next to the "Upload Files" button. Then, select "Textual Tags" at the top. Here, you can add, edit, and remove textual tags and their attributes.

To add a new tag, click on “Create new”, type the name, choose the colour and possible attributes and click “Create” to save your changes. Reload your page to see the changes in the editor.

Click on the "edit" or "delete" button on the right side of the textual tags to modify your textual tags or to delete them by clicking on the "Remove tag" button.

When it comes to default tags, you have the option to delete them using the "Remove tag" button or to add new attributes to them. However, it's important to note that you cannot delete the existing attributes.

Attributes provide information about the content of the tag and can be used to extract and process data from the transcription. For example, the date tag allows you to tag a date written in the document and add properties such as the day, month, and year in a standardised format. It's worth mentioning that not all tags require attributes, it depends on your specific needs.

Step 3:

In the tagging window, you can also modify the text styles by adding bold, strikethrough, underline, subscript, and superscript to your text. When you apply one of these styles to a word, you will see the word change in appearance, but in the background, Transkribus adds a textual tag to that word to indicate the text style. 

When working with historical documents, it is important to tailor the selection of textual tags to your specific needs. In general, certain tags are particularly useful in this context.

• Abbreviation
  You can tag the abbreviated word and type the expansion as an attribute.
  There is no right way to deal with abbreviations. Depending on the transcription you want to have in the end, you can adopt one of these approaches:
1. Transcribe the expanded version of the abbreviation directly into the text editor (the neural networks are often able to learn to recognise and use expansions, especially if they appear frequently); 
2. Transcribe the abbreviation using the base characters most similar to the characters written by the writer; you can then tag it and write the expansion as an attribute;
3. Transcribe the abbreviation using the Unicode characters which are near to the special graphemes of the original document. Remember that the Virtual Keyboard enables you to add special characters. Since it is often hard to decide which Unicode character may be the right one, you may also consult the MUFI website to get more information on this issue. As above, if interested, you can tag the abbreviation and write the expansion as an attribute.
• Unclear
  Use this tag when the text can not be transcribed since it is illegible. Highlight the unclear text in the text editor and tag it as “unclear”; you may also add alternatives or suggestions for the illegible word as an attribute of the tag.
• Gap
  If the text is impossible to read, add the “gap” tag where the illegible text should appear in the text editor.
• Blackening
  Use this tag to redact sensitive information in the export formats. Typically this is used to hide personal data in a document that is made publicly available. The blackening tag is used in conjunction with the “blackening” region to hide the word or section in the image. For now, the “blackening” region and the advanced export feature to render blackening are available only in Transkribus eXpert.
  
  

Once you have finished tagging your transcriptions, you can download your tags, for example in an Excel or Docx file, as described on the Downloading page. More download options as well as the possibility to search for your tags will be implemented soon. In the meantime, you can use the export and search functions in Transkribus eXpert, as described below.