Linking Your *-ographies: Developing project-specific TEI Authority File Lookups for LEAF-Writer

• James Cummings, Newcastle University,  https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6686-3728  
• Luciano Frizzera, University of Waterloo,  https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7244-4178 
• Diane Jakacki, Bucknell University,  https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7836-1223 
• Susan Brown, University of Guelph, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0267-7344 
• Mihaela Ilovan, University of Alberta, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0649-4465 
• Kelsey Rubin-Detlev, University of Southern California,   https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0654-0273 

LEAF-Writer is a popular, free, web-based, semantic editor for Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) and Linked Open Data (LOD) annotation. While LEAF-Writer is available in a standalone version that anyone can use (LEAF-Writer Commons), it is also a crucial component of the larger LEAF-VRE environment. LEAF-Writer Commons runs entirely in your browser and files are saved to your own GitHub repositories (or downloaded locally), with no data stored on LEAF servers.

LEAF-Writer provides an easy text-first editing interface that encourages the encoder to focus on adding semantic markup, scholarly notes, and identifying named entities. You can choose to edit in the tags-off view, show tags, or edit the underlying TEI XML. LEAF-Writer includes schema-constrained context-sensitive tagging and validation using out-of-the-box popular TEI customizations, or use your own custom TEI project schemas (with your own CSS). One of LEAF-Writer’s most important features is its built-in support for named entity linking. This enables tagging names of people, places, organisations, or works and associating these (with both TEI markup and LOD) to recognised authorities (such as VIAF, Wikidata, DBPedia, Getty, Geonames, GND and LINCS). LEAF-Writer can also generate LOD Annotations from already tagged XML references. 

Recently, the LEAF team, in collaboration with the CatCor (Correspondence of Catherine the Great) project has introduced functionality for adding web-accessible project-specific TEI Authority files for particular entity types. (e.g. a TEI ‘personography’ file containing a <listPerson> for person entities, <listPlace> for place entities, etc.). This exciting new feature is for many TEI projects that want to do look-ups using their own project-specific ‘*-ography’ authority files. 

LEAF-Writer was introduced at TEI2022 and we have run workshops and presented new features to the TEI community in the years since. For this conference, we will concentrate on these ‘new territories’ of project-specific TEI Authority Files for named entity lookups.