Tagging people and places

Objectives

The greatest use for the encoded Egyptian Gazette will come in linking its content to other data sets. There are wonderful datasets listing people and places of the past. This tutorial explains how we will link our project to those projects. To do so, we will use the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI)’s rich schema for tagging people and places.

1. Tagging places

The basic tag that we will use is <placeName>. Full details of usage are here and here.

The key element we will use to link our places to other date sets is ref=. We can use this to link to authorities such as wikidata, geonames, or geohack

Resources

• Goad fire insurance maps of Alexandria and Cairo
• David Rumsey map collection
• Wikimapia

2. Tagging persons

The basic tag we will use is <persName>. Full details of usage are here.

Work to link persons to references such as wikidata or viaf. For instance, you might describe Cromer thus:

<persName ref="https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q336487">
 <forename>Evelyn</forename>
 <surname>Baring</surname>, <roleName>1st Earl of Cromer</roleName>
</persName>

For persons not named, but who have a reference that you can supply (either an external authority or an xml:id), use <rs> (refering string).

3. Tagging events

To label an event, use a variant of the <interp xml:id=""> tag.