Lowering Barriers to Digital Editing: Collaborative Text Annotation with Customized Tag Sets in Transkribus

What if students with no XML experience could contribute to a digital scholarly edition? A project at the Zentralbibliothek Zürich made it possible by designing a custom tagging system in Transkribus that works like a highlighter — intuitive, visual, and powerful. Automated Python scripts then convert the annotations to TEI-XML, turning accessible collaboration into rigorous scholarly output.