How tagging works
The Episode Explorer relies on community tagging. Every episode is linked to one or more Periods, Regions, Topics, and sometimes a Series. These tags power all filters, charts, groupings and statistics across the site.
To keep things consistent, the tagging sheet uses locked dropdown lists. This ensures that categories remain stable across contributions.
Period, Region & Topic
These fields use pre-defined multi-select dropdowns. You may choose as many as needed, but you cannot create new values.
Examples of inconsistent tagging this prevents:
- “Early Medieval” vs “Early-Medieval”
- “Middle East” vs “ME”
- “America” vs “The Americas”
Allowed values are centrally maintained to keep filtering predictable and clean.
Series
The Series field is auto-suggested from the episode title, but you may freely edit or correct it.
It is the only editable free-text field. All other tagging fields use controlled lists to prevent accidental creation of new categories.
Locked fields
Episode titles, descriptions, dates, IDs, and all technical metadata are imported automatically from the official RSS feed and are locked for editing.
Only the tag fields described above are editable.
Contribute to tagging
You can edit Period, Region and Topic — all of them allow multiple selections. Series is semi-automatic and can be changed manually.
All other fields remain locked. Historians prefer their data unpillaged.
If someone tags an episode wildly incorrectly, don’t worry — another historian will quietly invade and restore order.
The tagging sheet is open for everyone to read. If you’d like editing access beyond the default viewer mode, you can request access using this Google Form:
Request editing access →You can view all current tagging data in the community sheet:
Open tagging sheet →Contact the maintainer
The Explorer is a community-driven project — most tagging improvements can be updated directly in the shared sheet by anyone who notices them.
If you still want to get in touch, feel free to send an email. I do my best to reply, even if it sometimes takes a little while.
📧 trihexplorer@gmail.com