Describers

Describers are individuals or systems that provide descriptions of objects, events, data, or phenomena. The term comes from describe and the agentive suffix -er, indicating an agent who performs the act of describing. Describers translate observations into textual or spoken representations that others can understand.

In biology and taxonomy, the describer is the scientist who first formally describes a species and assigns its scientific name. The describer’s name is cited as the authority after the species epithet. For example, Carl Linnaeus is noted as the describer of numerous taxa, with the year sometimes appended. Valid descriptions must meet scientific standards and be published to be recognized.

In accessibility and media production, an audio describer creates spoken descriptions of visual elements to assist blind or visually impaired audiences. Descriptions cover setting, appearance, actions, and expressions and are timed to avoid interrupting dialogue or narration. Describers may work for films, theatre, museums, or live events, and can perform live or provide pre-recorded narration.

In data science and artificial intelligence, a describer component generates natural language descriptions from data, tables, images, or model outputs. Such descriptions support descriptive analytics, reporting, and explainability, and can be rule-based or learned by machine learning models. The quality of a describer is judged by accuracy, relevance, conciseness, and readability.