annotate

Annotate means to add notes, comments, or explanations to a text, image, data set, or other information object. The term derives from Latin annotare, from nota “a mark, a note.” In scholarly and educational contexts, annotation involves marginalia, glosses, or summaries intended to clarify meaning, indicate sources, or guide interpretation.

Annotation can be manual or automatic. Manual annotation is performed by readers, scholars, or students who add marginal notes, inline comments, or critical markings. Automatic annotation uses algorithms to assign metadata or labels to content, often as part of data labeling for machine learning. Hybrid approaches combine both.

In text analysis, humanities, and philology, annotations may identify linguistic features, define terms, supply cross-references, or offer scholarly commentary. In digital contexts, annotations can be semantic tags, syntactic annotations, markup, or linked notes that attach information to specific passages, images, or time points in video or audio.

Applications span education, research, publishing, and data science. Annotated editions and marginalia support comprehension and scholarly dialogue. In data science, labeled data produced by annotation underpins supervised learning for natural language processing, computer vision, and information retrieval. Annotation also enhances searchability, reproducibility, and provenance.

Tools and standards vary by domain. Text annotation tools include readers or editors; image, video, and audio annotation platforms support bounding boxes, segmentation, timestamps, and transcripts. Key challenges include subjectivity and consistency, scalability, quality control, and maintaining clear audit trails.