Abstract
Annotation in the Humanities and Social Sciences covers a broad spectrum of different concepts and practices. Hermeneutic approaches differ regarding the theoretical novelty of their hypotheses: a) verifying hypotheses in deductive approaches, b) extracting new hypotheses within the framework of existing theoretical assumptions in inductive approaches and c) generating theories related to the subject matter in abductive approaches. When it comes to annotations, we suggest a classification based on two criteria. The first criterion distinguishes processoriented annotations from more product-oriented ones. This often correlates with the hermeneutic approach and at what point in the process of developing new knowledge annotation is actually applied. The second criterion relates to the mode of annotation: whether the main focus is on performing annotation manually or on applying automatic annotation. We exemplify our classification by means of cases involving the annotation of categories from (Computational) Linguistics and Cultural Anthropology in the interdisciplinary project hermA.
