Annotation

Mina Sadeghi
Translated by Mandana Karimi

2025-6-17

When conducting research or during the editing stage, the audience must be considered and the context must be provided for a better understanding of the text. When a series of statements or terms and expressions are used in the research that create ambiguity for the audience or cause damage to the semantic chain of the oral history text,[1] these sections must be annotated. Elements such as names of places and people, book names, historical events, local terms, political issues, or any other concept require information that will keep the audience more informed about the course of events. Therefore, the editor, by referring to reliable documents and sources, provides the required information in the form of footnotes, endnotes, chapter appendices, or even explanations within the text so that the final output has a greater ability to understand the content.[2] The purpose of this work is to clarify and disambiguate the statements in the text for the audience, which both enriches and authenticates the work and sends the message to the audience that sufficient research has been done on the text and that he is not simply faced with a raw text, and that the researcher has taken the necessary steps on behalf of the audience, and that the text can be referred to by all interested parties and researchers.[3]

In other words, annotation in oral history means explaining and clarifying the interview text, which may be vague and incomprehensible to the audience, and in some cases may even evoke completely false meanings and concepts that are far from the objectives of the research. For example, the narrator may present limited information with general interpretations based on his own image of the incident and consider it clear, which may lead to the mind of an unfamiliar audience being misled.

In other cases, specialized topics may be mentioned that the reader cannot understand some of the terms, or they may be incompletely or incorrectly narrated due to the passage of time and the narrator’s weak memory, or due to some political marginalizations and even emotional and sentimental considerations. In these cases, too, there is a need for clarification. Of course, in the first step, the interviewer clarifies the subject with targeted and precise questions. In the second step, if the interviewer has not resolved these ambiguities, the editor must pay attention to these issues and resolve them. The need for annotation becomes clear when the narrative presented to the audience is correct and clear.

In response to the question of what quality annotation should be presented, it should be noted that the annotation of each work is related to its time, place, conditions, and audience; for example, there may be a time when something happens in the country that makes a lot of noise and everyone becomes aware of it. At that time, this issue was understandable to everyone, but the same issue 30 years later and in a wider spatial dimension, is in serious need of explanation and disambiguation. In other words, each work, given its characteristics, can be considered for a specific and limited level of time, geography, and audience, and depending on their scope, it needs to be annotated. Therefore, annotation is a floating topic that requires its own requirements in each case.[4] This issue should be considered even in the normal process of content production as to when and to what extent there is a need for disambiguation.

One of the major and frequent issues in annotation is the necessity of not making the explanation section too long. If the explanation is out of bounds and becomes wordy in order to remove ambiguity, it will cause damage to the work.[5] Among the most important damages in this section are the dominance of the margin over the text and the obesity of footnotes and appendices, which will overshadow the main text. In general, the principle of conciseness, usefulness, and practicality of the explanations should be the criterion in the quality of the explanation.

Another important point is that if the work or narrative is based on research and investigation, the principle that the explanations should be documented and substantiated and obtained from reliable sources must be observed in the explanation. Invalid materials, incomplete and inaccurate information will damage the text and reduce its credibility.[6] For example, using unreliable websites or narratives from unrelated people known for exaggeration or contradiction, or using promotional books will damage the credibility of this section.

In the same vein, if the interviewer or editor wants to use their own information to remove ambiguity and annotate, they must be closely related to the topic under discussion and the audience and narrator must accept their full knowledge so that the documentary nature of the narrative is not compromised. In general, it should be noted that in the work we do with the aim of disambiguating the audience's mind, we should not get caught up in the challenge of disambiguating.

Another point of the quality of explanatory text is that it is not an encyclopedia; if this is the case, it requires another work in a different format to record the information in it. Also, terms should not be used solely for annotated text; because the needs are different in different places in the text and sometimes disambiguation requires more than one or two terms.

One of the issues that the author or editor faces is the issue of information gaps that, in addition to creating ambiguity, also impair the integrity of the text. To resolve such problems, the editor can refer to documented sources and complete them; this information may not even be recorded in the sources. Therefore, it is necessary to arrange supplementary interviews with the narrator and obtain first-hand information with specific questions so that the audience does not have any problems in using the narrative. In addition, in the process of annotation, along with documented and concise materials, images can also be used.[7] Sometimes some images can resolve many ambiguities without detailed explanations.

On the basis of the above, annotation, as the name suggests, is used for elements in the narrative that need clarification and the audience faces difficulty in understanding them. The completer and more precise this stage is, the more successful it will be in preserving the text and attracting the audience and gaining the trust of history.