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Donald Trump fact-check: 2024 RNC speech in Milwaukee full of falsehoods about immigrants, economy

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Former President Donald Trump raises his fist July 18, 2024, during his speech the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. (AP)

MILWAUKEE — Former President Donald Trump closed the Republican National Convention by accepting the presidential nomination and offering a speech that began somber and turned combative.

First, he recounted surviving an assassination attempt five days earlier in Butler, Pennsylvania.

"You’ll never hear it from me again a second time, because it’s too painful to tell," Trump told a hushed audience. "I stand before you in this arena only by the grace of Almighty God." When Trump said, "I'm not supposed to be here tonight," the audience chanted, "Yes you are! Yes you are!" Onstage, Trump  kissed the firefighter’s uniform of Corey Comperatore, whom Trump’s would-be assassin killed.

After about 20 minutes, Trump’s speech shifted. He countered Democrats’ claims that he endangers democracy, praised the federal judge who dismissed the classified documents case against him and called the legal charges "partisan witch hunts." 

Though he criticized the policies of his opponent, Democratic President Joe Biden, Trump said he’d avoid naming him. 

Trump occasionally offered conciliatory notes, but more often repeated questionable assertions we’ve repeatedly fact-checked . Here are some.

Immigrants are "coming from prisons, they’re coming from jails, they're coming from mental institutions and insane asylums." 

When Trump said earlier this year that Biden is letting in "millions" of immigrants from jails and mental institutions we rated it Pants on Fire . Immigration officials arrested about 103,700 noncitizens with criminal convictions (whether in the U.S. or abroad) from fiscal years 2021 to 2024, federal data shows. That accounts for people stopped at and between ports of entry.

Not everyone was let in. The term "noncitizens" includes people who may have legal immigration status in the U.S., but are not U.S. citizens.

The data reflects the people that the federal government knows about but it’s inexhaustive. Immigration experts said despite those data limitations, there is no evidence to support Trump’s statement. Many people in Latin American countries face barriers to mental health treatment, so if patients are coming to the U.S., they are probably coming from their homes, not psychiatric hospitals.

"Caracas, Venezuela, really dangerous place, but not anymore. Because in Venezuela, crime is down 72%"

Although Venezuelan government data is unreliable, some data from independent organizations shows that violent deaths have recently decreased, but not by 72%. From 2022 to 2023, violent deaths dropped by 25%, according to the independent Venezuelan Observatory of Violence. 

Criminologists attribute this decline to Venezuela’s poor economy and the government’s extrajudicial killings. They said there is no evidence that Venezuela’s government is emptying its prisons and sending criminals to the United States. 

El Salvador murders are down 70% "because they're sending their murderers to the United States of America."

There has been a significant drop in crime in El Salvador, but it is not because the country is sending prisoners to the U.S. 

According to data from El Salvador’s National Police, in 2023, the country reported a 70% drop in homicides compared with 2022, as Trump noted. 

But it’s been well reported — by the country’s government , international organizations and news organizations — that El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele has aggressively cracked down on crime. There is no evidence that Bukele’s effort involves sending prisoners to the U.S.

El Salvador has been under a state of emergency , because of gang violence and high crime rates, since March 2022. On July 10 , the Legislative Assembly voted to extend its use. 

The order suspends "a range of constitutional rights, including the rights to freedom of association and assembly, to privacy in communications, and to be informed of the reason for arrest, as well as the requirement that anyone be taken before a judge within 72 hours," according a Human Rights Watch report .

The state of emergency has led multiple international human rights groups and governments, including the U.S. , to condemn human rights abuses in El Salvador such as arbitrary killings, forced disappearances and torture. 

Trump claims Bukele is "sending all of his criminals, his drug dealers, his people that are in jails. He's sending them all to the United States." But El Salvador’s prison population has drastically increased in recent years, according to InSight Crime , a think tank focused on crime and security in the Americas. 

In 2020, El Salvador’s prison population stood at around 37,000. In 2023, it was more than 105,000 — around 1.7% of the country’s population, InSight Crime said .

"Behind me and to the right was a large screen that was displaying a chart of border crossings under my leadership, the numbers were absolutely amazing."

As he recounted the story of his attempted assassination, Trump mentioned a chart of illegal border crossings from fiscal year 2012 to 2024. We fact-checked the false and misleading annotations on the chart.

For example, a red arrow on the chart claims to show when "Trump leaves office. Lowest illegal immigration in recorded history." But the arrow points to a decline in immigration encounters at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, when migration overall plummeted as nations imposed lockdowns. Trump left office nine months later, when illegal immigration encounters were on the rise.

@politifact Here are 3 false claims Donald Trump made during his speech at the #RNC . #GOP #Trump ♬ News ... News style BGM(1148093) - MASK G

Later in the RNC speech, Trump said, "Under my presidency, we had the most secure border."

That’s Mostly False . Illegal immigration during Trump’s administration was higher than it was during both of former President Barack Obama’s terms.

Illegal immigration between ports of entry at the U.S. southern border dropped in 2017, Trump’s first year in office, compared with previous years. But illegal immigration began to rise after that. It dropped again when the COVID-19 pandemic started and immigration decreased drastically worldwide.

In the months before Trump left office, as some pandemic travel restrictions eased, illegal immigration was rising again. A spike in migrants , especially unaccompanied minors , started in spring 2020 during the Trump administration and generally continued to climb each month.

It’s difficult to compare pre-COVID-19 data with data since, because of changes in data reporting. But, accounting for challenges in data comparisons, a PolitiFact review found an increase of 300% in illegal immigration from Trump’s first full month in office, February 2017, to his last full month, December 2020.

The jobs that are created under Biden, "107% of those jobs are taken by illegal aliens."

Mostly False .

This Republican talking point paints the Biden years as being better for foreign-born workers than native-born Americans. But it is wrong.

Since Biden took office in early 2021, the number of foreign-born Americans who are employed has risen by about 5.6 million. But over the same period, the number of native-born Americans employed has increased by almost 7.4 million.

The unemployment rate for native-born workers under Biden is comparable to what it was during the final two prepandemic years of Trump’s presidency.

Trump: "There's an interesting statistic, the ears are the bloodiest part. If something happens with the ears, they bleed more than any other part of the body."

Mostly True. 

Trump said that in reference to the injury he sustained to the top of his right ear during the assassination attempt at his July 13 rally. 

Although the ears do bleed heavily, PolitiFact could not identify statistical evidence that they are the "bloodiest part" of the body.

The ear gets most of its blood from a branch of the external carotid artery. An injury to an artery is prone to heavier bleeding, according to a study published in the European Journal of Trauma and Emergency Surgery . 

But other parts of the upper body might bleed more from an external injury, doctors said.

"The scalp is perhaps the most ‘bloody’ part of the body if injured or cut," Céline Gounder, a physician, senior fellow at KFF and editor-at-large for public health at KFF Health News, told PolitiFact in an email. "But, in general, the head/neck is the ‘bloodiest’ part of the body. The ear is part of that."

"​​An injury similar to what Trump sustained to the ear would bleed less if inflicted on a part of the body below the neck," Gounder added. (KFF is the health policy research, polling, and news organization that includes KFF Health News.)

During my presidency, we had "the best economy in the history of our country, in the history of the world. … We had no inflation, soaring incomes." 

One of the strongest ways to assess the economy is the unemployment rate, which fell during Trump’s presidency to levels untouched in five decades. But his successor, Joe Biden, matched or exceeded those levels.

Another measure, the annual increases in gross domestic product, were broadly similar under Trump to what they were during the final six years under his predecessor, Barack Obama. And GDP growth under Trump was well below that of previous presidents.

Wage growth increased under Trump, but to say they soared is an exaggeration. Adjusted for inflation, wages began rising during the Obama years and kept increasing under Trump. But these were modest compared with the 2% a year increase seen in the 1960s. 

Another metric — the growth rate in personal consumption per person, adjusted for inflation — wasn’t higher under Trump than previous presidents. For many families, this statistic serves an economic activity bottom line, determining how much they can spend on food, clothing, housing, health care and travel. 

In Trump’s three years in office through January 2020, real consumption per person grew by 2% a year. Of the 30 nonoverlapping three-year periods from 1929 to the end of his presidency, Trump’s periods ranked in the bottom third.

As for inflation being zero, that’s also wrong. It was low, ranging from 1.8% to 2.4% increases year over year in 2017, 2018 and 2019. This is roughly the range the Federal Reserve likes to see. During the coronavirus pandemic-dominated year of 2020, inflation fell to 1.2%, because demand plummeted as entertainment and travel collapsed.

"Our current administration, groceries are up 57%, gasoline is up 60% and 70%, mortgage rates have quadrupled." 

Mostly False.

There is an element of truth, because prices have risen for all of these. But Trump exaggerated the percentages.

The price of groceries has risen by 21.5% in the more than three and a half years since Biden was inaugurated in January 2021. 

Gasoline prices are up 55% over the same period. 

Mortgage rates haven’t quadrupled. But they have more than doubled, because of Federal Reserve rate increases to curb inflation. The average 30-year fixed- mortgage rate mortgage was 2.73% in January 2021, but 6.89% in July 2024. 

"Our crime rate is going up." 

He’s wrong on violent crimes, but has a point for some property crimes.

Federal data shows the overall number of violent crimes, including homicide, has declined during Joe Biden’s presidency. Property crimes have risen, mostly because of motor vehicle thefts.

The FBI data shows the overall violent crime rate — which includes homicide, rape, robbery and aggravated assault per 100,000 population — fell by 1.6% from 2021 to 2022, the most recent year with full-year FBI data. 

Private sector analyses show continued crime declines. For instance, the Council on Criminal Justice , a nonpartisan think tank, samples reports from law enforcement agencies in several dozen cities to gauge crime data more quickly than the FBI. The council’s data shows the declining violent crime trends continued into 2023.

Property crime has increased under Biden, although three of the four main categories the FBI tracks — larceny, burglary and arson — were at or below their prepandemic level by 2022. The main exception has been motor vehicle theft, which rose 4% from 2020 to 2021 and 10.4% from 2021 to 2022.

The Biden administration is "the only administration that said we're going to raise your taxes by four times what you're paying now." 

Biden is proposing a tax increase of roughly 7% over the next decade, not 300%, as Trump claims.

About 83% of the proposed Biden tax increase would be borne by the top 1% of taxpayers, a level that starts at just under $1 million a year in income.

Taxpayers earning up to $60,400 would see their yearly taxes decline on average, and taxpayers earning $60,400 to $107,300 would see an annual increase of $20 on average.

The IRS hired "88,000 agents" to go after Americans. 

Mostly False. 

The figure, which has been cited as 87,000 in past statements , is related to hires the IRS approved in 2022 that included information technology and taxpayer services, not just enforcement staff. Many of those hires would go toward holding staff numbers steady in the face of a history of budget cuts at the IRS and a wave of projected retirements. 

The U.S. Treasury Department previously said that people and small businesses that make less than $400,000 per year would see no change, although audits of corporations and high-net-worth people would rise. House Republicans passed a bill in 2023 to rescind the funding for the hires. Passage by the Democratic Senate majority is unlikely. President Joe Biden has vowed to veto the bill if it reaches his desk. 

"Democrats are going to destroy Social Security and Medicare, because all of these people, by the millions, they’re coming in. They’re going to be on Social Security and Medicare and other things, and you’re not able to afford it. They are destroying your Social Security and your Medicare."

Most immigrants in the U.S. illegally are ineligible for Social Security. Some people who entered the U.S. illegally and were granted humanitarian parole — a temporary permission to stay in the country — for more than one year, may be eligible for Social Security for up to seven years, the Congressional Research Service said. 

Immigrants in the U.S. illegally also are generally ineligible to enroll in federally funded health care coverage such as Medicare and Medicaid. (Some states provide Medicaid coverage under state-funded programs regardless of immigration status. Immigrants are eligible for emergency Medicaid regardless of status.)

It’s also wrong to say that immigration will destroy Social Security. The program’s fiscal challenges stem from a shortage of workers compared with beneficiaries. Immigrants who are legally qualified can receive Social Security retirement benefits only after they’ve worked and paid Social Security taxes for 10 years . So, for at least 10 years, these immigrants will be paying into the system before they draw any benefits.

Immigration is far from a fiscal fix-all for Social Security’s challenges. But having more immigrants in the United States would increase the worker-to-beneficiary ratio, potentially for decades, thus extending the program’s solvency, economic experts say.

Trump: "They spent $9 billion on eight chargers."

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law , which Biden signed in November 2021, allocated $7.5 billion to electric vehicle charging. Trump exaggerated the program and charger costs.

The Federal Highway Administration told PolitiFact that as of this April, the infrastructure funding has created seven open charging stations with 29 spots for electric vehicles to charge. They were installed across five states — Hawaii, Maine, New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania — the administration said in a statement.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in a May CBS interview that the Biden administration’s goal is to install 500,000 EV chargers by 2030. 

"And the very first handful of chargers are now already being physically built. But again, that's the absolute very, very beginning stages of the construction to come," Buttigieg said.

The cost for equipment and installation of high-speed EV chargers can range from $58,000 to $150,000 per charger, depending on wattage and other factors.

The federally funded EV charging program started slowly. The Energy Department said initial state plans were approved in September 2022. Since April, federally funded charging stations have opened in Rhode Island , Utah and Vermont .

"I will end the electric vehicle mandate on Day 1." False .

There is no electric vehicle mandate to begin with.

The Biden administration has set a goal — not a mandate — to have electric vehicles comprise half of all new vehicle sales by 2030.

Later in his speech, Trump said: "I am all for electric. … But if somebody wants to buy a gas-powered car… or a hybrid, they are going to be able to do it. And we’re going to make that change on Day 1. " The Biden administration has introduced new regulations on gasoline-powered cars but those policies do not ban gasoline-powered cars. They can continue to be sold, even after 2030.

"Under the Trump administration, just three and a half years ago, we were energy independent." 

There are various definitions of "energy independence," but during Trump’s presidency, the U.S. became a net energy exporter and began producing more energy than it consumed. Both milestones hadn’t been achieved in decades.

However, that achievement built on more than a decade of improvements in shale oil and gas production, along with renewable energies. The U.S. also did not achieve net exporter status for crude oil, which produces the type of energy that voters hold politicians most accountable for: gasoline.

Even during a period of greater energy independence, the U.S. energy supply is still sensitive to global developments, experts told PolitiFact in 2023 . Because many U.S. refineries cannot process the type of crude oil produced in the U.S., they need to import a different type of oil from overseas to serve the domestic market. 

"They used COVID to cheat."

Pants on Fire!

During the pandemic, multiple states altered rules to ease mail-in voting for people concerned about contracting COVID-19 at indoor polling places. Changes included mailing ballots to all registered voters, removing excuse requirements to vote by mail and increasing the number of ballot drop boxes. State officials used legal methods to enact these changes, and the new rules applied to all voters, regardless of party affiliation. 

The 2020 election was certified by every state and confirmed by more than 60 court cases nationwide. 

During his presidency, we had "the biggest regulation cuts ever." 

We tracked Trump’s progress on his campaign promise to "enact a temporary ban on new regulations" and rated that a Compromise .

Near the end of Trump’s presidency, an expert told us that overall the amount of federal regulations was roughly unchanged since Trump took office.

Russia’s war in Ukraine and Hamas’ attack on Israel "would have never happened if I were president."

This is unsubstantiated and ignores the complexities of global conflict. There’s no way to assess whether Russian President Vladimir Putin wouldn’t have invaded Ukraine in February 2022 if Trump were still president, or whether Hamas wouldn’t have attacked Israel in October 2023. Experts told PolitiFact that there’s a limit to how much influence U.S. presidents have over whether a foreign conflict erupts into war. "American presidents have scant control over foreign decisions about war and peace unless they show their willingness to commit American power," said Richard Betts, a Columbia University professor emeritus of war and peace studies and of international and public affairs.

During the Trump administration, there were no new major overseas wars or invasions. But during his presidency, there were still conflicts within Israel and between Russia and Ukraine . For example, Russia was intervening militarily in the Ukraine’s Donbas region throughout Trump’s administration. Trump also supported weakening NATO, reducing expectations among allies that the U.S. would intervene militarily if they were attacked. Although there’s no way to know how the war in Israel would have played out, experts said the prospect of the Abraham Accords — the peace effort between Israel and Arab nations led by the Trump administration — likely helped drive Hamas’ attack. "There’s no doubt in my mind that the prospect of the Abraham Accords being embraced by countries such as Saudi Arabia was one of the main causes of the Oct. 7 attack," Ambassador Martin Kimani, the executive director of NYU’s Center on International Cooperation said.

When the U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan, we "left behind $85 billion worth of military equipment." 

This is an exaggeration. When the Taliban toppled Afghanistan’s civilian government in 2021, it inherited military hardware  the U.S. gave it. But the hardware’s value did not amount to $85 billion.

A 2022 independent inspector general report informed Congress that about $7 billion of U.S.-funded equipment remained in Afghanistan and in the Taliban’s hands. According to the report , "The U.S. military removed or destroyed nearly all major equipment used by U.S. troops in Afghanistan throughout the drawdown period in 2021." We rated a similar claim False in 2021.

When he was president, "Iran was broke."

Half True . 

Iran’s foreign currency reserves fell from $128 billion in 2015 to $15 billion in 2019, a dramatic drop in absolute dollars. The decline is widely believed to be a consequence of the tightened U.S. sanctions under Trump, and although Iran’s foreign currency reserves have grown since then, it's nowhere near pre-2019 levels.

The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis pegged Iran’s foreign currency reserves in 2024 around $36 billion.

PolitiFact Chief Correspondent Louis Jacobson, Senior Correspondent Amy Sherman, Staff Writers Kwasi Gyamfi Asiedu, Maria Briceño, Madison Czopek, Marta Campabadal Graus, Ranjan Jindal, Mia Penner, Samantha Putterman, Sara Swann, Loreben Tuquero, Maria Ramirez Uribe, Researcher Caryn Baird, KFF Health News Senior Editor Stephanie Stapleton and KFF Health News Senior Correspondent Stephanie Armour contributed to this story. 

Our convention fact-checks rely on both new and previously reported work. We link to past work whenever possible. In some cases, a fact-check rating may be different tonight than in past versions. In those cases, either details of what the candidate said, or how the candidate said it, differed enough that we evaluated it anew. 

RELATED: In Context: Trump recounts assassination attempt. Here’s what he said at the RNC

RELATED: A guide to Trump’s 2nd term promises: immigration, economy, foreign policy and more

RELATED: 2024 RNC fact-check: What Trump VP pick J.D. Vance got right, wrong in Milwaukee speech

Our Sources

See sources linked in story.

Browse the Truth-O-Meter

More by politifact staff.

Watch Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' speech at the Republican National Convention

Florida gov. ron desantis was was a featured speaker at the republican national convention tuesday night. watch the full speech here..

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis took the podium at the Republican National Convention on Tuesday to discuss the issues within President Joe Biden's presidential term.

The Republican National Convention is in Milwaukee through Thursday where former President Donald Trump on Thursday will formally accept the party’s nomination for the 2024 Election. 

USA TODAY and the USA TODAY Network have nearly 40 journalists on the ground in Milwaukee and you can   follow along with our live blog for updates throughout the day .

RNC 2024 live updates: Sam Brown takes the stage; Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis set to speak

What to know about Ron DeSantis:

DeSantis won the race for governor of Florida in 2018, with the help of an endorsement from former President Donald Trump, after representing Florida's 6th District in the U.S. House from 2012 to 2018.

A staunch MAGA conservative, DeSantis a culture warrior in the same vein as former Trump.

Before entering the Republican primary, he was widely seen as an avatar of, and then a possible alternative to, Trump but he dropped out of the race in January after a disappointing performance in the Iowa Caucus and brutal personal attacks from Trump, which went largely unanswered.

DeSantis came in third in terms of Republican primary delegates, with 9, compared to Nikki Haley's 97 and Trump's 2,268.

"Our border is a disaster, crime infests our cities, the federal government makes it harder for families to make ends meet, and the president flounders. But decline is a choice, success is attainable, and freedom is worth fighting for," DeSantis said in announcing his presidential run in 2023, summarizing some of the key points of his platform.

On Tuesday night, the theme remained largely the same, but this time Trump was named as the person who could stem the tide: "We need a Commander in Chief who can lead 24 hours a day and seven days a week," he said. "America cannot afford four more years of a Weekend at Bernie's presidency."

When and where is the Republican National Convention? 

The Republicans' convention will take place over four days, from July 15-18 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. 

The  Fiserv Forum ,  home of the Milwaukee Bucks , will be the  main venue  for the RNC. 

There  also will be events  at the nearby University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Panther Arena and the Baird Center. 

How can you watch the event and stay up-to-date on convention news? 

USA TODAY is streaming the RNC from start to finish, and you can watch it here starting Monday, July 15: 

Updates from the RNC will be available at  gopconvention2024.com .  

PolitiFact staff PolitiFact staff

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Fact-checking Trump’s RNC speech

This fact check originally appeared on PolitiFact .

MILWAUKEE — Former President Donald Trump closed the Republican National Convention by accepting the presidential nomination and offering a speech that began somber and turned combative.

WATCH: Donald Trump speaks at 2024 Republican National Convention

First, he recounted surviving an assassination attempt five days earlier in Butler, Pennsylvania.

“You’ll never hear it from me again a second time because it’s too painful to tell,” Trump told a hushed audience. “I stand before you in this arena only by the grace of Almighty God.”

When Trump said, “I’m not supposed to be here tonight,” the audience chanted, “Yes you are. Yes you are.” Onstage, Trump kissed the firefighter’s uniform of Corey Comperatore, whom Trump’s would-be assassin killed.

After about 20 minutes, Trump’s speech shifted. He countered Democrats’ claims that he endangers democracy, praised the federal judge who dismissed the classified documents case against him and called the legal charges “partisan witch hunts.”

Though he criticized the policies of his opponent, Democratic President Joe Biden, Trump said he’d avoid naming him.

Trump occasionally offered conciliatory notes, but more often repeated questionable assertions we’ve repeatedly fact-checked. Here are some.

Immigration

Immigrants are “coming from prisons, they’re coming from jails, they’re coming from mental institutions and insane asylums.”.

When Trump said earlier this year that Biden is letting in “millions” of immigrants from jails and mental institutions we rated it Pants on Fire. Immigration officials arrested about 103,700 noncitizens with criminal convictions (whether in the U.S. or abroad) from fiscal years 2021 to 2024, federal data shows. That accounts for people stopped at and between ports of entry.

Not everyone was let in. The term “noncitizens” includes people who may have legal immigration status in the U.S., but are not U.S. citizens.

The data reflects the people that the federal government knows about but it’s inexhaustive. Immigration experts said despite those data limitations, there is no evidence to support Trump’s statement. Many people in Latin American countries face barriers to mental health treatment, so if patients are coming to the U.S., they are probably coming from their homes, not psychiatric hospitals.

“Caracas, Venezuela, really dangerous place, but not anymore. Because in Venezuela, crime is down 72 percent”

Although Venezuelan government data is unreliable, some data from independent organizations shows that violent deaths have recently decreased, but not by 72 percent. From 2022 to 2023, violent deaths dropped by 25 percent, according to the independent Venezuelan Observatory of Violence.

Criminologists attribute this decline to Venezuela’s poor economy and the government’s extrajudicial killings. They said there is no evidence that Venezuela’s government is emptying its prisons and sending criminals to the United States.

El Salvador murders are down 70 percent “because they’re sending their murderers to the United States of America.”

There has been a significant drop in crime in El Salvador, but it is not because the country is sending prisoners to the U.S.

According to data from El Salvador’s National Police, in 2023, the country reported a 70 percent drop in homicides compared with 2022, as Trump noted.

But it’s been well reported — by the country’s government, international organizations and news organizations — that El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele has aggressively cracked down on crime. There is no evidence that Bukele’s effort involves sending prisoners to the U.S.

El Salvador has been under a state of emergency, because of gang violence and high crime rates, since March 2022. On July 10, the Legislative Assembly voted to extend its use.

The order suspends “a range of constitutional rights, including the rights to freedom of association and assembly, to privacy in communications, and to be informed of the reason for arrest, as well as the requirement that anyone be taken before a judge within 72 hours,” according a Human Rights Watch report.

The state of emergency has led multiple international human rights groups and governments, including the U.S., to condemn human rights abuses in El Salvador such as arbitrary killings, forced disappearances and torture.

Trump claims Bukele is “sending all of his criminals, his drug dealers, his people that are in jails. He’s sending them all to the United States.” But El Salvador’s prison population has drastically increased in recent years, according to InSight Crime, a think tank focused on crime and security in the Americas.

In 2020, El Salvador’s prison population stood at around 37,000. In 2023, it was more than 105,000 — around 1.7 percent of the country’s population, InSight Crime said.

“Behind me and to the right was a large screen that was displaying a chart of border crossings under my leadership, the numbers were absolutely amazing.”

As he recounted the story of his attempted assassination, Trump mentioned a chart of illegal border crossings from fiscal year 2012 to 2024. We fact-checked the false and misleading annotations on the chart.

For example, a red arrow on the chart claims to show when “Trump leaves office. Lowest illegal immigration in recorded history.” But the arrow points to a decline in immigration encounters at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, when migration overall significantly dropped as nations imposed lockdowns. Trump left office nine months later, when illegal immigration encounters were on the rise.

Later in the RNC speech, Trump said, “Under my presidency, we had the most secure border.”

That’s Mostly False . Illegal immigration during Trump’s administration was higher than it was during both of former President Barack Obama’s terms.

Illegal immigration between ports of entry at the U.S. southern border dropped in 2017, Trump’s first year in office, compared with previous years. But illegal immigration began to rise after that. It dropped again when the COVID-19 pandemic started and immigration decreased drastically worldwide.

In the months before Trump left office, as some pandemic travel restrictions eased, illegal immigration was rising again. A spike in migrants, especially unaccompanied minors, started in spring 2020 during the Trump administration and generally continued to climb each month.

It’s difficult to compare pre-COVID-19 data with data since, because of changes in data reporting. But, accounting for challenges in data comparisons, a PolitiFact review found an increase of 300 percent in illegal immigration from Trump’s first full month in office, February 2017, to his last full month, December 2020.

The jobs that are created under Biden, “107 percent of those jobs are taken by illegal aliens.”

Mostly False.

This Republican talking point paints the Biden years as being better for foreign-born workers than native-born Americans. But it is wrong.

Since Biden took office in early 2021, the number of foreign-born Americans who are employed has risen by about 5.6 million. But over the same period, the number of native-born Americans employed has increased by almost 7.4 million.

The unemployment rate for native-born workers under Biden is comparable to what it was during the final two prepandemic years of Trump’s presidency.

Assassination attempt

Trump: “there’s an interesting statistic, the ears are the bloodiest part. if something happens with the ears, they bleed more than any other part of the body.”.

Mostly True.

Trump said that in reference to the injury he sustained to the top of his right ear during the assassination attempt at his July 13 rally.

Although the ears do bleed heavily, PolitiFact could not identify statistical evidence that they are the “bloodiest part” of the body.

READ MORE: Trump’s campaign has given no official info about his medical care following assassination attempt

The ear gets most of its blood from a branch of the external carotid artery. An injury to an artery is prone to heavier bleeding, according to a study published in the European Journal of Trauma and Emergency Surgery.

But other parts of the upper body might bleed more from an external injury, doctors said.

“The scalp is perhaps the most ‘bloody’ part of the body if injured or cut,” Céline Gounder, a physician, senior fellow at KFF and editor-at-large for public health at KFF Health News, told PolitiFact in an email. “But, in general, the head/neck is the ‘bloodiest’ part of the body. The ear is part of that.”

“​​An injury similar to what Trump sustained to the ear would bleed less if inflicted on a part of the body below the neck,” Gounder added.

During my presidency, we had “the best economy in the history of our country, in the history of the world … We had no inflation, soaring incomes.”

One of the strongest ways to assess the economy is the unemployment rate, which fell during Trump’s presidency to levels untouched in five decades. But his successor, Joe Biden, matched or exceeded those levels.

READ MORE: U.S. continuing jobless claims rise for 9th straight week, though unemployment stays historically low

Another measure, the annual increases in gross domestic product, were broadly similar under Trump to what they were during the final six years under his predecessor, Barack Obama. And GDP growth under Trump was well below that of previous presidents.

Wage growth increased under Trump, but to say they soared is an exaggeration. Adjusted for inflation, wages began rising during the Obama years and kept increasing under Trump. But these were modest compared with the 2 percent a year increase seen in the 1960s.

Another metric — the growth rate in personal consumption per person, adjusted for inflation — wasn’t higher under Trump than previous presidents. For many families, this statistic serves an economic activity bottom line, determining how much they can spend on food, clothing, housing, health care and travel.

In Trump’s three years in office through January 2020, real consumption per person grew by 2 percent a year. Of the 30 nonoverlapping three-year periods from 1929 to the end of his presidency, Trump’s periods ranked in the bottom third.

As for inflation being zero, that’s also wrong. It was low, ranging from 1.8 percent to 2.4 percent increases year over year in 2017, 2018 and 2019. This is roughly the range the Federal Reserve likes to see. During the coronavirus pandemic-dominated year of 2020, inflation fell to 1.2 percent, because demand plummeted as entertainment and travel collapsed.

“Our current administration, groceries are up 57 percent, gasoline is up 60 percent and 70 percent, mortgage rates have quadrupled.”

There is an element of truth, because prices have risen for all of these. But Trump exaggerated the percentages.

The price of groceries has risen by 21.5 percent in the more than three and a half years since Biden was inaugurated in January 2021.

Gasoline prices are up 55 percent over the same period.

Mortgage rates haven’t quadrupled. But they have more than doubled, because of Federal Reserve rate increases to curb inflation. The average 30-year fixed- mortgage rate mortgage was 2.73 percent in January 2021, but 6.89 percent in July 2024.

“Our crime rate is going up.”

Mostly False

He’s wrong on violent crimes, but has a point for some property crimes.

Federal data shows the overall number of violent crimes, including homicide, has declined during Joe Biden’s presidency. Property crimes have risen, mostly because of motor vehicle thefts.

The FBI data shows the overall violent crime rate — which includes homicide, rape, robbery and aggravated assault per 100,000 population — fell by 1.6 percent from 2021 to 2022, the most recent year with full-year FBI data.

Private-sector analyses show continued crime declines. For instance, the Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan think tank, samples reports from law enforcement agencies in several dozen cities to gauge crime data more quickly than the FBI. The council’s data shows the declining violent crime trends continued into 2023.

Property crime has increased under Biden, although three of the four main categories the FBI tracks — larceny, burglary and arson — were at or below their prepandemic level by 2022. The main exception has been motor vehicle theft, which rose 4 percent from 2020 to 2021 and 10.4 percent from 2021 to 2022.

Taxes, Social Security and Medicare

The biden administration is “the only administration that said we’re going to raise your taxes by four times what you’re paying now.”.

Biden is proposing a tax increase of roughly 7 percent over the next decade, not 300 percent, as Trump claims.

About 83 percent of the proposed Biden tax increase would be borne by the top 1 percent of taxpayers, a level that starts at just under $1 million a year in income.

WATCH: Biden announces tax plan at campaign event in Scranton, PA

Taxpayers earning up to $60,400 would see their yearly taxes decline on average, and taxpayers between $60,400 and $107,300 would see an annual increase of $20 on average.

The IRS hired “88,000 agents” to go after Americans.

The figure, which has been cited as 87,000 in past statements, is related to hires the IRS approved in 2022 that included information technology and taxpayer services, not just enforcement staff. Many of those hires would go toward holding staff numbers steady in the face of a history of budget cuts at the IRS and a wave of projected retirements.

The U.S. Treasury Department previously said that people and small businesses who make less than $400,000 per year would see no change, while audits of corporations and high-net-worth people would rise. House Republicans passed a bill in 2023 to rescind the funding for the hires. Passage by the Democratic Senate majority is unlikely. President Joe Biden has vowed to veto the bill if it reaches his desk.

“Democrats are going to destroy Social Security and Medicare, because all of these people, by the millions, they’re coming in. They’re going to be on Social Security and Medicare and other things, and you’re not able to afford it. They are destroying your Social Security and your Medicare.”

Most immigrants in the U.S. illegally are ineligible for Social Security. Some people who entered the U.S. illegally and were granted humanitarian parole — a temporary permission to stay in the country — for more than one year, may be eligible for Social Security for up to seven years, the Congressional Research Service said.

Immigrants in the U.S. illegally also are generally ineligible to enroll in federally funded health care coverage such as Medicare and Medicaid. (Some states provide Medicaid coverage under state-funded programs regardless of immigration status. Immigrants are eligible for emergency Medicaid regardless of status.)

It’s also wrong to say that immigration will destroy Social Security. The program’s fiscal challenges stem from a shortage of workers compared with beneficiaries. Immigrants who are legally qualified can receive Social Security retirement benefits only after they’ve worked and paid Social Security taxes for 10 years. So, for at least 10 years, these immigrants will be paying into the system before they draw any benefits.

Immigration is far from a fiscal fix-all for Social Security’s challenges. But having more immigrants in the United States would increase the worker-to-beneficiary ratio, potentially for decades, thus extending the program’s solvency, economic experts say.

Electric vehicles

Trump: “they spent $9 billion on eight chargers.”.

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which Biden signed in November 2021, allocated $7.5 billion to electric vehicle charging. Trump exaggerated the program and charger costs.

The Federal Highway Administration told PolitiFact that as of this April, the infrastructure funding has created seven open charging stations with 29 spots for electric vehicles to charge. They were installed across five states — Hawaii, Maine, New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania — the administration said in a statement.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in a May CBS interview that the Biden administration’s goal is to install 500,000 EV chargers by 2030.

“And the very first handful of chargers are now already being physically built. But again, that’s the absolute very, very beginning stages of the construction to come,” Buttigieg said.

The cost for equipment and installation of high-speed EV chargers can range from $58,000 to $150,000 per charger, depending on wattage and other factors.

The federally funded EV charging program started slowly. The Energy Department said initial state plans were approved in September 2022. Since April, federally funded charging stations have opened in Rhode Island, Utah and Vermont.

“I will end the electric vehicle mandate on Day 1.”

There is no electric vehicle mandate to begin with.

The Biden administration has set a goal — not a mandate — to have electric vehicles comprise half of all new vehicle sales by 2030.

Later in his speech, Trump said: “I am all for electric. … But if somebody wants to buy a gas-powered car… or a hybrid, they are going to be able to do it. And we’re going to make that change on Day 1. ” The Biden administration has introduced new regulations on gas-powered cars but those policies do not ban gas-powered cars. They can continue to be sold, even after 2030.

“Under the Trump administration, just three and a half years ago, we were energy independent.”

Half True .

There are various definitions of “energy independence,” but during Trump’s presidency, the U.S. became a net energy exporter and began producing more energy than it consumed. Both milestones hadn’t been achieved in decades.

However, that achievement built on more than a decade of improvements in shale oil and gas production, along with renewable energies. The U.S. also did not achieve net exporter status for crude oil, which produces the type of energy that voters hold politicians most accountable for: gasoline.

Even during a period of greater energy independence, the U.S. energy supply is still sensitive to global developments, experts told PolitiFact in 2023. Because many U.S. refineries cannot process the type of crude oil produced in the U.S., they need to import a different type of oil from overseas to serve the domestic market.

Election fraud claims

“they used covid to cheat.”.

Pants on Fire !

During the pandemic, multiple states altered rules to ease mail-in voting for people concerned about contracting COVID-19 at indoor polling places. Changes included mailing ballots to all registered voters, removing excuse requirements to vote by mail and increasing the number of ballot drop boxes. State officials used legal methods to enact these changes, and the new rules applied to all voters, regardless of party affiliation.

The 2020 election was certified by every state and confirmed by more than 60 court cases nationwide.

During his presidency, we had “the biggest regulation cuts ever.”

We tracked Trump’s progress on his campaign promise to “enact a temporary ban on new regulations” and rated that a Compromise.

Near the end of Trump’s presidency, an expert told us that overall the amount of federal regulations was roughly unchanged since Trump took office.

Foreign policy

Russia’s war in ukraine and hamas’ attack on israel “would have never happened if i were president.”.

This is unsubstantiated and ignores the complexities of global conflict. There’s no way to assess whether Russian President Vladimir Putin wouldn’t have invaded Ukraine in February 2022 if Trump were still president, or whether Hamas wouldn’t have attacked Israel in October 2023.

Experts told PolitiFact that there’s a limit to how much influence U.S. presidents have over whether a foreign conflict erupts into war. “American presidents have scant control over foreign decisions about war and peace unless they show their willingness to commit American power,” said Richard Betts, a Columbia University professor emeritus of war and peace studies and of international and public affairs.

During the Trump administration, there were no new major overseas wars or invasions. But during his presidency, there were still conflicts within Israel and between Russia and Ukraine. For example, Russia was intervening militarily in the Ukraine’s Donbas region throughout Trump’s administration.

Trump also supported weakening NATO, reducing expectations among allies that the U.S. would intervene militarily if they were attacked.

Although there’s no way to know how the war in Israel would have played out, experts said the prospect of the Abraham Accords — the peace effort between Israel and Arab nations led by the Trump administration — likely helped drive Hamas’ attack.

“There’s no doubt in my mind that the prospect of the Abraham Accords being embraced by countries such as Saudi Arabia was one of the main causes of the Oct. 7 attack,” Ambassador Martin Kimani, the executive director of NYU’s Center on International Cooperation said.

When the U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan, we “left behind $85 billion worth of military equipment.”

This is an exaggeration. When the Taliban toppled Afghanistan’s civilian government in 2021, it inherited military hardware the U.S. gave it. But it did not amount to $85 billion.

A 2022 independent inspector general report informed Congress that about $7 billion of U.S.-funded equipment remained in Afghanistan and in the Taliban’s hands. According to the report, “The U.S. military removed or destroyed nearly all major equipment used by U.S. troops in Afghanistan throughout the drawdown period in 2021.”

We rated a similar claim False in 2021.

When he was president, “Iran was broke.”

Iran’s foreign currency reserves fell from $128 billion in 2015 to $15 billion in 2019, a dramatic drop in absolute dollars. The decline is widely believed to be a consequence of the tightened U.S. sanctions under Trump, and although Iran’s foreign currency reserves have grown since then, it’s nowhere near pre-2019 levels.

The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis pegged Iran’s foreign currency reserves in 2024 around $36 billion.

PolitiFact Chief Correspondent Louis Jacobson, Senior Correspondent Amy Sherman, Staff Writers Kwasi Gyamfi Asiedu, Maria Briceño, Madison Czopek, Marta Campabadal Graus, Ranjan Jindal, Mia Penner, Samantha Putterman, Sara Swann, Loreben Tuquero, Maria Ramirez Uribe and Researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this story.

Our convention fact-checks rely on both new and previously reported work. We link to past work whenever possible. In some cases, a fact-check rating may be different tonight than in past versions. In those cases, either details of what the candidate said, or how the candidate said it, differed enough that we evaluated it anew.

More RNC 2024 coverage

• Live updates: Trump to speak at RNC Night 4
• Live fact check: Night 4 of the Republican National Convention
• WATCH: Sen. JD Vance’s full speech at 2024 Republican National Convention
• Fact-checking VP nominee Vance’s speech to the RNC
• WATCH: Trump tells private event that he got lucky, ‘God was with me’ during assassination attempt
• WATCH: Where RNC delegates stand on immigration

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Fact-Checking Trump’s Speech and More: Day 4 of the Republican National Convention

A team of New York Times reporters followed the developments and fact-checked the speakers, providing context and explanation.

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Former President Donald J. Trump accepted his party’s nomination during the final night of the Republican National Convention on Thursday, delivering a freewheeling, factually challenged and often ad-libbed speech.

Mr. Trump began by describing in detail the assassination attempt that left him with a bandaged ear. Then, he essentially staged a campaign rally, repeating familiar boasts and delving into a cascade of false and misleading claims about his own record and the state of the border, the economy and the world.

Here’s a fact-check of his remarks.

“We’ve got Right to Try. They were trying to get that for 52 years.”

— Former President Donald J. Trump

This needs context.

The “right to try” law of 2018 allows terminally ill patients to seek access to experimental medicine that is not yet fully approved by the Food and Drug Administration, but a similar program has been in place since the 1970s.

Jeanna Smialek

An inflation crisis “is just simply crushing our people, like never before — they’ve never seen anything like it.”

This is false..

Inflation peaked at 9.1 percent in the summer of 2022, but that is considerably lower than its peak of nearly 15 percent in the early 1980s.

Republicans will sometimes point out that the inflation methodology has changed since then — meaning that we are measuring price increases differently — but even accounting for those tweaks, economists have said that inflation was lower in 2022 than it was four decades earlier. Inflation is not, based on the data, crushing people like never before.

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“Our planet is teetering on the edge of World War III, and this will be a war like no other.”

This lacks evidence..

While there is an active war between Russia and Ukraine, and between Hamas and Israel, and fighting in Sudan, Myanmar and other countries, there is no evidence that a third world war is imminent.

In terms of previous world wars, according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, an estimated 8.5 million soldiers were killed in World War I and an estimated 35 million to 60 million people died during World War II.

The concept of World War III has traditionally referred to a potential war between the United States and Russia, which is not imminent. President Biden has often said he is actively trying to avoid such a conflict even as he arms Kyiv in its war with Moscow.

Brad Plumer

“We will drill, baby, drill, and by doing that we will lead to a large-scale decline in prices.”

More drilling doesn’t always cause gasoline prices to plunge. Case in point: The United States is actually producing significantly more crude oil today under the Biden administration than it did under the Trump administration, yet gasoline prices are still higher than they were four years ago.

That’s because gasoline costs are also influenced by broader market forces that can cause the global price of crude oil to rise or fall. For instance, a big reason prices increased in 2022 was Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which disrupted the flow of crude across the globe. All else equal, an increase in U.S. oil drilling should put downward pressure on prices, but those other global factors also play a considerable role.

Angelo Fichera

“If you look at the arrow at the bottom, that’s the lowest level — the one on the bottom, heavy red arrow — that’s the lowest level of illegal immigrants ever to come into our country in recorded history right there, right there. And that was my last week in office.”

Mr. Trump presented an immigration graphic that he credited with saving his life during an assassination attempt at a rally in Pennsylvania days earlier.

Moments before a gunman opened fire at the rally, Mr. Trump turned to gesture at the chart, a move that he said prevented him from being shot in the head . The shooting left his ear bloodied, killed one spectator and seriously injured two others.

In his acceptance speech on Thursday, he referred to a thick red arrow on the chart, titled “Illegal Immigration Into the U.S.,” that points to a significant drop in migrant crossings at the southern border during his presidency.

But despite text on the chart and Mr. Trump’s description at the convention, the arrow is actually pointing to a dip in early 2020 — when migration slowed globally during the coronavirus pandemic and the restrictions that followed — not during his last week in office. And that low did not last.

In March 2020, there were about 30,000 encounters at the southern border recorded by Border Patrol, according to Customs and Border Protection statistics . That dropped in April 2020 by almost half, to about 16,000.

In the months that followed, however, the number of migrants encountered at the border then climbed back up. During Mr. Trump’s last month in office, there were about 75,000 encounters by Border Patrol.

And contrary to Mr. Trump’s claim, even the low in 2020 was not the lowest “in recorded history.” Earlier in Mr. Trump’s presidency, the number of apprehensions at the border had dipped to about 11,000 in April 2017 , before the flow increased again.

Also, since 1925, total annual apprehensions nationwide by Border Patrol have often been lower than they were under Mr. Trump’s presidency, noted Michelle Mittelstadt, a spokeswoman for the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute.

There is no arguing that the situation at the southern border grew worse during the Biden administration: In December, there were around 250,000 encounters .

In an effort to reverse course, President Biden recently announced severe restrictions on asylum, and illegal crossings have since significantly dropped . Border Patrol reported about 83,500 encounters in June.

“We gave you the largest tax cuts.”

The $1.5 trillion tax cut, enacted in December 2017, ranks below at least half a dozen other tax cuts by several metrics. The 1981 Reagan tax cut was the largest as a percentage of the economy and by its reduction to federal revenue. The 2012 Obama tax cut amounted to the largest reduction in inflation-adjusted dollars: $321 billion a year.

“We built most of the wall.”

During Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign, he promised to build a wall spanning at least 1,000 miles along the southern border and have Mexico pay for it. That did not happen. Overall, the Trump administration constructed 458 miles of border barriers — most of which upgraded or replaced existing structures. Officials put up new primary barriers where none previously existed along only 47 miles.

“I will end every single international crisis that the current administration has created — including the horrible war with Russia and Ukraine, which would have never happened if I was president, and the war caused by the attack on Israel, which never would have happened if I were president.”

There is no evidence that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia would not have invaded Ukraine if Donald J. Trump had been president of the United States in February 2022, when Russian forces began a full-scale war on Ukraine.

In fact, Mr. Trump supported one of Mr. Putin’s greatest desires — weakening the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Senior administration officials told The New York Times that several times over the course of 2018 Mr. Trump privately said he wanted to withdraw from NATO . And Mr. Trump was impeached for withholding Javelin missiles from Ukraine in 2019. Those missiles proved effective in blunting Russian armor advances into Ukraine in 2022.

“And then we had that horrible, horrible result that we’ll never let happen again. The election result. We’re never going to let that happen again. They used Covid to cheat.”

Mr. Trump has continued to falsely claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him. His assertions about widespread cheating are unsubstantiated. Since the election, the former president has used claims mischaracterizing the voting and counting process, cited baseless examples of fraud and peddled conspiracy theories.

“Just a few short years ago under my presidency, we had the most secure border and the best economy in the history of the world.”

This is exaggerated..

Apprehensions of unauthorized crossings along the southwest border in the 2017 fiscal year, which includes several months of the Obama administration, fell to the lowest point since the 1970s.

But they increased in subsequent years. In the 2019 fiscal year, apprehensions topped 800,000 and were the highest in a decade. And in the 2020 fiscal year, even as the coronavirus pandemic ground global movement to a halt, apprehensions were higher than in 2011, 2012 and 2015.

And when Mr. Trump left office, the coronavirus pandemic had decimated the economy with an unemployment rate of 6.4 percent in January 2021 and gross domestic product had not yet rebounded to pre-Covid levels. But even before all of that, annual average growth was lower under Mr. Trump than under Presidents Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan.

“We had no inflation.”

The rate of inflation was indeed low under Mr. Trump, but it was not completely nonexistent.

Under Mr. Trump, the rate of inflation measured by the overall Consumer Price Index largely gravitated around 2 percent — with the rate slightly lower and higher some months — according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics . That dropped at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, and inflation reached a low of 0.1 percent in May 2020 before trending upward.

“By the way, you know who’s taking the jobs? The jobs that are created? 107 percent of those jobs are taken by illegal aliens”

Official estimates of employment do not support Mr. Trump’s statement, which makes little sense. And estimates from various groups show that the population of unauthorized immigrants has grown in recent years, but not nearly enough to take all the jobs created during Mr. Biden’s presidency.

The economy has added more than 15 million jobs since January 2021. Two groups that advocate for lower levels of migration and stricter border security have estimated that there are 2.3 million to 2.5 million more unauthorized immigrants in 2023 than in 2020.

Overall, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that 29.9 million foreign-born workers — both authorized and unauthorized — and 131.1 million native-born workers were employed in 2023. That is an increase of 5.1 million in employed foreign-born workers and 8.1 million native-born workers since 2020 .

“Our current administration, groceries are up 57 percent, gasoline is up 60 and 70 percent.”

Grocery prices are up substantially since Joseph R. Biden Jr. took office in early 2021, but not by 57 percent: The Consumer Price Index’s food-at-home index is up about 21 percent . Gas prices are up about 35 percent , depending upon the measure used.

Lisa Friedman

“Under the Trump administration, just three and a half years ago, we were energy independent. But soon we will actually be better than that. We will be energy dominant and supply not only ourselves, but we supply the rest of the world, with numbers that nobody has ever seen.”

This is misleading..

Under the Trump administration, the United States for the first time began to export more oil than it imported. Energy experts say that is not because of Trump’s policies, but because of the fracking boom that began during the George W. Bush administration and soared under President Barack Obama. It’s still happening.

In fact, under President Biden, the United States has become the biggest oil producer in the world and is producing more natural gas than ever before. The phrases “energy independence” and “energy dominance” also fail to take into account wind, solar and other renewable energy, which is growing at a rapid pace.

Alan Rappeport

“We will reduce our debt, $36 trillion, and we will reduce your taxes still further.”

Mr. Trump suggested that the national debt would be paid down by jump-starting economic growth. He made this promise during his first term, promising that $2 trillion of tax cuts would pay for themselves, and ended up approving more than $8 trillion of borrowing. The Republican platform this year makes no mention of debt or deficits but does call for cutting wasteful spending.

Also, the national debt currently stands at $34.9 trillion, not $36 trillion.

“They want to raise your taxes four times.”

Many elements of the 2017 tax cut Mr. Trump signed into law will expire in 2025, and Mr. Biden has proposed some tax increases on high-income earners and corporations. But this does not amount to a quadrupling of taxes.

The 2017 tax cuts are expected to reduce the average tax rate by 1.4 percent in 2025, according to the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, a left-leaning Washington think tank. Most in the top 5 percent of income would see the greatest change, by 2.4 percent. Mr. Biden has also consistently said he does not support raising taxes on people making under $400,000 a year and, in his latest budget, proposed extending tax cuts for those making under that threshold.

Mr. Biden’s proposals would increase the average tax rate by about 1.9 percent, according to a Tax Policy Center analysis . The top 0.1 percent would see the biggest increase of about 13.9 percent, while the low income filers would see a reduction in taxes. That is no nowhere near the 300 percent increase Mr. Trump warned of.

“I will end the electric vehicle mandate on Day 1, thereby saving the U.S. auto industry from complete obliteration, which is happening right now, and saving U.S. customers thousands and thousands per car.”

There is no electric vehicle mandate. The Biden administration has imposed rules requiring carmakers to meet new average emissions limits across their entire product line. It is up to auto manufacturers how to comply. The Environmental Protection Agency has estimated that the rule would mean that by 2032, about 56 percent of new passenger vehicles sold would be electric and another 16 percent would be hybrids. Autoworkers do fear job losses because electric vehicles could require less than half the number of workers to assemble than cars with internal combustion engines do.

There is also no evidence that the rule or other policies aimed at encouraging electric vehicles are leading the automobile industry toward “obliteration.” Many automakers have, in fact, embraced electric vehicle production. General Motors, for example, has been talking about preparing for an “all-electric future” since 2017. The Biden administration has argued that its policies are aimed at moving electric vehicle jobs from China to the United States.

“We’re going to bring back car manufacturing.”

The American auto industry lost jobs under the Trump administration, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. General Motors, Ford and Fiat Chrysler all closed factories during Mr. Trump’s presidency.

“Probably the best trade deal was the deal I made with China, where they buy $50 billion worth of our product.”

The trade agreement that Mr. Trump signed with China in 2020 was quickly derailed by the coronavirus pandemic, and China never fulfilled its obligations to purchase American goods. And Mr. Trump gave an incorrect total for how much American product China was supposed to buy. A 2022 analysis by the Peterson Institute for International Economics found that China had bought none of the extra $200 billion of U.S. exports in the trade pact.

“Democrats are going to destroy Social Security and Medicare.”

President Biden has pledged not to make any cuts to America’s social safety net programs. Mr. Trump suggested this year that he was open to scaling back the programs when he said there was “a lot you can do in terms of entitlements in terms of cutting.” He later walked back those comments and pledged to protect the programs. But if changes to the programs are not made, the programs’ benefits will automatically be reduced eventually. Government reports released earlier this year projected that the Social Security and disability insurance programs, if combined, would not have enough money to pay all of their obligations in 2035. Medicare will be unable to pay all its hospital bills starting in 2036.

Hamed Aleaziz

The Biden administration “demolished Title 42.”

The Biden administration kept in place the Trump-era policy, known as Title 42, which allowed border agents to quickly turn back migrants and cut off access to asylum protections for more than a year.

The Biden administration did not move to get rid of Title 42 until spring 2022. The move was later blocked by a federal judge, which forced the administration to keep the policy in place.

During that time, the Biden administration expanded the use of the policy and began expelling Venezuelans to Mexico. It was later rolled back in 2023 by the Biden administration.

“In Venezuela, crime is down 72 percent.”

Mr. Trump claimed that crime had fallen drastically in Venezuela because the country had sent “their murderers” and prisoners to the United States. Annual reports from the Venezuelan Violence Observatory, a research organization based in Caracas, shows a 25 percent decline in the country’s homicide rate from 2022 to 2023 , and a 41 percent decline since 2020 . In comparison, the homicide rate declined even more precipitously while Mr. Trump was president, by almost 50 percent from 2016 .

The Venezuelan Prison Observatory told Univision in 2022, when Mr. Trump first made the claim, that the prisons in the country had not been emptied and rather were at 170 percent capacity. According to the group’s latest annual report, Venezuela’s prison population stood at 33,558 in 2022, about level with its 2021 population of 33,710. Immigration experts have said they could not corroborate Mr. Trump’s claims that other countries were “dumping” their criminal and prison populations into the United States.

“I was the first president in modern times to start no new wars.”

Depending on the definition of “modern times,” President Jimmy Carter started no new wars during his time in office between 1977 and 1981.

“The whole world was at peace. And now the whole world is blowing up around us. Under President Bush, Russia invaded Georgia. Under President Obama, Russia took Crimea. Under the current administration, Russia is after all of Ukraine. Under President Trump, Russia took nothing.”

Under Mr. Trump’s presidency, there was not global peace. While Mr. Trump was in the Oval Office, there was an active war in eastern Ukraine between the Russian and Ukrainian armies, he authorized airstrikes and ground combat operations against fighters of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, and he ordered the assassination of an Iranian military leader in Iraq.

“We defeated 100 percent of ISIS in Syria, something that was going to take five years — ‘It’ll take five years, sir’ — and I did it in two months.”

The American-led coalition campaign against the Islamic State began in 2014 . The research firm IHS Markit estimated that the Islamic State lost about a third of its territory from January 2015 to January 2017. Mr. Trump has largely stuck with, and taken advantage of, a strategy that Mr. Obama began , and the Islamic State lost its final territories in March 2019 , two years after Mr. Trump took office, not two months.

“I stopped the missile launches from North Korea.”

North Korea continued to test missiles during Mr. Trump’s time in the White House, a fact that the former president continually dismissed at the time .

“Our opponents inherited a planet at peace and turned it into a planet at war.”

While Russia had not invaded Ukraine and the war between Israel and Hamas had not broken out, it is a stretch to claim that the world was entirely peaceful under the Trump administration.

Average peacefulness declined in 2018 and 2020 , according to the Global Peace Index, an annual measure of violence around the world compiled by the Institute for Economics & Peace. During the Trump administration, the United States was also engaged in military conflicts in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan and more than 60 American soldiers died in hostile action . When Mr. Trump left office, there were 2,500 troops remaining in Afghanistan.

“We also left $85 billion worth of military equipment” in Afghanistan.

Mr. Trump was once again referring to the total amount that the United States spent on security in Afghanistan over the course of 20 years — not the value of equipment left behind in the 2021 withdrawal.

The United States provided $88.6 billion for security in Afghanistan from October 2001 to July 2021, and disbursed about $75 billion, according to Pentagon figures .

That figure includes the amount spent on training, antidrug trafficking efforts and infrastructure, as well as $18 billion for equipment. CNN previously reported that about $7 billion worth of military equipment that the United States transferred to the Afghan government was left behind during the withdrawal.

“We will replenish our military and build an Iron Dome missile defense system to ensure that no enemy can strike our homeland. And this great Iron Dome will be built entirely in the U.S.A. and Wisconsin.”

The U.S. military’s budget continues to grow year by year, and the Iron Dome missile defense system is effective only against relatively short-range rockets and missiles. Installing an Iron Dome across the country would in no way ensure that an enemy could not strike the United States.

“They spent $9 billion on eight chargers.”

— Former President Donald J. Trump.

This is false .

This is an inflated claim of another false statement Mr. Trump has made on the campaign trail about electric vehicle charging stations. (He recently said that the Biden administration had “opened seven chargers for $8 billion.”)

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which President Biden signed in 2021, allocated $7.5 billion for electric vehicle charging stations, with the goal of installing 500,000 across the country.

So far, only seven chargers have been installed — not a great pace. But the suggestion that the entire amount was used on seven chargers is not accurate. The Biden administration has argued that the pace is the result of wanting to get a complex new national program done right.

“He decided to leave behind the comforts of an unbelievable business empire. To leave behind everything he had ever built. To answer the call to serve our nation. Unlike his predecessor, it was not a decision born out of necessity. Unlike the current president, it was not a decision that would enrich his family.”

— Eric Trump, a son of Donald J. Trump

Former President Donald J. Trump did not divest from his businesses when he assumed the presidency, and his critics argue that his companies did benefit from his being in public office. Mr. Trump’s businesses received nearly $8 million from 20 foreign governments during his time in office, according to documents released by House Democrats this year. Much of that was from China. The nonprofit OpenSecrets has also tracked millions of dollars flowing to Trump properties from political entities and groups in recent years, suggesting that those seeking favor with Mr. Trump may do so through his properties.

“He slashed regulations.”

This needs context ..

As president, Donald J. Trump indeed slashed regulations, rolling back more than 100 environmental protections alone. The bulk of those were aimed at keeping the air and water clean, and cutting planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions from automobiles and power plants.

However, the Trump administration’s attempt to deregulate was also often thwarted by the courts. All told, the Trump administration lost 57 percent of cases challenging its environmental policies, a much higher rate of loss than previous administrations, according to a database maintained by New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity .

“The U.S. dollar has been diminished.”

The value of the U.S. dollar is stronger than it has been in decades . This year, the dollar index, which measures the strength of the currency against the currencies of six major trading partners, has been hovering at levels last seen in the early 2000s.

Eric Trump’s suggestion that the dollar has been diminished is actually at odds with his father’s recent suggestion that the dollar is too strong, making American exports too expensive abroad.

Former President Donald J. Trump and Senator J.D. Vance, his running mate, have both argued that a weaker dollar would be better for the U.S. economy and have suggested that steps should be taken to depreciate the currency.

“In 2019, I was with him at the United Nations when the first president of history of this country stood there to advocate for religious liberty worldwide.”

— Franklin Graham, the evangelical leader

President Donald J. Trump hosted a United Nations event on religious freedom in 2019 in New York. At the time, he characterized it as the first time a U.S. president had hosted such a meeting. But aside from specific meetings, Mr. Trump’s appearance was certainly not the first time that an American president had championed religious freedom before the United Nations. President Barack Obama did so in a 2012 address to the General Assembly . President George W. Bush pressed the importance of religious liberty in a 2008 interfaith event.

“We’ve lost more Americans from drugs in the past four years than we lost in World War II. Yeah. Our bloodiest war. More than we lost in World War II. Does anybody care? It is pathetic. It is pathetic. And do you hear a single word from Washington about doing anything about it?”

— Tucker Carlson, Trump ally and former Fox News host

Mr. Carlson can certainly argue that lawmakers have not done enough to address the opioid crisis in the United States, but his suggestion that they have done nothing is wrong. The Congressional Research Service listed several major legislative efforts in 2016, 2018, 2019 and 2021.

These laws, according to the research service, “addressed overprescribing and misuse of opioids, expanded substance use disorder prevention and treatment capacities, bolstered drug diversion capabilities, and enhanced international drug interdiction, counternarcotics cooperation and sanctions efforts.”

Annual funding for border security and the Drug Enforcement Administration has tried to directly address drug trafficking. The bipartisan border bill that failed this past spring would have also included increased funding for enforcement efforts and new technology to detect drug smuggling. Former President Donald J. Trump lobbied against its passage.

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Group Registration of Updates to a News Website

A Rule by the Copyright Office, Library of Congress on 07/22/2024

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Supplementary information:, i. background, ii. final rule, a. eligibility requirements, 1. works that may be included in the group, i. constitutional challenge, ii. news website limitation, iii. website limitation, 2. scope of collective work, 3. one-month limitation, 4. authorship, ownership, and work made for hire requirements, 5. subjects of inquiry, i. permitted additional title information, ii. permitted archived urls, b. filing fee, c. deposit requirements, 1. “home page” requirement, i. timing of deposit capture, ii. “complete copy”, 2. site maps, 3. additional deposit suggestions, 4. other comments, e. application requirements, f. conclusion, list of subjects, 37 cfr part 201, 37 cfr part 202, final regulations, part 201—general provisions, part 202—preregistration and registration of claims to copyright, enhanced content - submit public comment.

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U.S. Copyright Office, Library of Congress.

Final rule.

The U.S. Copyright Office is creating a new group registration for frequently updated news websites. This option will enable online news publishers to register a group of updates to a news website as a collective work with a deposit composed of identifying material representing sufficient portions of the work, rather than the complete contents of the website. The final rule is nearly identical to the provisions set forth in the January 2024 notice of proposed rulemaking, with one modification in response to public comments and one to reflect a technical change in the process for submitting these claims.

Effective July 22, 2024.

Rhea Efthimiadis, Assistant to the General Counsel, by email at [email protected] or by telephone at 202-707-8350.

The Copyright Act authorizes the Register of Copyrights to specify by regulation the administrative classes of works for the purpose of registration and the deposit required for each class. [ 1 ] In addition, Congress gave the Register the discretion to allow registration of groups of related works with one application and one filing fee. [ 2 ] This procedure is known as “group registration.”  [ 3 ] Pursuant to this authority, the Register has issued several regulations permitting group registrations for certain types of works, including newspapers, newsletters and serials, unpublished works, unpublished and published photographs, contributions to periodicals, secure test items, works on an album of music, short online literary works, and database updates. [ 4 ]

This rulemaking expands the available group registration options because of several factors specifically impacting news websites. Along with receiving requests from online publishers, the Office observed the increase in news content offered online and the dynamic nature of such material. [ 5 ] It also reviewed stakeholder comments in prior proceedings that discussed the challenges associated with registering online news content, including those submitted in response to its 2022 Copyright Protections for Press Publishers report. [ 6 ] Finally, the Office acknowledged the deposit challenges associated with websites, particularly news websites, in its 2011 publication titled Priorities and Special Projects of the United States Copyright Office (October 2011-October 2013) . [ 7 ]

On January 3, 2024, the Office published a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (“NPRM”) to establish a new group registration option for frequently updated news websites. [ 8 ] The proposed rule would allow an applicant to register a news website as a collective work (including any individual component works it fully owns, such as literary works, photographs, and/or graphics)  [ 9 ] with a deposit composed of identifying material, rather than the complete contents of the website. The proposed rule would also allow registration of the news website and any updates published within one calendar month, if the deposit evidences a sufficiently creative selection, coordination, or arrangement within each collective work to constitute a copyrightable compilation. [ 10 ] Each Start Printed Page 58992 collective work must have been created as a work made for hire, with the same person or entity named as both the author and copyright claimant. The proposed rule stated that applicants would be required to submit their claims through the online copyright registration system, using the application currently in use for a group of newspaper issues. [ 11 ]

The Office received twenty comments in response to the NPRM. [ 12 ] All but one  [ 13 ] supported the Office's proposal to create the new group registration option, though the majority requested various modifications. Two commenters, however, expressly conditioned their support on substantive changes to the rule, which would substantially change its scope. [ 14 ] In general, commenters were interested in expanding eligibility for this option to a greater number of works and changing the deposit requirement. Proposals included revising the definition of “news website,” removing the work made for hire and author/claimant requirements, increasing the time limitation for updates to the news website, clarifying the “home page” deposit requirement, and asking the Office to confirm the scope of remedies for copyright infringement of a collective work. [ 15 ] Finally, one commenter encouraged the Office to “identify opportunities for improvement” and to remain “adaptive to technological changes.”  [ 16 ]

Having reviewed and carefully considered each of the comments, the Office now issues a final rule that is nearly identical to the proposed rule, with one modification reflecting concerns raised by some commenters regarding the “home page” deposit requirement and one modification concerning the application form for this option. These modifications are discussed in more detail below. With respect to requests that we received to expand the scope of the rule, the Office will closely monitor how the new group option performs, including the number and complexity of the claims submitted, the amount of time needed to examine these claims, and the modest filing fee for this option. The Office remains open to revisiting these issues in the future based on this rule's performance.

In the NPRM, the Office proposed to limit this group registration option to updates to a “news website,” defined as “a website that is designed to be a primary source of written information on current events, either local, national, or international in scope, that contains a broad range of news on all subjects and activities and is not limited to any specific subject matter.” As described in the NPRM, the proposed rule stems from the rapid development and predominance of news websites over print newspapers, [ 17 ] and requests from news publishers for a feasible way to register “newspaper websites” that are “updated frequently.”  [ 18 ] Thus, the proposed rule is an extension of the existing group newspaper option that has been available for decades. [ 19 ] Consistent with the Compendium of U.S. Copyright Office Practices, the proposed rule defines a “website” as “a web page or set of interconnected web pages that are accessed using a uniform resource locator (“URL”) organized under a particular domain name.” A number of commenters encouraged the Office to expand the type of works eligible under the rule and recommended revisions to both definitions.

Before turning to the requests to expand the rule, the Office addresses the argument made by a small number of commenters that the proposed group registration option would violate the First Amendment by limiting the option to a particular type of work. In a joint comment, NWU, NPPA, and NASW stated that restricting the option to “news” websites constitutes “[c]ontent-based discrimination,” which they considered “[c]onstitutionally suspect and subject to strict scrutiny” that the rule “cannot meet.”  [ 20 ] In support of this argument, they cited Arkansas Writers Project v. Ragland, 481 U.S. 221 (1987), which reviewed a state sales tax scheme that taxed general interest magazines, but exempted newspapers and religious, professional trade, and sports journals. Because Arkansas “advanced no compelling justification for selective, content-based taxation of certain magazines,” the Supreme Court held the tax scheme invalid under the First Amendment. [ 21 ] Analogizing the tax scheme in Arkansas Writers Project to the proposed registration option, NWU, NPPA, and NASW argued that the exclusion of any web content that does not meet the “news website” definition is unconstitutional. [ 22 ]

Aligned with NWU, NPPA, and NASW, another commenter, Gordon Firemark, contended that, by limiting the group option to updates to news websites, the proposed rule “excludes other types of content from [its] benefits” and denies content creators “relief from the burdens of the current system.”  [ 23 ] He argued that recent Supreme Court precedent concerning trademark registration requires a content-neutral approach. [ 24 ]

The Office disagrees with these arguments. It is correct that the Supreme Court has held that content-based laws—laws restricting or compelling Start Printed Page 58993 speech based on its communicative content—are presumptively unconstitutional, [ 25 ] and subject to strict scrutiny, under which the government must show that the law is the “least restrictive means” of advancing a “compelling” governmental interest. [ 26 ] A regulation can be content-based “on its face,” if its text applies to speech based on the subject matter, topic, or viewpoint of that speech. It can also be content-based if it has a discriminatory purpose that “cannot be justified without reference to the content of the regulated speech” or was “adopted by the government because of disagreement with the message” conveyed. [ 27 ] However, a regulation that places “a differential burden on speakers is insufficient by itself to raise First Amendment concerns.”  [ 28 ] The tax scheme in Arkansas Writers Project was found to violate these principles by being directed at particular subjects, thus targeting a small group within the press. [ 29 ] That is not the case here.

The Office's proposed group registration option is not analogous to the unconstitutional tax statute in Arkansas Writers Project for multiple reasons. First, the option does not restrict or compel speech based on its communicative content. Nor does it favor or disfavor particular topics or subjects, or exclude a small group of the press. [ 30 ] Instead the option is available for updates to news websites that contain a broad range of topics regardless of the content of the speech involved.

Second, the registration option is viewpoint neutral and operates not as a restriction on speech, but as a condition for qualifying for one of many options available to register copyrights, including online websites and other publications. The Standard Application is available to any type of author for any type of work within the statutory categories. [ 31 ] Group registration options are discretionary accommodations offered by the Office in a number of areas. Currently, the Office administers ten group options covering unpublished works, short online literary works, works on an album of music, serials, newspapers, newsletters, contributions to periodicals, published and unpublished photographs, automated databases, and secure test items. [ 32 ] For online publications, group serials and group newsletters are other registration options for publications that fall outside of the “newspaper” or “news website” definitions.

The Supreme Court's recent ruling in a case involving trademark regulations supports the Office's view. There the Court reviewed a rule of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (“USPTO”) barring the registration of trademarks that use the names of particular living individuals without their written consent. [ 33 ] The Court held that this bar, though content-based, is viewpoint neutral and does not violate the First Amendment. [ 34 ] The Court noted that while its precedents “distinguish between content-based and content-neutral regulations of speech,”  [ 35 ] they further distinguish “a particularly `egregious form of content discrimination'—viewpoint discrimination,” which targets not merely a subject matter, “but particular views taken by speakers on a subject.”  [ 36 ] The Court identified “[s]everal features of trademark [law]” that “counsel against a per se rule of applying heightened scrutiny to viewpoint-neutral, but content-based trademark regulations.” Most notably, it found that “trademark rights have always coexisted with the First Amendment, despite the fact that trademark protection necessarily requires content-based distinctions.”  [ 37 ] Accordingly, the Court held that USPTO's “content-based, but viewpoint-neutral, trademark restriction [ ] is compatible with the First Amendment.”  [ 38 ]

Similarly, copyright registration, and the broad administrative classification authority Congress granted to the Register, necessarily requires content-based distinctions. Indeed, since its passage in 1976, the Copyright Act has authorized the Register “to specify by regulation the administrative classes into which works are to be placed for purposes of deposit and registration” and to permit “ for particular classes, the deposit of identifying material instead of copies or phonorecords, the deposit of only one copy or phonorecord where two would normally be required, or a single registration for a group of related works.”  [ 39 ] Like the USPTO's name bar, these administrative distinctions are not based on the particular views taken by authors and have always coexisted with the First Amendment. The addition of an administrative classification for this new group registration option, which adopts near-identical criteria for determining “news” content to that of the existing group option for newspapers, is “a matter of policy and discretion”  [ 40 ] fully compatible with the First Amendment.

Further, unlike the viewpoint-based trademark provisions held unconstitutional for barring registration of scandalous or disparaging marks, [ 41 ] the Office's viewpoint-neutral administrative classification does not bar registration for non-news content or websites. Quite the opposite: to increase participation in the registration system, the Office has created several group options for the registration of works that are published online. [ 42 ] The Standard Application also remains available to any type of author for any type of work within the statutory categories. This rule does not prevent anyone's ability to register non-news works.

Multiple commenters urged the Office to expand the rule's definition of “news website” by removing the condition that the website must contain news on all subjects and activities. [ 43 ] In encouraging Start Printed Page 58994 the Office “not to exclude . . . specialized websites,” the ABA-IPL noted that the “proposed rule may provide especially meaningful benefit to smaller news websites—including those that focus on certain `specific subject matter.' ”  [ 44 ] HBP argued that “websites, like HBR.org, that focus on a particular area of news . . . still face the same registration problems afflicting all news websites.”  [ 45 ] The Authors Guild also expressed concern that the rule would exclude more specialized news publications, such as those that focus on political news. It argued that “these publications clearly qualify as news websites under any ordinary understanding of that term.”  [ 46 ] Relatedly, commenters claimed that content restrictions “put[ ] examiners in an untenable position of deciding what is or is not `news.' ”  [ 47 ] Finally, four commenters asked the Office to abandon the “news website” definition and extend the group option “to any periodically-produced content distributed through the internet.”  [ 48 ]

After considering this request and in the interest of implementing this final rule as quickly as possible, the Office declines to revise the definition at this time. As an extension of the newspaper group option, the “news website” definition is modeled on the Office's longstanding regulation defining a “newspaper” as a publication that is “mainly designed to be a primary source of written information on current events, either local, national, or international in scope,” that “contains a broad range of news on all subjects and activities and is not limited to any specific subject matter.”  [ 49 ] This definition is very broad and it is intended to “make any newspaper eligible for a group registration.”  [ 50 ] It is also intended to distinguish a “newspaper” from a “newsletter,” which is defined elsewhere in the regulations as a publication that contains “news or information that is chiefly of interest to a special group, such as trade and professional associations, colleges, schools, or churches.”  [ 51 ]

Under this definition, newspapers are aimed at any member of the general public who may be interested in newsworthy information or events that are reported on a given day. [ 52 ] By applying a similar definition to websites, the final rule recognizes that “news websites” are also intended to have universal appeal.

This definition would encompass news websites that cover current events and provide information on diverse topics, including some political websites like those identified in the Authors Guild's comment. [ 53 ] Although these sites focus primarily on issues involving politics and events with political implications, they do not limit their coverage to a particular subject matter nor are they directed at narrow or discrete groups of readers. [ 54 ]

The Office also disagrees with commenters that the “news website” eligibility requirement places a burden on examiners. Indeed, the definitions for “news website” and “newspaper” are similar, in part, to enable consistent application of both rules. Examiners are accustomed to assessing eligibility based on this definition.

However, if the definition proves too rigid or unworkable, the Office is willing to revisit this issue based on its experience in administering this rule. Importantly, however, this new group option is not intended to extend to the websites of all serials or newsletters, which in print or ePrint form have the benefit of separate group registration options. [ 55 ]

The Office received requests to expand the rule beyond websites. Commenters recommended that the proposed rule be amended to include mobile applications (“apps”) in the definition of “website.”  [ 56 ] They argued that “[m]any news publishers encourage users to access content on an app rather than a website.”  [ 57 ]

The Office declines to amend the definition. It considers an app to be “a computer program that is used directly or indirectly in a computer or handheld electronic device.”  [ 58 ] The Office has a procedure for registering the underlying code that operates the app. [ 59 ] To the extent that news publishers seek to register the works published on the app, a registration for a newspaper or a news website would protect those works if they contain the same content.

AIPLA encouraged the Office to revise the definition of “website” to clarify that a website is not limited to content accessed using a single domain name. [ 60 ] It explained that “web pages are composed of various elements, like text, images, and videos” that “might be hosted on a different server than the one hosting the main web page for reasons such as efficiency, speed, and cost.”  [ 61 ] The Office appreciates this distinction but declines to revise the definition. To qualify for this option, each collective work in the group must be published under one particular domain name. For registration purposes, the Office does not assess eligibility based on where component digital works may be stored. The Office believes the “particular web page” requirement is necessary to prevent applicants from using the option to register collective works published under different domain names on the same application, which would make it difficult to identify the website that is covered by the registration. Therefore, the final rule retains the definition proposed in the NPRM.

The proposed rule provides that claims registered under this option will be limited to the collective work authorship based on the selection, coordination, and/or arrangement of the individual component works, and that all parts of the collective work will constitute one work for purposes of 17 U.S.C. 504(c)(1) . [ 62 ] Additionally, the Start Printed Page 58995 Office made clear that the registration will also cover the individual contributions contained within the collective work if they are fully owned by the copyright claimant and were first published in that work.

NPR asked the Office to confirm that “the scope of the collective work will explicitly include all copyrightable contributions made by the claimant, not just textual works.”  [ 63 ] As noted above, a “news website” is defined as “a website that is designed to be a primary source of written information.”  [ 64 ] If the collective work contains individual contributions that are fully owned by the copyright claimant and were first published in the work, then the registration will cover those contributions, so long as they are copyrightable subject matter. However, a component work “that is perceptible to the user only by downloading or separately purchasing that particular work is not considered part of the website for registration purposes and must be registered separately.”  [ 65 ] Additionally, any “externally linked content [ i.e., content residing on another website] is not considered part of the website's content for registration purposes.”  [ 66 ]

HBP recommended that the Office permit applicants to disclaim content that is licensed and not owned by the applicant. As with group newspapers, the Office does not see the need for a limitation of claim for news websites, because the proposed rule expressly states that “[e]ach update to the website must be [an original] collective work.” A registration issued by the Office pursuant to this rule will only cover the new contributions owned by the copyright claimant. Consistent with any collective work registration, any articles, photos, or other contributions included in the collective work that were previously published, previously registered, owned by another party, or in the public domain are automatically excluded from the claim. As a practical matter, therefore, a disclaimer to expressly exclude material in the application is unnecessary.

Port. Prerogative Club asked the Office to “[c]larify whether updates to numerical information, such as prices, volumes, retweets, or other metrics, qualify as registrable under the rule, and whether the Office has changed its policy on the registrability of short phrases and headlines.” The Office states that its longstanding regulation denying protection for words and short phrases has not changed. [ 67 ] Regarding “prices, volumes, retweets, or other metrics,” it is unclear whether the commenter is referring to individual works of authorship, or whether these items appear in a compilation. Individual numbers and short phrases are not copyrightable. However, a copyrightable compilation of these items may be registrable.

The proposed rule permits an applicant to include updates published on the same website within the same calendar month. Three commenters urged the Office to remove the limitation, arguing that it is too “onerous.”  [ 68 ] NPR recommended that the Office allow for the option to cover “three months, or six months, or a calendar year” to “reduce registration costs.”  [ 69 ] Noting that “attorneys' fees and statutory damages can be awarded as long as copyright is registered within three months of first publication,” NWU, NPPA, and NASW requested that the rule be amended to allow registration of updates published “during any specified three-month period.”  [ 70 ]

At this time, given administrative capabilities, the Office cannot expand the option to cover more than one month of updates. As the NPRM explained, to deliver the option promptly, and to minimize development time, the Office is adapting the existing group application for newspapers, which is used to register up to one month of newspaper issues and contains technical validations that prevent applicants from entering publication dates that are more than one month apart. Changing the limit would require additional modifications to the application and delay implementation of the final rule. Further, the Office seeks an appropriate balance between the interests of copyright owners and the administrative burden to the Office. Based on the modest fee set for this option, some limit on the number of works included in each claim is necessary. The Office will reassess whether the limit can be increased after it has gained sufficient experience administering the rule.

Under the proposed rule, to be eligible for the option, each collective work in the group must have been created as a work made for hire, with the same person or entity named as the author and copyright claimant. Multiple commenters questioned this requirement. [ 71 ] The Authors Guild argued that the work made for hire requirement “arbitrarily and unfairly confines the benefit of the rule to corporate entities even where other creators are producing substantially the same type of content.”  [ 72 ] While they recognized that this requirement reflects practical and technical limitations, NMA and AIPLA noted that “there does not seem to be a fundamental reason for such a limitation in principle, and in many business cases, the work may be fully owned by the publisher, or obtained via assignment or operation of law.”  [ 73 ]

The Office acknowledges that the work made for hire requirement may not reflect every business case of ownership. However, this requirement streamlines the registration procedures, which, as noted above, will adapt the existing group application option for newspapers. Under that option, the same person or entity must be named as the author and copyright claimant, and each issue must be a work made for hire. The Office retains the same requirements for the news websites option to minimize the need for additional development time that would otherwise be required. Start Printed Page 58996

Additionally, under general Copyright Office practice, if the author and claimant are not the same person, the applicant is statutorily required to provide a transfer statement explaining how the claimant acquired all of the rights initially belonging to the author. [ 74 ] If an applicant names a third party as the copyright claimant, but fails to provide a transfer statement, then the Office must correspond to determine whether the claimant actually owns all of the exclusive rights in the works, which delays the registration decision. The corresponding additional time and costs that the Office would incur are inconsistent with the reduced fee for examination of multiple collective works.

Moreover, imposing a work made for hire limitation is consistent with the goal of this rulemaking, which is to address obstacles to registering online news content produced by news publishers, who often also publish newspapers. Based on its experience with the existing group newspaper registrations, the Office expects that this requirement will produce an optimal public record, while reducing the administrative burden that these claims impose. The final rule accordingly retains the work made for hire requirement. Applicants who do not qualify for the option may still register their works individually using the Standard Application.

The Office invited public comments on whether it should give applicants the opportunity to provide additional information, such as individual article or photograph titles, as part of this group registration option. Commenters expressed support for the implementation of an opportunity to include granular information concerning individual component works at the applicant's discretion. [ 75 ] The Authors Guild noted that “in the event an individual article is the subject of a later infringement action, the applicant may need to rely on its own recordkeeping to establish that the article was on the website during the period covered by the registration.”  [ 76 ] It concluded, “[t]he listing of individual titles or other information on the application may provide additional evidence relevant to that showing.”  [ 77 ] The Office agrees and will provide instructions on its website explaining how applicants may submit additional information regarding component works on an optional basis. [ 78 ]

The Office also invited public comments on the availability and effectiveness of technological solutions for saving or archiving websites that could assist or supplement news websites' recordkeeping efforts while also informing the public of the contents of the website and/or any updates registered. The Office suggested that applicants may provide in the “Note to Office” field additional information regarding the contents of the work, such as archived URLs that capture the complete content of each collective work submitted for registration. The Copyright Alliance expressed support for this suggestion, provided that doing so is voluntary. [ 79 ] Therefore the Office encourages applicants to submit archived URLs in the “Note to Office” field on a voluntary basis.

The NPRM provided that the filing fee for this option will be $95, the same fee that currently applies to a claim in a group of newspapers. It noted that the Office believes it is reasonable to charge the same fee as for the group newspaper option, given the similarities in expected workflow associated with examining these claims. The NMA expressed support for this modest fee, describing it as “reasonable and unarbitrary.”  [ 80 ] The final rule establishes this fee.

The NPRM proposed that for each collective work submitted under this group registration option, applicants must “submit a deposit that is sufficient to identify some of the updates that were made to the website.”  [ 81 ] The Office specified that “applicants will need to submit separate PDF files that each contain a complete copy of the home page for the site. Each PDF must show how the home page appeared at a specific point during each day of the calendar month when new updates were published on the site.”  [ 82 ] Additionally, the NPRM required that each deposit demonstrate “that the home page contains a sufficient degree of selection, coordination, and/or arrangement to be registered as a collective work.”  [ 83 ] Several commenters requested that the Office consider different deposit requirements, though commenters varied on the specific changes they requested or discussed deposits generally. The Office addresses each suggested change below.

After considering NMA's request to resolve a purported ambiguity in the proposed rule regarding the time of day for daily deposits of home pages, the Office is clarifying the time period for capturing deposits. [ 84 ] The language within section (m)(6)(i) requiring “[e]ach PDF [to] show how the home page appeared at a specific point during each day of the calendar month” does not require applicants to capture PDFs of home pages at the same exact time every day. [ 85 ] Instead, PDFs of home pages must show how the home page appeared at some point during each day, in addition to satisfying other applicable deposit requirements.

Three commenters specifically requested that the Office expand the identifying material it will accept to encompass more than “a complete copy of the home page for the site.”  [ 86 ] The NAB stated that “the Office should amend the deposit requirements proposed in § 202.4(m)(6)(i) to allow for the submission of a copy of identifying material in lieu of a complete copy of the home page.”  [ 87 ] It explained that “many news websites utilize an `infinite scroll' feature that automatically and continuously loads more content as users scroll down the web page” making Start Printed Page 58997 it “technologically impossible for an applicant to satisfy the deposit requirement of providing a PDF of the home page in its entirety.”  [ 88 ] Copyright Alliance echoed this sentiment stating “a user is able to continuously reveal additional content on the web page without having to leave the page to view the content on a separate web page. For such web pages, it is not possible to capture an `entire copy' of the page since the user can endlessly reveal the contents of the page.”  [ 89 ] Similarly, NMA noted that, due to the difficulties posed by “extensive or close-to-infinite scroll,” the Office should clarify that an applicant could meet the deposit requirement “as long as [the PDF] captures the masthead, URL identifier, and a defined minimum amount of the homepage (which in most cases will encompass all of it), including representative updates from the previous deposit copy.”  [ 90 ]

After considering these comments, the Office concludes that the requested modification to the proposed rule is reasonable and supports the overall goal of this group registration option. Accordingly, the final rule includes an alternative to the “complete copy of the home page” requirement where submitting a complete copy is not feasible due to the size or continuous nature of the home page. In such circumstances, applicants may “submit the first 25 pages of the home page that demonstrates updates from the previous deposit copy.” This portion of the rule is designed to decrease the burden on applicants that wish to utilize this group registration option, but are unable to satisfy the “complete copy” deposit requirement. The Office believes that this modification will facilitate registration, while also ensuring that the deposit provided is sufficient to identify the work and the copyrightable authorship covered by the registration. Applicants utilizing this provision are advised that any deposit should only include updates within the time period covered by the application. In the event that an applicant includes updates outside the time period, they would be considered previously published material, and would not be covered by the registration. Additionally, as stated in the NPRM, if a copyright owner is required to prove to a court or an alleged infringer “the specific contents of a website at any particular point in time, it will need to preserve and maintain its own copy of the site and rely on its own recordkeeping to provide such proof.”  [ 91 ]

NWU, NPPA, and NASW disagreed that a home page would constitute sufficient identifying material for registration. [ 92 ] They asserted that “requiring deposit of PDFs of images of the home page is disconnected from the reality that updates aren't necessarily visible on the `home page' of a website.”  [ 93 ] While “[u]pdates appear on the home pages of some—but far from all—newspaper publishers' websites,” the home pages of other websites, such as self-published or references websites, are “mostly or entirely static,” with updates occurring on other “inside” pages that are not indexed or referenced on the home page. [ 94 ] Instead, NWU, NPPA, and NASW suggested that the Office accept a “sitemap page or set of sitemap pages,” “as the way to indicate which pages of a site have most recently been added or modified, and when.”  [ 95 ] Sitemaps, they alleged, “are structured, standardized, machine-readable, and human-readable” and “all updates in a given period can be identified by a single sitemap or set of sitemaps,” which the Office could “use[ ] immediately.”  [ 96 ]

The Office declines to permit applicants to submit a sitemap page or a set of sitemap pages as identifying material for several reasons. First, it is not clear that sitemaps themselves provide information that would allow an examiner to determine whether each collective work within the group application contains sufficient creative selection, coordination, or arrangement. [ 97 ] Second, sitemaps do not satisfy the public notice function that deposits serve, as they do not display the work requested for registration and are not sufficient to identify the updates made to the websites. [ 98 ] As explained in the NPRM, any deposit requirement must “satisfy the public notice function of capturing, and making available for public inspection, a deposit that should be sufficient to identify” the work covered by the application. [ 99 ] Lastly, accepting sitemap deposits would likely not aid in efficiency as suggested. [ 100 ] If an examiner receives a sitemap, they would likely need to correspond with the applicant to determine what exactly the application covers. For these reasons, the Office declines to modify the final rule to include sitemaps.

Commenters also suggested that the Office accept deposits comprised of annotated Portable Document Formats (“PDFs”)  [ 101 ] or PDF deposits of apps. [ 102 ] Specifically, one commenter encouraged the Office to consider accepting annotated PDFs of a single web page, where “[a]nnotations could circle content that is not included in registration, such as licensed content as compared to original news organization content” or “content already registered.”  [ 103 ] Other commenters, including Copyright Alliance, NMA, and the Authors Guild, proposed that the Office should accept PDFs that “contain a complete copy of the home page of . . . mobile application[s]. ”  [ 104 ] Start Printed Page 58998 They discussed the ease with which applicants could submit app PDFs  [ 105 ] and how PDFs address record-keeping concerns and “concerns over whether the collective works stem from the same source.”  [ 106 ] Copyright Alliance and NMA also suggested that the absence of a uniform resource locator (“URL”) from app PDFs, a requirement of the proposed rule, is immaterial because apps “generally prominently feature the logo or other visible identifier of the publication in question” and news content on an app is “organized and contained,” similar to a website. [ 107 ] NMA further recommended that because the USPTO has “long accepted” app screenshots for trademark specimens, subject to certain requirements, the Office should adopt similar standards. [ 108 ]

The Office declines to permit parties to submit annotated PDFs of a single web page. As discussed above, each update will be registered as a collective work. For that reason, there is no need to identify component works that are not owned by the claimant or component works that have been previously registered, because as a general rule, a registration for a collective work does not cover this type of preexisting material.

The Office also declines to accept PDF deposits of apps to represent a news website. Initially, it is unclear whether the selection, coordination, and/or arrangement of material encompassed within the PDFs would be identical to the selection, coordination, and/or arrangement of a website's home page, regardless of whether the same content is present on both. [ 109 ] Further, the Office continues to believe that the rule's deposit regulations offer flexibility, while still satisfying the public notice function of deposits. The regulation will permit applicants to submit a complete copy of the website's home page, and when that is not feasible due to the size or continuous nature of the home page, applicants may submit the first 25 pages of the home page demonstrating updates from the previous deposit copy.

Commenters made additional suggestions and remarks on the proposed rule's deposit requirements and the Office's deposit requirements generally. With respect to the Office's modernization efforts, ABA-IPL suggested that the Office consider generally expanding the “format of deposit copies accepted” and regularly reviewing and updating registration regulations. [ 110 ] ABA-IPL stated that the Office should accept deposits in .xml format for regularly updated news content, such as content covered under the proposed rule, “as [.xml] and similar formats are widely used in digital content creation and management.”  [ 111 ] The University of Michigan Library (“UM-Library”) expressed concerns with the proposed regulations regarding fixation and preservation. [ 112 ] They asserted that the proposed deposit requirements are not “sufficiently fixed for copyright purposes” and that if deposit “materials are not collected and preserved—even as facsimiles or through emulation—then as a practical matter there will be a huge gap in the possibilities for research, scholarship, and understanding.”

The Office is sympathetic to commenters' desires to expand the file formats accepted for deposit purposes generally, including regularly updated news content. As stated above and in the NPRM, the current registration system only accepts certain file types. [ 113 ] The Office anticipates revisiting its acceptable file formats in connection with ongoing improvements to its technology systems. Until then, the Office continues to actively engage in research about the suitability of other file formats. [ 114 ]

The Office appreciates the fixation and preservation concerns about the proposed deposit requirements, codified in the final rule. It continues to believe, however, that the deposit requirements are sufficient. As stated above and in the NPRM, the Copyright Act imbues the Register with broad authority to accept identifying material in lieu of complete copies or phonorecords  [ 115 ] where such copies or phonorecords are “bulky, unwieldly, easily broken, or otherwise impractical to [serve] . . . as records identifying the work[s] registered.”  [ 116 ] This provision, and its legislative history, give the Register flexibility in determining the deposit requirements when identifying material is involved, and the Office has used this authority in the past. Within this rulemaking, the Office believes the proposed deposit requirements are appropriate, and less burdensome than general deposit requirements for websites. [ 117 ] As the Office discussed in the NPRM, the proposed deposit requirements satisfy the public notice function and still require that deposits sufficiently “identify some of the updates” made to the website. [ 118 ] Any fixation concerns may be alleviated by the fact that the proposed regulations are merely registration deposit requirements. They do not relieve a registrant from complying with other legal obligations, such as the obligation to maintain and preserve copies of a website, including its content, in the context of an infringement claim. [ 119 ]

The NPRM explained that the Office planned to use one of its existing group registration application forms to process these claims. Specifically, it said applicants would be required to submit their claims through the current electronic registration system using the application designated for a group of newspaper issues. None of the commenters objected to this proposal.

After consulting with the Library of Congress's Office of the Chief Information Officer, the Office determined that it would be feasible to create a separate application for news website claims that will be cloned from the corresponding application that is used for group newspaper claims. This should simplify the registration process for both applicants and Office staff by preventing potential confusion between claims involving newspaper issues and claims involving updates to a news website. The cloned application will include the same technical specifications and system validations that appear in the group newspaper Start Printed Page 58999 form. The final rule has been modified to reflect this change. Information and instructions on how to submit these claims will be provided in the application itself and on a dedicated page on the Office's website.

Based on requests from affected parties for the expeditious implementation of the rule  [ 120 ] and the absence of arguments supporting a delay, the Office finds that good cause exists to issue these regulations as a final rule with an immediate effective date. Commenters have presented a record supporting “the demonstrable urgency of the conditions [the rule is] designed to correct.”  [ 121 ] Finally, the registration option authorized by the final rule will be available to registrants at or near the rule's publication date.

• General provisions
• Copyright claims, preregistration and registration

For the reasons set forth in the preamble, the Copyright Office amends 37 CFR parts 201 and 202 as follows:

1. The authority citation for part 201 continues to read as follows:

Authority: 17 U.S.C. 702 .

Section 201.10 also issued under 17 U.S.C. 304 .

2. In § 201.3, amend table 1 to paragraph (c) by redesignating paragraphs (c)(12) through (c)(29) as (c)(13) through (c)(30), respectively, and adding a new paragraph (c)(12) to read as follows:

Table 1 to Paragraph ( c )

Registration, recordation, and related servicesFees ($) *         *         *         *         *         *         *(12) Registration of a group of updates to a news website95 *         *         *         *         *         *         *

3. The authority citation for part 202 continues to read as follows:

Authority: 17 U.S.C. 408(f) , 702 .

4. Amend § 202.4 by adding paragraph (m) and revising paragraph (r) to read as follows:

(m) Group registration of updates to a news website. Pursuant to the authority granted by 17 U.S.C. 408(c)(1) , the Register of Copyrights has determined that a group of updates to a news website may be registered with one application, the required deposit, and the filing fee required by § 201.3 of this chapter, with each update being registered as a collective work, if the following conditions are met:

(1) Definitions. For the purposes of this paragraph (m):

(i) News website means a website that is designed to be a primary source of written information on current events, either local, national, or international in scope, that contains a broad range of news on all subjects and activities and is not limited to any specific subject matter.

(ii) Website means a web page or set of interconnected web pages that are accessed using a uniform resource locator (“URL”) organized under a particular domain name.

(2) Requirements for collective works. Each update to the website must be a collective work, and the claim must be limited to the collective work.

(3) Author and claimant. Each collective work in the group must be a work made for hire, and the author and claimant for each collective work must be the same person or organization.

(4) Updates must be from one news website; time period covered. Each collective work in the group must be published on the same news website under the same URL, and they must be published within the same calendar month. The applicant must identify the earliest and latest date that the collective works were published.

(5) Application. The applicant must complete and submit the online application designated for a group of updates to a news website. The application may be submitted by any of the parties listed in § 202.3(c)(1).

(6) Deposit. (i) For each collective work within the group, the applicant must submit identifying material from the news website. For these purposes “ identifying material ” shall mean separate Portable Document Format (PDF) files that each contain a complete copy of the home page of the website. In case a complete copy is technically unfeasible due to the size or continuous nature of the home page, the applicant may submit the first 25 pages of the home page that demonstrates updates from the previous deposit copy. Each PDF must show how the home page appeared at a specific point during each day of the calendar month when new updates were published on the website.

(ii) The identifying material must demonstrate that the home page contains sufficient selection, coordination, and arrangement authorship to be registered as a collective work If the home page does not demonstrate sufficient compilation authorship, the deposit should include as many additional pages as necessary to demonstrate that the updates to the news website can be registered as a collective work.

(iii) The identifying material must be submitted through the electronic registration system, and all of the Start Printed Page 59000 identifying material that was published on a particular date must be contained in the same electronic file. The files must be submitted in PDF format, they must be assembled in an orderly form, and each file must be uploaded to the electronic registration system as an individual electronic file ( i.e., not .zip files). The file size for each uploaded file must not exceed 500 megabytes, but files may be compressed to comply with this requirement.

(7) Special relief. In an exceptional case, the Copyright Office may waive the online filing requirement set forth in paragraph (m)(5) of this section or may grant special relief from the deposit requirement under § 202.20(d) of this chapter, subject to such conditions as the Associate Register of Copyrights and Director of the Office of Registration Policy and Practice may impose on the applicant.

(r) The scope of a group registration. When the Office issues a group registration under paragraph (d), (e), or (f) of this section, the registration covers each issue in the group and each issue is registered as a separate work or a separate collective work (as the case may be). When the Office issues a group registration under paragraphs (c), (g), (h), (i), (j), (k), or (o) of this section, the registration covers each work in the group and each work is registered as a separate work. When the Office issues a group registration under paragraph (m) of this section, the registration covers each update in the group, and each update is registered as a separate collective work. For purposes of registration, the group as a whole is not considered a compilation, a collective work, or a derivative work under section 101, 103(b), or 504(c)(1) of title 17 of the United States Code.

Shira Perlmutter,

Register of Copyrights and Director of the U.S. Copyright Office.

Approved by:

Carla D. Hayden,

Librarian of Congress.

1.   17 U.S.C. 408(c)(1) .

2.   Id.

3.   See generally 37 CFR 202.3(b)(5) , 202.4 .

4.   Id. at 202.3(b)(5), 202.4(c)-(k), (o).

5.   See 89 FR 311 , 311-12 (Jan. 3, 2024).

6.  U.S. Copyright Office, Copyright Protection for Press Publishers (June 2022), https://copyright.gov/​policy/​publishersprotections/​202206-Publishers-Protections-Study.pdf .

7.   See 89 FR 311 , 312 .

8.   Id. at 311. The final rule defines a “news website” as “a website that is designed to be a primary source of written information on current events, either local, national, or international in scope, that contains a broad range of news on all subjects and activities and is not limited to any specific subject matter.” 37 CFR 202.4(m)(1)(i) .

9.  Because the Office will not examine each component work within the collective work, the copyright claimant bears the burden of proving that it owns the individual component works claimed in the submission.

10.  A “collective work” is a type of compilation. See 17 U.S.C. 101 . A “compilation” is “a work formed by the collection and assembling of preexisting materials or of data that are selected, coordinated, or arranged in such a way that the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship.” Id.

11.  As noted in the NPRM, “in appropriate circumstances, the Office may waive the online filing requirement, subject to the conditions the Associate Register of Copyrights and Director of the Office of Registration Policy and Practice may impose.” 89 FR 311 , 316 n.55.

12.  The Office also received a letter from several organizations reflecting their collective support for finalizing the rulemaking in a timely manner and in-line edits to the Office's proposed regulatory language. Letter from Ass'n of Am. Publishers et al. to Suzanne Wilson, Gen. Counsel and Assoc. Register of Copyrights (Apr. 4, 2024), https://www.copyright.gov/​rulemaking/​newswebsite/​Association-of-American-Publishers-et-al%E2%80%93Letter-to-Copyright-Office.pdf .

13.   See Am. Ass'n of Independent Music, Ass'n of Am. Publishers, Inc, and Recording Industry Ass'n of Am., Inc. (“A2IM, AAP, & RIAA”) Comment at 2 (“Commenters express no position on the primary focus of the NPRM—whether the Office should create a new group registration option for frequently updated news websites—or on the details of how such an option should be implemented.”).

14.   See generally Nat'l Writers Union, Nat'l Press Photographers Ass'n, Nat'l Ass'n of Sci. Writers (“NWU, NPPA, & NASW”) Comment; Gordon Firemark 2 Comment.

15.  A handful of commenters also proposed that the Office should adopt the NPRM immediately, as an interim rule. See, e.g., Copyright All. Comment at 11; Nat'l Pub. Radio (“NPR”) Comment at 3-5; News Media All. (“NMA”) Comment at 2.

16.  Am. Bar Ass'n Section of Intell. Prop. L. (“ABA-IPL”) Comment at 4.

17.  89 FR at 311-12 (noting that “[m]ore than eight in ten Americans get news from digital devices, and, as of 2021, more than half prefer digital platforms to access news”).

18.   Id. (citing Newspaper Association of America Comments at 12-18, Submitted in Response to July 15, 2009 Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, Mandatory Deposit of Published Electronic Works Available Only Online, U.S. Copyright Office Dkt. No. 2009-3 (Aug. 31, 2009) (emphasis omitted), https://www.copyright.gov/​rulemaking/​online-only/​comments/​naa.pdf ).

19.   37 CFR 202.4(e) . The Office's definition of newspapers is based on the Library of Congress's collection policy definition. Library of Congress, Collections Policy Statements: Newspapers—United States 1 (Sept. 2023), https://www.loc.gov/​acq/​devpol/​neu.pdf .

20.  NWU, NPPA, & NASW Comment at 12-13; Gordon Firemark 2 Comment (asserting that “the proposed regulation is not Content Neutral, as required under the First Amendment”).

21.   Arkansas Writers Project, 481 U.S. at 234.

22.  NWU, NPPA, & NASW Comment at 12-13.

23.  Gordon Firemark 2 Comment.

24.   Id. (citing Iancu v. Brunetti, 139 S. Ct. 2294 (2019), and Matal v. Tam, 582 U.S. 218 (2017)).

25.   Reed v. Town of Gilbert, 576 U.S. 155, 163 (2015).

26.   Sable Commc'ns of Cal. v. FCC, 492 U.S. 115, 126 (1989).

27.   Reed, 576 U.S. at 164 (internal quotes omitted).

28.   Leathers v. Medlock, 499 U.S. 439, 452-53 (1991) (citing Mabee v. White Plains Publ'g Co., 327 U.S. 178 (1946), and Oklahoma Press Publ'g Co. v. Walling, 327 U.S. 186 (1946)).

29.   Arkansas Writers Project, 481 U.S. at 229 (finding the tax scheme impermissibly targets a small group of the press because “the magazine exemption means that only a few Arkansas magazines pay any sales tax”).

30.   Arkansas Writers Project, 481 U.S. at 229-30.

31.   37 CFR 202.3(b)(2)(i)(A) .

32.   See generally id. at 202.4.

33.   Vidal v. Elster, No. 22-704, slip op. at 1 (2024).

34.   Id.

35.   Id. at 4 (2024) (quoting National Institute of Family and Life Advocates v. Becerra, 585 U.S. 755, 766 (2018)).

36.   Id. (2024) (quoting Rosenberger v. Rector and Visitors of Univ. of Va., 515 U. S. 819, 829 (1995)).

37.   Id. at 6.

38.   Id. at 12.

39.   17 U.S.C. 408(c)(1) (emphasis added).

40.   Leathers, 499 U.S. at 452 (quoting Regan v. Taxation with Representation, 461 U.S. 540, 549 (1983)).

41.   See Gordon Firemark 2 Comment (citing Iancu v. Brunetti, 139 S. Ct. 2294 (2019), and Matal v. Tam, 582 U.S. 218 (2017)).

42.   See, e.g., 85 FR 37341 , 37345 (June 22, 2020) (final rule for group registration of short online literary works); 83 FR 61546 , 61546-48 (Nov. 30, 2018) (final rule for group registration of newsletters and serials); 82 FR 29410 , 29410-11 (June 29, 2017) (final rule for group registration of contributions to periodicals).

43.   See ABA-IPL Comment at 2; Am. Intell. Prop. L. Ass'n (“AIPLA”) Comment at 1 (“We encourage the Office to reconsider [the definition of `news website'] and clarify the final clause—`not limited to any specific subject matter'—which could be construed as excluding news websites with an industry-specific focus ( e.g., wired.com), and thus unnecessarily limiting access to this group registration option.”); Copyright All. Comment at 4 (“We urge deletion of the phrase `. . . on all subjects and activities and is not limited to any specific subject matter' in the proposed rule . . . .”); Harvard Bus. Publ'g (“HBP”) Comment; Nat'l Ass'n of Broad. (“NAB”) Comment at 3; NWU, NPPA, & NASW Comment at 12-13; NMA Comment at 8; The Authors Guild Comment at 2; see also Letter from Ass'n of Am. Publishers et al. to Suzanne Wilson, Gen. Counsel and Assoc. Register of Copyrights (Apr. 4, 2024).

44.  ABA-IPL Comment at 2.

45.  HBP Comment.

46.  The Authors Guild Comment at 1-2.

47.  John Murphy Comment; The Authors Guild Comment at 2 (arguing that “making eligibility determinations based on the substantive content of the materials submitted for registration . . . goes well beyond the Office's ordinary examination process”).

48.  Gordon Firemark 1 Comment; see NWU, NPPA, & NASW at 12-13; Brenda Ulrich Comment; John Murphy Comment.

49.   37 CFR 202.4(e)(1) .

50.   82 FR 51369 , 51371 (Nov. 6, 2017).

51.   37 CFR 202.4(f)(1)(i) .

52.   Id. at 202.4(e)(1) (“Newspapers are intended either for the general public or for a particular ethnic, cultural, or national group”).

53.  The Authors Guild Comment at 1-2.

54.   Cf. 37 CFR 202.4(f)(1)(i) (designed for newsletters that “contain news or information that is chiefly of interest to a special group”).

55.  Group registration of serials provides a registration option for serial issues within a three-month period that meet the eligibility requirements for that option. Id. at 202.4(d)(1). Group registration of newsletters provides an option for registering a group of newsletters published within a one-month period. Id. at 202.4(f)(1).

56.  Copyright All. Comment at 6; NAB Comment at 4; NMA Comment at 10.

57.  The Authors Guild Comment at 2; Copyright All. Comment at 6; NAB Comment at 4.

58.  U.S. Copyright Office, Compendium of U.S. Copyright Office Practices sec. 722 (3d ed. 2021) (“ Compendium (Third) ”).

59.   Id.

60.  AIPLA Comment at 1-2.

61.   Id.

62.  In the NPRM, the Office also noted that when a website is registered as a compilation, the statute provides that the copyright owner may seek only one award of statutory damages for infringement of the compilation as a whole—rather than a separate award for each individual work that appears on the website—even if the defendant infringed all of the works covered by the registration. 17 U.S.C. 504(c)(1) (“For the purposes of this subsection, all the parts of a compilation or derivative work constitute one work.”). Some commenters urged the Office to acknowledge and adopt the “ `independent economic value' test to determine when copyrighted material constitutes a separate `work' for the purpose of determining eligibility for statutory damages.” A2IM, AAP, & RIAA Comment at 2-3; Copyright All. Comment at 8; NAB Comment at 6-8. Acknowledging that the NPRM correctly states “that the group registration option will extend to individual works that make up the collective work if they are fully owned by the applicant,” NMA asked the Office to confirm that its statement “do[es] not reflect a substantive opinion on eligibility for statutory damages.” NMA Comment at 11-12. The Office stands by its restatement of section 504(c)(1) and declines to address the matter further in this rulemaking. See H.R. Rep. No. 94-1476, at 162 (1976), reprinted in 1976 U.S.C.C.A.N. 5659, 5770 (“Subsection (c)(1) makes clear, however, that, although they are regarded as independent works for other purposes, `all the parts of a compilation or derivative work constitute one work' for this purpose.”).

63.  NPR Comment at 7.

64.   37 CFR 202.4(m)(1)(i) (emphasis added).

65.   Compendium (Third) sec. 1002.2.

66.   Id.

67.   See 37 CFR 202.1(a) .

68.  John Murphy Comment; see NPR Comment at 5 (“[T]he office should further relax the frequency”); NWU, NPPA, & NASW Comment at 16-17.

69.  NPR Comment at 5.

70.  NWU, NPPA, & NASW Comment at 16.

71.  The Authors Guild Comment at 3; NWU, NPPA, & NASW Comment at 11; NMA Comment at 11; AIPLA Comment at 2; Letter from Ass'n of Am. Publishers et al. to Suzanne Wilson, Gen. Counsel and Assoc. Register of Copyrights (Apr. 4, 2024).

72.  The Authors Guild Comment at 3; NWU, NPPA, & NASW Comment at 11.

73.  NMA Comment at 11; AIPLA Comment at 2 (“[W]e see no clear policy reason to disfavor registration of copyrights acquired through other means ( e.g., by assignment).”).

74.   Compendium (Third) sec. 620.4.

75.  ABA-IPL Comment at 3; AIPLA Comment at 2; Copyright All. Comment at 6-7; NAB Comment at 5; NMA Comment at 7; The Authors Guild Comment at 4.

76.  The Authors Guild Comment at 4.

77.   Id.

78.  Note, however, the Office will not certify the accuracy of such additional information based on the identifying material deposited.

79.  Copyright All. Comment at 7.

80.  NMA Comment at 7.

81.  89 FR at 316.

82.   Id.

83.   Id.

84.  NMA Comment at 11.

85.   37 CFR 202.4(m)(6)(i) (emphasis added); see also 89 FR at 316 (“Each PDF must show how the home page appeared at a specific point during each day of the calendar month when new updates were published on the site.”).

86.  Copyright Alliance Comment at 10-11; NAB Comment at 4-5; NMA Comment at 11. See also Letter from Ass'n of Am. Publishers et al. to Suzanne Wilson, Gen. Counsel and Assoc. Register of Copyrights at App. at 2 (Apr. 4, 2024) (proposing regulatory language altering the deposit requirement when “a complete copy is technically unfeasible or unreadable due to the size or continuous nature of the home page”); Nexstar Media Group Inc. Comment (stating that Nexstar “would like to see even more modification of the requirements for article submission, so that each local television station or other news site would not be required to have dedicated staff purely for depositing copyrighted materials, which may be updated several times per day”).

87.  NAB Comment at 5.

88.   Id.

89.  Copyright All. Comment at 10-11.

90.  NMA Comment at 11.

91.  89 FR at 316.

92.  NWU, NPPA, & NASW Comment at 17-20.

93.   Id.

94.   Id.

95.   Id.; see also id. at 20 (proposing “submission of `a file or set of files linked from a master file listing in structured form the text files on the site added or modified during the time period covered by the application, including the URL and the date each file was added to the site or most recently modified' ”).

96.   Id. at 17, 20. NWU, NPPA, and NASW asserted that “the `sitemap.xml' standard has been widely accepted and adopted by website publishers, web publishing platforms, and developers of content management systems (CMSs).” Id. at 17-18.

97.   See 17 U.S.C. 410(a) ; Compendium (Third) sec. 204.3 (“[D]eposit copy(ies) should be clear and should contain all the authorship that the applicant intends to register.”). This finding is bolstered by the examples cited in NWU, NPPA, and NASW's comment, which do not provide any information that would allow the examiner to determine any copyrightability of the collective work. See NWU, NPPA, & NASW Comment at 18 nn.19-22; id. at 19 nn.23-26.

98.   See H.R. Rep. No. 94-1476, at 153 (1976), reprinted in 1976 U.S.C.C.A.N. 5659, 5769 (“As a general rule the deposit of more than a tear sheet or similar fraction of a collective work is needed to identify the contribution properly and to show the form in which it was published.”).

99.  89 FR at 316.

100.   See NWU, NPPA, & NASW Comment at 20 (suggesting that sitemaps “could be used immediately in manual Copyright Office work flow but would also lend themselves to efficiencies through automated parsing”).

101.  Erik Gottlieb Comment.

102.  Copyright All. Comment at 6; NMA Comment at 10; The Authors Guild Comment at 2. See also Letter from Ass'n of Am. Publishers et al. to Suzanne Wilson, Gen. Counsel and Assoc. Register of Copyrights at 1 & App. at 2 (Apr. 4, 2024) (proposing the Office “include[e] mobile app content in the scope of the rule”). The Office also received a comment from Port. Prerogative Club, suggesting that the Office “evaluate whether native [version control systems (“VCS”)] files would satisfy [the Office's] internal requirements for deposit copies.” Port. Prerogative Club Comment at 2. The Office currently does not accept this file format, but will revisit file formats as part of its ongoing work in developing the Enterprise Copyright System.

103.  Erik Gottlieb Comment.

104.  NMA Comment at App. at 16 (proposing regulatory language). See Copyright All. Comment at 6; NMA Comment at 10; The Authors Guild Comment at 2. See also Letter from Ass'n of Am. Publishers et al. to Suzanne Wilson, Gen. Counsel and Assoc. Register of Copyrights at 1 & App. at 2 (Apr. 4, 2024) (proposing the Office “includ[e] mobile app content in the scope of the rule”).

105.  Copyright All. Comment at 6; The Authors Guild Comment at 2.

106.  Copyright All. Comment at 6.

107.   Id. (noting that “news content on an app is already organized and contained in an interconnected and uniform ecosystem, much like a website”); NMA Comment at 10 (stating that app screenshots serve the same “identifying function as URLs”).

108.  NMA Comment at 10.

109.   See 89 FR at 313 (“[T]he organization and arrangement show in a PDF package may vary depending on whether it depicts the website as it would appear on a desktop computer, a mobile phone or other electronic device.”). But cf. ABA-IPL Comment at 4 (“The Section is aware of no substantive difference between what is published at a URL and what is published on an app.”).

110.  ABA-IPL Comment at 4-5.

111.   Id. at 4.

112.  UM-Library Comment at 1-2.

113.  89 FR at 313; see also eCO Acceptable File Types, U.S. Copyright Office, https://www.copyright.gov/​eco/​help-file-types.html (last visited July 5, 2024) (listing acceptable file formats).

114.  For example, the Office is researching the web archive file format (“WARC”) that is utilized by the Library of Congress' Web Archiving Team. Research has shown that there are many publicly available options for adapting websites in the WARC format, including through internet browser extensions.

115.   17 U.S.C. 408(c)(1) ; see also 89 FR at 311 (discussing identifying material).

116.  H.R. Rep. No. 94-1496, at 154 (1976), reprinted in 1976 U.S.C.C.A.N. 5659, 5770.

117.   See 89 FR at 313, 316 (discussing how depositing complete copies of websites poses difficulties for applicants and the Office).

118.   Id. at 316.

119.   Id.

120.   See Letter from Ass'n of Am. Publishers et al. to Suzanne Wilson, Gen. Counsel and Assoc. Register of Copyrights (Apr. 4, 2024); Copyright All. Comment at 11.

121.  H.R. Rep. No. 79-1980, at 260 (1946). See 5 U.S.C. 553(d) (30-day notice not required where agency finds good cause).

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How to Annotate Texts

Use the links below to jump directly to any section of this guide:

Annotation Fundamentals

How to start annotating , how to annotate digital texts, how to annotate a textbook, how to annotate a scholarly article or book, how to annotate literature, how to annotate images, videos, and performances, additional resources for teachers.

Writing in your books can make you smarter. Or, at least (according to education experts), annotation–an umbrella term for underlining, highlighting, circling, and, most importantly, leaving comments in the margins–helps students to remember and comprehend what they read. Annotation is like a conversation between reader and text. Proper annotation allows students to record their own opinions and reactions, which can serve as the inspiration for research questions and theses. So, whether you're reading a novel, poem, news article, or science textbook, taking notes along the way can give you an advantage in preparing for tests or writing essays. This guide contains resources that explain the benefits of annotating texts, provide annotation tools, and suggest approaches for diverse kinds of texts; the last section includes lesson plans and exercises for teachers.

Why annotate? As the resources below explain, annotation allows students to emphasize connections to material covered elsewhere in the text (or in other texts), material covered previously in the course, or material covered in lectures and discussion. In other words, proper annotation is an organizing tool and a time saver. The links in this section will introduce you to the theory, practice, and purpose of annotation. 

How to Mark a Book, by Mortimer Adler

This famous, charming essay lays out the case for marking up books, and provides practical suggestions at the end including underlining, highlighting, circling key words, using vertical lines to mark shifts in tone/subject, numbering points in an argument, and keeping track of questions that occur to you as you read. 

How Annotation Reshapes Student Thinking (TeacherHUB)

In this article, a high school teacher discusses the importance of annotation and how annotation encourages more effective critical thinking.

The Future of Annotation (Journal of Business and Technical Communication)

This scholarly article summarizes research on the benefits of annotation in the classroom and in business. It also discusses how technology and digital texts might affect the future of annotation. 

Annotating to Deepen Understanding (Texas Education Agency)

This website provides another introduction to annotation (designed for 11th graders). It includes a helpful section that teaches students how to annotate reading comprehension passages on tests.

Once you understand what annotation is, you're ready to begin. But what tools do you need? How do you prepare? The resources linked in this section list strategies and techniques you can use to start annotating. 

What is Annotating? (Charleston County School District)

This resource gives an overview of annotation styles, including useful shorthands and symbols. This is a good place for a student who has never annotated before to begin.

How to Annotate Text While Reading (YouTube)

This video tutorial (appropriate for grades 6–10) explains the basic ins and outs of annotation and gives examples of the type of information students should be looking for.

Annotation Practices: Reading a Play-text vs. Watching Film (U Calgary)

This blog post, written by a student, talks about how the goals and approaches of annotation might change depending on the type of text or performance being observed. 

Annotating Texts with Sticky Notes (Lyndhurst Schools)

Sometimes students are asked to annotate books they don't own or can't write in for other reasons. This resource provides some strategies for using sticky notes instead.

Teaching Students to Close Read...When You Can't Mark the Text (Performing in Education)

Here, a sixth grade teacher demonstrates the strategies she uses for getting her students to annotate with sticky notes. This resource includes a link to the teacher's free Annotation Bookmark (via Teachers Pay Teachers).

Digital texts can present a special challenge when it comes to annotation; emerging research suggests that many students struggle to critically read and retain information from digital texts. However, proper annotation can solve the problem. This section contains links to the most highly-utilized platforms for electronic annotation.

Evernote is one of the two big players in the "digital annotation apps" game. In addition to allowing users to annotate digital documents, the service (for a fee) allows users to group multiple formats (PDF, webpages, scanned hand-written notes) into separate notebooks, create voice recordings, and sync across all sorts of devices. 

OneNote is Evernote's main competitor. Reviews suggest that OneNote allows for more freedom for digital note-taking than Evernote, but that it is slightly more awkward to import and annotate a PDF, especially on certain platforms. However, OneNote's free version is slightly more feature-filled, and OneNote allows you to link your notes to time stamps on an audio recording.

Diigo is a basic browser extension that allows a user to annotate webpages. Diigo also offers a Screenshot app that allows for direct saving to Google Drive.

While the creators of Hypothesis like to focus on their app's social dimension, students are more likely to be interested in the private highlighting and annotating functions of this program.

Foxit PDF Reader

Foxit is one of the leading PDF readers. Though the full suite must be purchased, Foxit offers a number of annotation and highlighting tools for free.

Nitro PDF Reader

This is another well-reviewed, free PDF reader that includes annotation and highlighting. Annotation, text editing, and other tools are included in the free version.

Goodreader is a very popular Mac-only app that includes annotation and editing tools for PDFs, Word documents, Powerpoint, and other formats.

Although textbooks have vocabulary lists, summaries, and other features to emphasize important material, annotation can allow students to process information and discover their own connections. This section links to guides and video tutorials that introduce you to textbook annotation. 

Annotating Textbooks (Niagara University)

This PDF provides a basic introduction as well as strategies including focusing on main ideas, working by section or chapter, annotating in your own words, and turning section headings into questions.

A Simple Guide to Text Annotation (Catawba College)

The simple, practical strategies laid out in this step-by-step guide will help students learn how to break down chapters in their textbooks using main ideas, definitions, lists, summaries, and potential test questions.

Annotating (Mercer Community College)

This packet, an excerpt from a literature textbook, provides a short exercise and some examples of how to do textbook annotation, including using shorthand and symbols.

Reading Your Healthcare Textbook: Annotation (Saddleback College)

This powerpoint contains a number of helpful suggestions, especially for students who are new to annotation. It emphasizes limited highlighting, lots of student writing, and using key words to find the most important information in a textbook. Despite the title, it is useful to a student in any discipline.

Annotating a Textbook (Excelsior College OWL)

This video (with included transcript) discusses how to use textbook features like boxes and sidebars to help guide annotation. It's an extremely helpful, detailed discussion of how textbooks are organized.

Because scholarly articles and books have complex arguments and often depend on technical vocabulary, they present particular challenges for an annotating student. The resources in this section help students get to the heart of scholarly texts in order to annotate and, by extension, understand the reading.

Annotating a Text (Hunter College)

This resource is designed for college students and shows how to annotate a scholarly article using highlighting, paraphrase, a descriptive outline, and a two-margin approach. It ends with a sample passage marked up using the strategies provided. 

Guide to Annotating the Scholarly Article (ReadWriteThink.org)

This is an effective introduction to annotating scholarly articles across all disciplines. This resource encourages students to break down how the article uses primary and secondary sources and to annotate the types of arguments and persuasive strategies (synthesis, analysis, compare/contrast).

How to Highlight and Annotate Your Research Articles (CHHS Media Center)

This video, developed by a high school media specialist, provides an effective beginner-level introduction to annotating research articles. 

How to Read a Scholarly Book (AndrewJacobs.org)

In this essay, a college professor lets readers in on the secrets of scholarly monographs. Though he does not discuss annotation, he explains how to find a scholarly book's thesis, methodology, and often even a brief literature review in the introduction. This is a key place for students to focus when creating annotations. 

A 5-step Approach to Reading Scholarly Literature and Taking Notes (Heather Young Leslie)

This resource, written by a professor of anthropology, is an even more comprehensive and detailed guide to reading scholarly literature. Combining the annotation techniques above with the reading strategy here allows students to process scholarly book efficiently. 

Annotation is also an important part of close reading works of literature. Annotating helps students recognize symbolism, double meanings, and other literary devices. These resources provide additional guidelines on annotating literature.

AP English Language Annotation Guide (YouTube)

In this ~10 minute video, an AP Language teacher provides tips and suggestions for using annotations to point out rhetorical strategies and other important information.

Annotating Text Lesson (YouTube)

In this video tutorial, an English teacher shows how she uses the white board to guide students through annotation and close reading. This resource uses an in-depth example to model annotation step-by-step.

Close Reading a Text and Avoiding Pitfalls (Purdue OWL)

This resources demonstrates how annotation is a central part of a solid close reading strategy; it also lists common mistakes to avoid in the annotation process.

AP Literature Assignment: Annotating Literature (Mount Notre Dame H.S.)

This brief assignment sheet contains suggestions for what to annotate in a novel, including building connections between parts of the book, among multiple books you are reading/have read, and between the book and your own experience. It also includes samples of quality annotations.

AP Handout: Annotation Guide (Covington Catholic H.S.)

This annotation guide shows how to keep track of symbolism, figurative language, and other devices in a novel using a highlighter, a pencil, and every part of a book (including the front and back covers).

In addition to written resources, it's possible to annotate visual "texts" like theatrical performances, movies, sculptures, and paintings. Taking notes on visual texts allows students to recall details after viewing a resource which, unlike a book, can't be re-read or re-visited ( for example, a play that has finished its run, or an art exhibition that is far away). These resources draw attention to the special questions and techniques that students should use when dealing with visual texts.

How to Take Notes on Videos (U of Southern California)

This resource is a good place to start for a student who has never had to take notes on film before. It briefly outlines three general approaches to note-taking on a film. 

How to Analyze a Movie, Step-by-Step (San Diego Film Festival)

This detailed guide provides lots of tips for film criticism and analysis. It contains a list of specific questions to ask with respect to plot, character development, direction, musical score, cinematography, special effects, and more. 

How to "Read" a Film (UPenn)

This resource provides an academic perspective on the art of annotating and analyzing a film. Like other resources, it provides students a checklist of things to watch out for as they watch the film.

Art Annotation Guide (Gosford Hill School)

This resource focuses on how to annotate a piece of art with respect to its formal elements like line, tone, mood, and composition. It contains a number of helpful questions and relevant examples. 

Photography Annotation (Arts at Trinity)

This resource is designed specifically for photography students. Like some of the other resources on this list, it primarily focuses on formal elements, but also shows students how to integrate the specific technical vocabulary of modern photography. This resource also contains a number of helpful sample annotations.

How to Review a Play (U of Wisconsin)

This resource from the University of Wisconsin Writing Center is designed to help students write a review of a play. It contains suggested questions for students to keep in mind as they watch a given production. This resource helps students think about staging, props, script alterations, and many other key elements of a performance.

This section contains links to lessons plans and exercises suitable for high school and college instructors.

Beyond the Yellow Highlighter: Teaching Annotation Skills to Improve Reading Comprehension (English Journal)

In this journal article, a high school teacher talks about her approach to teaching annotation. This article makes a clear distinction between annotation and mere highlighting.

Lesson Plan for Teaching Annotation, Grades 9–12 (readwritethink.org)

This lesson plan, published by the National Council of Teachers of English, contains four complete lessons that help introduce high school students to annotation.

Teaching Theme Using Close Reading (Performing in Education)

This lesson plan was developed by a middle school teacher, and is aligned to Common Core. The teacher presents her strategies and resources in comprehensive fashion.

Analyzing a Speech Using Annotation (UNC-TV/PBS Learning Media)

This complete lesson plan, which includes a guide for the teacher and relevant handouts for students, will prepare students to analyze both the written and presentation components of a speech. This lesson plan is best for students in 6th–10th grade.

Writing to Learn History: Annotation and Mini-Writes (teachinghistory.org)

This teaching guide, developed for high school History classes, provides handouts and suggested exercises that can help students become more comfortable with annotating historical sources.

Writing About Art (The College Board)

This Prezi presentation is useful to any teacher introducing students to the basics of annotating art. The presentation covers annotating for both formal elements and historical/cultural significance.

Film Study Worksheets (TeachWithMovies.org)

This resource contains links to a general film study worksheet, as well as specific worksheets for novel adaptations, historical films, documentaries, and more. These resources are appropriate for advanced middle school students and some high school students. 

Annotation Practice Worksheet (La Guardia Community College)

This worksheet has a sample text and instructions for students to annotate it. It is a useful resource for teachers who want to give their students a chance to practice, but don't have the time to select an appropriate piece of text. 

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How to Annotate a Speech

M.t. wroblewski.

Annotation is a function of active reading, with the objective being to think about and respond to what you read. Most speeches are driven by purpose and contain both rhetorical flourishes and emotional appeals, which can make annotations flow with ease. Begin with one of the great speeches of history -- such as Martin Luther King's “I Have a Dream” speech or President John F. Kennedy's inaugural address -- and burnish your annotation skills for other school assignments.

Explore this article

• Develop Your System
• Scrutinize the Words

1 Develop Your System

There is no right or wrong way to annotate, so develop a system that works for you. Choose your favorite tool: pencil, pen or highlighter. Write observations, critiques and questions in the margins. Reach for sticky notes only in the unlikely event that you fill the margins so that you don't run the risk of the notes becoming detached from the page. Underline, circle or draw a box around key words. Draw lines or arrows to connect ideas. Show your emotional response to speech passages with exclamation points or stars.

2 Scrutinize the Words

Take the time to annotate the speech in two waves: while you're reading it for the first time and then after pondering its meaning. Identify the purpose of the speech and the intended audience. Focus on word choices -- are they simple or complex? -- and the emotional appeals. Evaluate the use of rhetorical devices, such as alliteration and redundancies. Conclude your review by answering: Did the speech succeed in influencing you? If so, why? If not, why not?

• 1 Edmond Public Schools: How to Annotate a Text
• 2 The Atlantic: Annotated State of the Union Speech

About the Author

With education, health care and small business marketing as her core interests, M.T. Wroblewski has penned pieces for Woman's Day, Family Circle, Ladies Home Journal and many newspapers and magazines. She holds a master's degree in journalism from Northern Illinois University.

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• How to Annotate

Where to Make Notes

First, determine how you will annotate the text you are about to read. 

If it is a printed article, you may be able to just write in the margins. A colored pen might make it easier to see than black or even blue. 

If it is an article posted on the web, you could also you Diigo , which is a highlighting and annotating tool that you can use on the website and even share your notes with your instructor. Other note-taking plug-ins for web browsers might serve a similar function. 

If it is a textbook that you do not own (or wish to sell back), use post it notes to annotate in the margins.

You can also use a notebook to keep written commentary as you read in any platform, digital or print. If you do this, be sure to leave enough information about the specific text you’re responding to that you can find it later if you need to. (Make notes about page number, which paragraph it is, or even short quotes to help you locate the passage again.)

What Notes to Make

Now you will annotate the document by adding your own words, phrases, and summaries to the written text. For the following examples, the article “ Guinea Worm Facts ” was used.

• Scan the document you are annotating. Some obvious clues will be apparent before you read it, such as titles or headers for sections. Read the first paragraph. Somewhere in the first (or possibly the second) paragraph should be a BIG IDEA about what the article is going to be about. In the margins, near the top, write down the big idea of the article in your own words. This shouldn’t be more than a phrase or a sentence. This big idea is likely the article’s thesis.
• Underline topic sentences or phrases that express the main idea for that paragraph or section. You should never underline more than 5 words, though for large paragraphs or blocks of text, you can use brackets. (Underlining long stretches gets messy, and makes it hard to review the text later.) Write in the margin next to what you’ve underlined a summary of the paragraph or the idea being expressed.

• “Depending on the outcome of the assessment, the commission recommends to WHO which formerly endemic countries should be declared free of transmission, i.e., certified as free of the disease.” –> ?? What does this mean? Who is WHO?
• “Guinea worm disease incapacitates victims for extended periods of time making them unable to work or grow enough food to feed their families or attend school.” –> My dad was sick for a while and couldn’t work. This was hard on our family.
• “Guinea worm disease is set to become the second human disease in history, after smallpox, to be eradicated.” –> Eradicated = to put an end to, destroy

To summarize how you will annotate text:

1. Identify the BIG IDEA 2. Underline topic sentences or main ideas 3. Connect ideas with arrows 4. Ask questions 5. Add personal notes 6. Define technical words

Like many skills, annotating takes practice. Remember that the main goal for doing this is to give you a strategy for reading text that may be more complicated and technical than what you are used to.

• Revision and Adaptation. Provided by : Lumen Learning. License : CC BY-NC: Attribution-NonCommercial
• How to Annotate Text. Provided by : Biology Corner. Located at : https://biologycorner.com/worksheets/annotate.html . License : CC BY-NC: Attribution-NonCommercial
• Image of taking notes. Authored by : Security & Defence Agenda. Located at : https://flic.kr/p/8NunXe . License : CC BY: Attribution
• Table of Contents

Instructor Resources (available upon sign-in)

• Overview of Instructor Resources
• Quiz Survey

Reading: Types of Reading Material

• Introduction to Reading
• Outcome: Types of Reading Material
• Characteristics of Texts, Part 1
• Characteristics of Texts, Part 2
• Characteristics of Texts, Part 3
• Characteristics of Texts, Conclusion
• Self Check: Types of Writing

Reading: Reading Strategies

• Outcome: Reading Strategies
• The Rhetorical Situation
• Academic Reading Strategies
• Self Check: Reading Strategies

Reading: Specialized Reading Strategies

• Outcome: Specialized Reading Strategies
• Online Reading Comprehension
• How to Read Effectively in Math
• How to Read Effectively in the Social Sciences
• How to Read Effectively in the Sciences
• 5 Step Approach for Reading Charts and Graphs
• Self Check: Specialized Reading Strategies

Reading: Vocabulary

• Outcome: Vocabulary
• Strategies to Improve Your Vocabulary
• Using Context Clues
• The Relationship Between Reading and Vocabulary
• Self Check: Vocabulary

Reading: Thesis

• Outcome: Thesis
• Locating and Evaluating Thesis Statements
• The Organizational Statement
• Self Check: Thesis

Reading: Supporting Claims

• Outcome: Supporting Claims
• Types of Support
• Supporting Claims
• Self Check: Supporting Claims

Reading: Logic and Structure

• Outcome: Logic and Structure
• Rhetorical Modes
• Inductive and Deductive Reasoning
• Diagramming and Evaluating Arguments
• Logical Fallacies
• Evaluating Appeals to Ethos, Logos, and Pathos
• Self Check: Logic and Structure

Reading: Summary Skills

• Outcome: Summary Skills
• Paraphrasing
• Quote Bombs
• Summary Writing
• Self Check: Summary Skills
• Conclusion to Reading

Writing Process: Topic Selection

• Introduction to Writing Process
• Outcome: Topic Selection
• Starting a Paper
• Choosing and Developing Topics
• Back to the Future of Topics
• Developing Your Topic
• Self Check: Topic Selection

Writing Process: Prewriting

• Outcome: Prewriting
• Prewriting Strategies for Diverse Learners
• Rhetorical Context
• Working Thesis Statements
• Self Check: Prewriting

Writing Process: Finding Evidence

• Outcome: Finding Evidence
• Using Personal Examples
• Performing Background Research
• Listening to Sources, Talking to Sources
• Self Check: Finding Evidence

Writing Process: Organizing

• Outcome: Organizing
• Moving Beyond the Five-Paragraph Theme
• Introduction to Argument
• The Three-Story Thesis
• Organically Structured Arguments
• Logic and Structure
• The Perfect Paragraph
• Introductions and Conclusions
• Self Check: Organizing

Writing Process: Drafting

• Outcome: Drafting
• From Outlining to Drafting
• Flash Drafts
• Self Check: Drafting

Writing Process: Revising

• Outcome: Revising
• Seeking Input from Others
• Responding to Input from Others
• The Art of Re-Seeing
• Higher Order Concerns
• Self Check: Revising

Writing Process: Proofreading

• Outcome: Proofreading
• Lower Order Concerns
• Proofreading Advice
• "Correctness" in Writing
• The Importance of Spelling
• Punctuation Concerns
• Self Check: Proofreading
• Conclusion to Writing Process

Research Process: Finding Sources

• Introduction to Research Process
• Outcome: Finding Sources
• The Research Process
• Finding Sources
• What are Scholarly Articles?
• Finding Scholarly Articles and Using Databases
• Database Searching
• Advanced Search Strategies
• Preliminary Research Strategies
• Reading and Using Scholarly Sources
• Self Check: Finding Sources

Research Process: Source Analysis

• Outcome: Source Analysis
• Evaluating Sources
• CRAAP Analysis
• Evaluating Websites
• Synthesizing Sources
• Self Check: Source Analysis

Research Process: Writing Ethically

• Outcome: Writing Ethically
• Academic Integrity
• Defining Plagiarism
• Avoiding Plagiarism
• Using Sources in Your Writing
• Self Check: Writing Ethically

Research Process: MLA Documentation

• Introduction to MLA Documentation
• Outcome: MLA Documentation
• MLA Document Formatting
• MLA Works Cited
• Creating MLA Citations
• MLA In-Text Citations
• Self Check: MLA Documentation
• Conclusion to Research Process

Grammar: Nouns and Pronouns

• Introduction to Grammar
• Outcome: Nouns and Pronouns
• Pronoun Cases and Types
• Pronoun Antecedents
• Try It: Nouns and Pronouns
• Self Check: Nouns and Pronouns

Grammar: Verbs

• Outcome: Verbs
• Verb Tenses and Agreement
• Non-Finite Verbs
• Complex Verb Tenses
• Try It: Verbs
• Self Check: Verbs

Grammar: Other Parts of Speech

• Outcome: Other Parts of Speech
• Comparing Adjectives and Adverbs
• Adjectives and Adverbs
• Conjunctions
• Prepositions
• Try It: Other Parts of Speech
• Self Check: Other Parts of Speech

Grammar: Punctuation

• Outcome: Punctuation
• End Punctuation
• Hyphens and Dashes
• Apostrophes and Quotation Marks
• Brackets, Parentheses, and Ellipses
• Semicolons and Colons
• Try It: Punctuation
• Self Check: Punctuation

Grammar: Sentence Structure

• Outcome: Sentence Structure
• Parts of a Sentence
• Common Sentence Structures
• Run-on Sentences
• Sentence Fragments
• Parallel Structure
• Try It: Sentence Structure
• Self Check: Sentence Structure

Grammar: Voice

• Outcome: Voice
• Active and Passive Voice
• Using the Passive Voice
• Conclusion to Grammar
• Try It: Voice
• Self Check: Voice

Success Skills

• Introduction to Success Skills
• Habits for Success
• Critical Thinking
• Time Management
• Writing in College
• Computer-Based Writing
• Conclusion to Success Skills

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[ an - uh -teyt ]

verb (used with object)

to annotate the works of Shakespeare.

verb (used without object)

• to make annotations or notes .

/ ˈænəʊˌteɪt; ˈænə- /

• to supply (a written work, such as an ancient text) with critical or explanatory notes

Derived Forms

• ˈannoˌtatable , adjective
• ˈannoˌtator , noun
• ˈannoˌtative , adjective

Other Words From

• anno·tative an·no·ta·to·ry [ an, -, uh, -tey-t, uh, -ree, -t, uh, -tawr-ee, -tohr-ee, uh, -, noh, -t, uh, -tawr-ee, -tohr-ee ] , adjective
• anno·tator noun
• over·anno·tate verb overannotated overannotating
• re·anno·tate verb reannotated reannotating

Word History and Origins

Origin of annotate 1

Example Sentences

An AI trained to recognize cancer from a slew of medical scans, annotated in yellow marker by a human doctor, could learn to associate “yellow” with “cancer.”

To make any sense of these images, and in turn, what the brain is doing, the parts of neurons have to be annotated in three dimensions, the result of which is a wiring diagram.

This kind of labeling and reconstruction is necessary to make sense of the vast datasets in connectomics, and have traditionally required armies of undergraduate students or citizen scientists to manually annotate all chunks.

Once a video is annotated with a topic, it is associated with IAB’s categories to be monetized.

You should annotate your reports to document these indexing bugs during the month of September through October 14th.

The latest $400 model has a reading light and a touch screen that allows you to annotate while reading.

Madame Beattie threw back her plumed head and laughed, the same laugh she had used to annotate the stories.

He read industriously for some time, occasionally pausing to annotate; and once or twice he raised his head and listened.

He would annotate three hundred volumes for a page of facts.

To annotate it in detail would be to spoil its completeness.

His curiosity turning to admiration, he began to translate and annotate the most striking treatises that fell into his hands.

More About Annotate

What does  annotate mean.

To annotate is to add notes or comments to a text or something similar to provide explanation or criticism about a particular part of it.

Such notes or comments are called annotations . Annotation can also refer to the act of annotating.

Annotations are often added to scholarly articles or to literary works that are being analyzed. But any text can be annotated. For example, a note that you scribble in the margin of your textbook is an annotation, as is an explanatory comment that you add to a list of tasks at work.

Something that has had such notes added to it can be described with the adjective annotated , as in This is the annotated edition of the book. 

Example: I like to annotate the books I’m reading by writing my thoughts in the margins.

Where does  annotate come from?

The first records of the word annotate come from the 1700s. ( Annotation is recorded much earlier, in the 1400s.) Annotate derives from the Latin annotātus, which means “noted down” and comes from the Latin verb annotāre. At the root of the word is the Latin nota, which means “mark” and is also the basis of the English word note.

Typically, text is annotated in order to add explanation, criticism, analysis, or historical perspective. The word can be used in more specific ways in different contexts. In an annotated bibliography , each citation is annotated with a summary or other information. In computer programming, strings of code can be annotated with explanatory notes. In genomics , gene sequences can be annotated with interpretations of genes and their possible functions. In all cases, the word refers to adding some kind of extra information to an existing thing.

Did you know ... ?

What are some other forms related to annotate ?

• annotation (noun)
• annotated (past tense verb, adjective)
• annotative (adjective)
• annotatory (adjective)
• annotator (noun)
• reannotate (verb)

What are some synonyms for annotate ?

What are some words that share a root or word element with annotate ? 

What are some words that often get used in discussing annotate ?

• explanation

How is  annotate used in real life?

Annotate is most commonly used in the context of academic and literary works.

every time i annotate a book i think about how beautiful the reading experience will be for the next person but nobody ever borrows books from me so 😔 https://t.co/Uktg1BLIUo — mahnoor (@mahnewr_) July 26, 2020

When I read books, I analyze them completely. I annotate, I take notes—I try to communicate with the author. Doing this has shown dramatic improvement in retaining the information I read from the books. I also listen to ASMR ambiences, whether a crackling fireplace or a library. pic.twitter.com/Y4s69lHESb — Brice van der Post (@bricevdp) July 26, 2020

Human workers are needed to prepare data for #AI , annotate the datasets used to train AI models, monitor the performance of these models — and correct inaccurate predictions. Namrata Yadav examines. https://t.co/IXieNmjfkD — ORF (@orfonline) July 30, 2020

Try using  annotate !

Which of the following things can be annotated ?

A. a classic novel B. a scholarly article C. a grocery list D. all of the above

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Definition of annotate

intransitive verb

transitive verb

Examples of annotate in a Sentence

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'annotate.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Word History

Latin annotatus , past participle of annotare , from ad- + notare to mark — more at note

1693, in the meaning defined at transitive sense

Dictionary Entries Near annotate

Cite this entry.

“Annotate.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary , Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/annotate. Accessed 23 Jul. 2024.

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Beginner’s guide to audio annotation

Have you ever wondered how your voice assistant recognizes what you’re saying? From Siri to Alexa, to speech recognition software, to wider applications – audio annotation is the unsung hero of the AI world, working hard behind the scenes to ensure that these applications work seamlessly. This blog post explores audio annotation in detail, from basic understanding of audio annotation as a concept, to its applications and use cases, to tools and techniques being used behind the scenes to ensure effective annotation, as well as typical challenges for annotators. 

Use cases and industries

It's crucial in multiple fields that audio data is correctly annotated. This data can offer valuable insights and open up opportunities for innovation across multiple industries and use cases. Here’s our round-up of the top 10: 

1. Communication and language understanding:

Audio data provides a rich source of information for researching the way humans communicate. It helps academics and linguists to analyze language patterns, to complete processes in speech recognition and natural language processing , and to enable the development of voice-controlled technologies, virtual assistants , and language translation systems. 

2. Multimedia analysis:

Audio data enhances the analysis of multimedia content such as videos, podcasts, and music. Through careful examination of the audio component, content creators can gain valuable insights into emotions , sentiment, and context. They can use this information to improve the user experiences and personalized recommendations of their audience. 

3. Healthcare and medicine:

Audio data enables the diagnosis and treatment of speech disorders, monitoring patient vitals, analyzing breathing patterns, and detecting anomalies in heart and lung sounds. By annotating sounds in medical audio recordings, such as respiratory sounds or heart murmurs, we can assist in diagnosing medical conditions, monitoring patients remotely, or even detecting abnormalities more quickly and more accurately. It becomes easier to predict patient outcomes and mitigate potential drawbacks. Audio data also plays a vital role in telemedicine, remote patient monitoring, and assisting individuals with disabilities.   

4. Market research and customer insights:

Audio data can provide valuable insights into consumer behavior, preferences, and sentiment to enterprises. Call center recordings, customer feedback, and social media audio content can all be analyzed. This leads to deeper understanding of customer expectations and requirements, improved products or services, and can also drive more relevant business strategies. 

5. Security and forensics:

Audio data is increasingly important in security and forensic applications. It helps in voice authentication, speaker identification, and audio forensics for law enforcement, fraud detection, and criminal investigations. Audio analysis can help to provide evidence in legal proceedings and assist in identifying individuals or verifying audio recordings' authenticity. 

6. Education and accessibility:

Audio data facilitates e-learning, audiobooks, and educational resources for visually impaired individuals. It allows for the creation of accessible content, enabling a wider audience to access and benefit from educational materials, for example through subtitles. 

7. Environmental monitoring:

Audio data helps researchers to monitor and analyze sounds from the natural world. This is particularly useful in instances such as wildlife monitoring, bird song analysis, or detecting industrial noise pollution. It aids in understanding ecosystems and biodiversity, as well as the human impact on different ecosystems. 

8. Enabling accessibility:

Audio annotation plays a crucial role in creating accessible content for individuals with visual impairments. By annotating audio with detailed descriptions, transcripts, or in alternative formats, we render different resources like educational resources, audiobooks, and multimedia content far more accessible to a wider audience of consumers. 

9. Data analysis and insights:

Annotation allows us to extract valuable insights from audio data. By labeling emotions, detecting sentiment, or categorizing sounds, we can gain deeper insights to user behavior, consumer preferences, or environmental patterns. This information improves decision-making, strategic processes, etc. 

10. Enhancing data searchability:

Annotated audio data improves the potential for searchability and retrieval of data. With transcriptions, keywords, or semantic annotations, audio recordings can be indexed and searched effectively, enabling more efficient content retrieval and data management, saving time and frustrations. 

These are just our top 10 use cases of why audio data is significant, but before anyone can harness the power of audio data, it must be annotated correctly. Once annotated, we can gain valuable insights, improve technologies, and make informed decisions in various domains thanks to the data. 

Read more: Annotation tools – market overview 

What does audio annotation involve? 

Audio annotation is the process of transforming raw audio data into usable materials through labeling and tagging audio data with relevant information. The goal is to make it understandable and usable for machine learning algorithms and human analysis. The process involves manually or automatically adding metadata, transcriptions, or annotations to audio recordings. This enables deeper insights and facilities various applications. Its relevance spans across various industries and applications, enabling advancements in technology, improving user experiences, and unlocking valuable insights from audio content. 

The key purpose of audio annotation is its ability to make audio data accessible for analysis, machine learning, and decision-making. Audio annotation provides labeled data that is absolutely essential for training machine learning models. There are different elements to audio annotation which we explore here. 

Transcription:

Transcription is the process of converting audio content into written text. It involves taking audio recordings such as phone conversations, and transcribing the spoken words into writing. Sometimes background noises, music, or other non-human noises are also noted. The transcriptions can be done by a human transcriber manually, or by an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) system. In manual transcription, the human listens to the audio recording then manually types out the words that they hear. Sometimes they use specialized tools to help with this. In ASR, technology uses machine learning and algorithms to transcribe the audio automatically into text. This is known as “speech to text”. This sometimes isn’t yet as accurate as using human specialists, especially when there are instances of background noise, accents in the speech, or if one or more speaker has a complex speech pattern or speech impediment.  

“Listen and playback”:

“Listen and playback” sounds quite self-explanatory. The human specialist transcriber, or the ASR system listen to the audio as many times as needed in order to obtain an accurate insight into exactly what was said. They can replay sections as necessary, and this helps to ensure higher accuracy in their transcriptions. This is a self-explanatory but crucial aspect of the process, especially if some of the speech is fast paces, mumbled, or if there is “overlap” in the speech when more than one person is speaking at the same time. 

Text formatting and punctuation:

When manual transcription is concerned, the human specialist transcriber is not only capturing the spoken language, but also the appropriate punctuation and formatting to keep the textual rendition of the speech as accurate as possible. This helps to make the transcription more coherent and easier to read. Formatting can include insertion of paragraph breaks, the use of quotation marks to indicate dialogue, and the application of appropriate punctuation. The relevant protocol can change on a case-by-case basis so it’s important that the specialist pays attention to any specific instructions. 

Timestamps and speaker identification:

Depending on the project, the protocol can also include a request for timestamps and speaker identification to be added to the transcription. Timestamps show the specific point in time from the audio recording where each snippet of text occurs. The speaker identification tags differentiate the different speakers or voices in conversations. 

Proofing and editing:

For manual transcription processes, the transcriber will carefully review the transcription in order to ensure accuracy, as well as check the grammar and overall coherence of the transcription. This step can be lengthy as it also involves the correction of any errors, completing any missing words or phrases, and ensuring that the entirety of the finished transcription aligns perfectly with the entirety of the audio file. 

Final delivery:

The completed transcription is saved in various formats (JSON, CSV, plain text, Microsoft Word document…) and is then ready for delivery to the end user or for further analysis as required. It can be indexed, translated, or processed in other ways depending on the use case. 

Emotion analysis:

Audio annotation can also be used to analyze and label emotions expressed within the speech audio. Transcribers and annotators can tag segments of the audio or assign specific emotional categories to segments of speech. This process involves manually or automatically identifying patterns in speech, tone, and vocal cues that indicate different speaker’s various emotions. The use of emotion labels, such as happiness, sadness, anger, or surprise, helps researchers and analysts to gain valuable insights into the emotional content of the audio files. They can then study the impact of different emotions on customer experiences, or within psychological research.  

Read more: What is emotion analytics?

Noise detection:

Audio annotation can identify and classify background noises or disturbances in audio data. By manually or automatically annotating the audio, specific segments containing background noises can be marked and labeled accordingly. This allows for the identification of unwanted sounds, such as wind, traffic, or electronic interference, and distinguishes them from the main audio content. With annotated labels, researchers or audio engineers can then apply noise reduction techniques, filter out unwanted sounds, or improve the overall audio quality for an improved listening experience. This can be crucial in fields like audio production, speech recognition, and improving audio-based systems for use in noisy environments. 

Manual transcription requires excellent attention to detail, near-perfect listening skills, and expert levels of language proficiency. Whether done manually or by using ASR, the transcription process is essential for making audio content accessible, searchable, and analyzable in written formats. 

What are the tools and techniques required for audio annotation? 

Today a plethora of platforms exists for annotating speech. The process of commercial speech annotation typically involves segmentation and transcription of an audio clip. This means that the audio clip is segmented into sections of speech such as sentences or paragraphs according to predefined criteria. These segments are then transcribed into sentences representing what the speakers are saying. These transcriptions can also be annotated with details such as background noise, coughs, non-human noises, and so on.  

There are a number of basic features that are expected as standard from annotation platforms. Those are:  

•   Data collection : scripted data, unscripted data, conversational data…  
•   Speech labeling : applying labels such as “low/mid/high noise” etc.  
•  Speech segmentation: marking segments of an audio recording as different types of content (e.g., speech segments, overlapping speech segments of two or more people speaking simultaneously, noise segments, and music segments).  
•  Speech transcriptions: most companies have their own requirements.  

As experienced annotators ourselves, we noticed large gaps on the market where high-quality solutions simply didn’t exist. This was causing frustration in our team as the low-quality tools were impacting delivery times – so we decided to create our own tool. How did we do it? 

We started by creating an intuitive user interface so that when we hire new team members, they didn’t need training for it. We didn’t need to make demos, and new hires were able to get to work immediately. We noticed this was motivational for new teammates, and resulted in faster turn-around times on transcription projects. Win-win! 

We also integrated multiple AI features to the tool, to help us to speed things up (we reckon we’re saving about 66% project delivery time!) and to enhance the overall accuracy of our work. The AI preprocesses the audio recordings and segments them automatically by speaker and non-human sounds. We can modify the suggestions with one click if needed. The tool supports overlapping segments, and with one click we can skip to a new segment or replay the sections we want to. This is saving us about 3 hours per recording on average.  

Sometimes we just want to transcribe the data without the segmentation, and this is possible too. The built-in AI will suggest transcriptions for the audio file automatically, and then we just accept or correct those. This is available in all major and most smaller languages, and for specific industries or use cases we can even provide a specific list of industry terminology for the AI to recognize. You can read more about the tool here . 

What are the main challenges and considerations in audio annotation? 

Data privacy is a strong theme when handling audio recordings, and rightly so. Data privacy and ethical considerations are critical. Audio data often contains personal or confidential information that must be protected to respect individuals' privacy rights. Mishandling such data can lead to privacy breaches, identity theft, or unauthorized access to sensitive information. Adhering to privacy regulations, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) or the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), is crucial to maintain trust and legal compliance. Check out our Data Privacy Checklist to learn more. 

Sensitive audio data, such as customer conversations, financial transactions, or healthcare-related discussions, can contain highly confidential information. In such cases, ensuring proper encryption, access controls, and secure storage are essential. Companies need to prevent unauthorized access, data leaks, or cyber attacks, as these can have severe consequences for both individuals and organizations. Various industries (e.g. healthcare, finance, and telecommunications…) have their own specific regulations to govern the handling of sensitive audio data. Compliance with regulations like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) or the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is crucial to avoid legal penalties, reputational damage, and loss of business. 

On top of this, organizations must prioritize privacy and compliance to establish trust with their customers and partners. No reputable enterprise would risk their reputation by dealing with a partner who doesn’t put privacy at the top of their agenda. Demonstrating a commitment to protecting data privacy builds confidence, strengthens customer relationships, and enhances the organization's reputation. It’s also a strong ethical responsibility. People expect their personal information to be handled with care and to have control over how their data is used, and upholding ethical standards is essential to build long-term relationships with customers and stakeholders. 

Hand-in-hand with privacy comes rigorous quality control processes. There are essential to maintain accuracy and consistency in annotations. Inaccurate or inconsistent annotations can lead to flawed models, biased outcomes , and unreliable insights, but by implementing robust quality control measures, enterprises ensure that their annotations adhere to any guidelines and result in the desired outcomes. Regular evaluations, inter-annotator agreements, calibration exercises, and feedback loops help to identify and to rectify any errors, as well as to enhance annotation consistency, and to improve the overall quality of labeled data. High-quality annotations are foundational for training reliable machine learning models and ensuring trustworthy and unbiased results. 

Finally, scalability and cost should be addressed carefully. The scaling of annotation efforts can result in increased costs and this double-edged sword should be tackled with foresight. As the volume of audio data grows, the need for additional annotation resources, such as skilled annotators and quality control personnel, escalates. Hiring and training annotators, ensuring consistent annotation practices, and managing large annotation projects can incur significant expenses. As annotation requirements become more complex, such as the need for fine-grained labeling or multilingual support, the costs can further escalate. Balancing scalability and cost-effectiveness requires efficient annotation workflows, leveraging automation and technology, optimizing resource allocation, and exploring partnerships to manage the scaling challenges while controlling costs. Check out our top tips to ensure ROI on your project here . 

Read more:   StageZero's guide and checklist to privacy and AI ; How to develop GDPR-compliant AI ; and AI and regional data privacy laws: key aspects and comparison

Now you should have a clear idea about audio annotation in detail, from basic understanding of audio annotation as a concept, to its applications and use cases, to tools and techniques being used behind the scenes to ensure effective annotation, as well as typical challenges for annotators. The significance of audio annotation is growing across multiple industries and is set to become increasingly critical as AI dominates more.

If you’d like to find out more about audio annotation tips or try out our annotation tool for free, contact us here . 

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AP ® Lang teachers: looking to help your students improve their rhetorical analysis essays?

Coach Hall Writes

clear, concise rhetorical analysis instruction.

How to Annotate a Speech

September 13, 2022 by Beth Hall

Preparing for the AP® Lang exam can seem overwhelming. There is so much to do in a short amount of time. However, it does not have to be stressful! This will only make the experience miserable. Instead, you want to break down the key elements and develop a technique that will help you succeed on the exam. For instance, one essential aspect will be practicing how to annotate a speech. Since you have limited time to do this on the exam, you want to progress from more detailed annotations to becoming methodical in your process. Thankfully, these tips and techniques below will help you gain the confidence needed to streamline your annotations! 

Saying/Doing Analysis 

This is an excellent method if you find the speech a bit dense or complicated! If there is space, you will have one side of the paper representing “saying” and one side representing “doing.” If you do not have room, everything can go together. You can even use two colors to differentiate these points. 

As you read or listen to the material, write down what it is saying. For instance, what is the main idea of each section? Ultimately, you are summarizing the main components by breaking down the speech into more manageable pieces. Then, you can go back and review your notes versus having to reread everything.

For the “doing” part, you are examining what the writer is doing. 

• Is the writer contrasting something?
• Is there a specific tone?
• Why is the writer sharing this information?

Honestly, this part of the activity is imperative to genuinely analyze the speech. It should have more bullet points than the “saying” section. 

What/Why Analysis 

This method is very similar to the Saying/Doing Analysis. In the right column or margin, write bullet point notes about “what” the writer is doing (such as rhetorical choices.) In the right column or margin, write bullet point notes about the “why” or “how.” Doing so helps you plan your commentary. 

Bonus tip: Ask yourself why does the speaker makes this choice for this audience on this occasion.

When figuring out how to annotate a speech, practice is imperative! You need to gain comfort with your technique to apply it the second testing begins. For instance, highlighting is not permitted on AP exams. However, using different color highlights may be helpful as you work on comprehension. As the test comes closer, develop a method that works best for you and can occur on the exam. For instance, maybe you underline or circle meaningful words or phrases you need to remember. Or, perhaps you divide the passage into sections and star key points. This allows you to watch for tone changes, define unfamiliar terms, and explore how the writer builds an argument. Make sure to be meaningful in what you make stand out to avoid becoming distracted by the markings.

Exam-Like Conditions 

As you practice, mimicking exam-like conditions will be vital. However, you do not need to do this on the first day of your course. You must prepare over the months and weeks leading up to the exam. So, you may give yourself 15-17 minutes to annotate a speech during the first practice. Then, you shorten this time as the exam comes closer. Ultimately, this method will allow you to see your growth while ensuring you are comfortable on exam day.

Identification of Key Elements 

As you build your technique on how to annotate a speech, focus on the essential aspects. Ultimately, you need to identify the writer’s purpose and argument or message. You cannot lose sight of the prompt as you are reading.

For instance, you can use SPACE (speaker, purpose, audience, context, exigence) or SOAP (speaker, occasion, audience, purpose) to ensure you slow down to really absorb the information. This also allows you to identify rhetorical devices (nouns) and choices (verbs). You can then use the margin to pick out interesting word choice, tone, and comparisons/contrasts. As you mark, just make sure the focus is on reading. This is not a scavenger hunt. You want to keep an open mindset and focus on what the writer is “doing.”     

Learning how to annotate a speech takes time. You must give yourself plenty of practice to hone in on your method. You need a streamlined process to focus on “what” (choices) and “why” (commentary). Maybe you like to read the speech once and then go back and annotate. Or, maybe you want to annotate from the beginning. Likewise, you may like to use the margins or need more space on a separate sheet of paper. Since you only have about 5-10 minutes to annotate on the exam, start practicing now. Your future self will thank you!

Wondering how to prepare for the Lang exam? Check out this blog post here for more tips!

AP® Lang Teachers

Looking to help your students improve their rhetorical analysis essays?

[…] in the prompt, such as by writing an “S” above the speaker’s name. These are good annotation habits, but they are just the […]

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Audio Annotation in 2024: What is it & why is it important?

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In 2020, the market capitalization of AI/ML was $22.59 billion and is expected to reach $125 billion, growing at about 40% per year. Supervised and human-in-the-loop ML models make successful predictions if they have high-quality labeled/annotated data, as both models learn reality via the categorization of humans.

A subset of data annotation – audio annotation – is a critical technique for building well-performing natural language processing (NLP) models that offer many benefits to organizations, such as analyzing text, speeding up customer responses, recognizing human emotions, etc. In this article, we take a deep dive into audio annotation to understand its importance for businesses.

What is audio annotation?

Audio annotation is a subset of data annotation that involves classifying components of audio that come from people, animals, the environment, instruments, and so on. For the annotation process, engineers use data formats such as MP3, FLAC, AAC, etc. Audio annotation, like all other types of annotation (such as image and text annotation), requires manual work and software specialized in the annotation process. In the case of audio annotation, data scientists specify the labels or “tags” by using software and pass the audio-specific information to the NLP model being trained.

Why is audio annotation important now?

Audio annotation is crucial for the development of virtual assistants, chatbots , voice recognition security systems, etc. As the figure above shows, NLP is the third most common form of AI used by enterprises. In 2017, 53% of companies used some form of NLP. Consequently, it is a huge market in terms of value. The NLP market generated over $12 billion in revenue in 2020, and it is predicted that the market will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of about 25% from 2021 to 2025, reaching over $43 billion in revenue. Consequently, audio labeling is an important task today.

In addition, customers are increasingly demanding digitized and fast customer service, as the following figure shows. Consequently, chatbots are becoming an integral part of customer service and the success of chatbots is directly related to the quality of audio annotation.

What are the types of audio annotation?

There are five main techniques of audio annotation:

• Speech to Text Transcription : Transcription of speech into text is an important part of the development of NLP models. This technique involves converting recorded speech into text, marking both words and sounds that the person pronounces. In this technique, it is also important to use correct punctuation.
• Audio Classification : Thanks to this technique, machines can distinguish voice and sound characteristics. This type of audio labeling is important for the development of virtual assistants, as the AI model recognizes who is performing the voice command.
• Natural Language Utterance : Natural language utterance is about annotating human speech to classify minute details such as semantics, dialects, context, intonation, and so on. Therefore, natural language utterance is an important part of training virtual assistants and chatbots.
• Speech Labeling : Data annotators separate the required sounds from a given recording and label them with keywords. This technique helps in the development of chatbots that handle a specific, repetitive task.
• Music Classification : Data annotators can mark genres or instruments in this kind of audio annotation. Music classification is very useful for organizing music libraries and improving user recommendations.

For a deeper understanding of audio data collection, feel free to download our data collection whitepaper:

How to annotate audio data?

Audio annotation software.

Companies need software that specializes in audio annotation. It is possible to use third-party providers that offer open-source and closed-source audio annotation tools. Open-source audio annotation tools are free, and since the code is available to everyone, it can be customized to meet your organization’s needs. Closed-source tools, on the other hand, have a team available to help you set up and use the software for your business. However, there is a fee for this service.

An alternative to outsourcing could be to develop your own audio annotation software. However, this is a costly and slow process. The main advantage is that in-house tools offer greater data security. Nevertheless, developing your own software is only possible for a small proportion of firms that have sources and similar experience to accomplish such a challenging task.

In-housing vs outsourcing vs crowdsourcing

In-housing, outsourcing, and crowdsourcing are ways to perform the manual work of audio annotation. These methods come with varying costs, output quality, and data security. Therefore, it is an important strategic decision for organizations which method to use.

Of course, the optimal strategy depends on the organization’s capabilities, sources, and needs. However, the following table might help you choose the optimal strategy. For more information, see our article on data labeling outsourcing .

	Outsource	In-house	Crowdsource
Time required	Average	High	Low
Price	Average	Expensive	Cheap
Quality of labeling	High	High	Low
Security	Average	High	Low

Don’t forget to check our sortable/filterable list of data labeling/annotation/classification vendors list.

You might also want to read our articles on image and text annotation . If you are looking for a vendor for audio annotation, please contact us:

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Data interoperability & machine learning in 2024 & beyond, top 3 applications of entity linking in 2024, top 10 open source data labeling/annotation platforms in 2024.

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Meaning of annotation in English

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• The new translation of the Latin work includes extensive annotation by scholars .
• It's a book that cries out for annotation.
• The program is designed for annotation of images .
• There is an easy-to-use facility in the program for adding annotations to your document .
• creative writing
• intertextual
• intertextuality
• intertextually
• self-portrait
• uncaptioned
• versification

You can also find related words, phrases, and synonyms in the topics:

Translations of annotation

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unwanted matter or material of any type, especially what is left after useful substances or parts have been removed

In for a penny, in for a pound: Idioms in The Thursday Murder Club

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Definition of annotate verb from the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary

present simple I / you / we / they annotate	/ˈænəteɪt/ /ˈænəteɪt/
he / she / it annotates	/ˈænəteɪts/ /ˈænəteɪts/
past simple annotated	/ˈænəteɪtɪd/ /ˈænəteɪtɪd/
past participle annotated	/ˈænəteɪtɪd/ /ˈænəteɪtɪd/
-ing form annotating	/ˈænəteɪtɪŋ/ /ˈænəteɪtɪŋ/

• The drawings were all clearly annotated.
• The text was annotated with her own comments.

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	annotates, annotating, annotated
	to provide (a written work) with explanatory notes or critical commentary. , ,
	to add explanatory notes or critical commentary to a written work.
	annotative (adj.), annotator (n.)

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Look up a word, learn it forever. /ˈænəˌteɪʃən/, /ænəʊˈteɪʃən/. Other forms: annotations Annotations are simply notes or comments. If you have trouble understanding Shakespeare, you may want to buy a copy of "Hamlet" with annotations on each page that explain all the vocabulary words and major themes. The word annotation comes from the Latin root words ad , meaning "to," and notare , meaning "to note." The act of adding explanatory notes to something is also called annotation , as in "Your friends might be amused by your annotation of the text, but I don't think the professor will accept "No one knows and no one cares!" as a reason for why the protagonist acted the way he did." noun the act of adding notes synonyms: annotating see more see less type of: expanding upon , expansion adding information or detail noun a comment or instruction (usually added) synonyms: notation , note see more see less types: show 7 types... hide 7 types... poste restante a notation written on mail that is to be held at the post office until called for (not in the United States or Canada) acknowledgment , citation , cite , credit , mention , quotation , reference a short note recognizing a source of information or of a quoted passage footer , footnote a printed note placed below the text on a printed page N.B. , NB , nota bene a Latin phrase (or its abbreviation) used to indicate that special attention should be paid to something PS , postscript a note appended to a letter after the signature photo credit a note acknowledging the source of a published photograph cross-index , cross-reference a reference at one place in a work to information at another place in the same work type of: comment , commentary a written explanation or criticism or illustration that is added to a book or other textual material Vocabulary lists containing annotation Get the facts about informational texts by reviewing this list. Learn about text structure, text features, reference works, author's purpose, tone and point of view, and much more. Your vocabulary will be off the charts once you master these words! In the first part of The Lord of the Rings , nine representatives of different races band together for a dangerous quest to destroy the Ring of Power and save Middle-earth from the Dark Lord. Sign up now (it’s free!) Whether you’re a teacher or a learner, vocabulary.com can put you or your class on the path to systematic vocabulary improvement.. The Ultimate Guide to Text Annotation: Techniques, Tools, and Best Practices Puneet Jindal Introduction. Welcome to the realm where language meets machine intelligence : text annotation - the catalyst propelling artificial intelligence to understand, interpret, and communicate in human language. Evolving from editorial footnotes to a cornerstone in data science, text annotation now drives Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computer Vision , reshaping industries across the globe. Imagine AI models decoding sentiments, recognizing entities, and grasping human nuances in a text. Text annotation is the magical key to making this possible. Join us on this journey through text annotation - exploring its techniques, challenges, and the transformative potential it holds for healthcare, finance, government, logistics, and beyond. In this exploration, witness text annotation's evolution and its pivotal role in fueling AI's understanding of language. Explore how tools such as Labellerr help in text annotation and work.  Let's unravel the artistry behind text annotation, shaping a future where AI comprehends, adapts, and innovates alongside human communication. 1. What is Text Annotation? Text annotation is a crucial process that involves adding labels, comments, or metadata to textual data to facilitate machine learning algorithms' understanding and analysis. This practice, known for its traditional role in editorial reviews by adding comments or footnotes to text drafts, has evolved significantly within the realm of data science, particularly in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computer Vision applications . In the context of machine learning, text annotation takes on a more specific role. It involves systematically labeling pieces of text to create a reference dataset, enabling supervised machine learning algorithms to recognize patterns, learn from labeled data, and make accurate predictions or classifications when faced with new, unseen text. To elaborate on what it means to annotate text: In data science and NLP, annotating text demands a comprehensive understanding of the problem domain and the dataset. It involves identifying and marking relevant features within the text. This can be akin to labeling images in image classification tasks, but in text, it includes categorizing sentences or segments into predefined classes or topics. For instance, labeling sentiments in online reviews, distinguishing fake and real news articles, or marking parts of speech and named entities in text. 1.1 Text Annotation Tasks: A Multifaceted Approach to Data Labeling (i) Text Classification : Assigning predefined categories or labels to text segments based on their content, such as sentiment analysis or topic classification. (ii) Named Entity Recognition (NER) : Identifying and labeling specific entities within the text, like names of people, organizations, locations, dates, etc. (iii) Parts of Speech Tagging : Labeling words in a sentence with their respective grammatical categories, like nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc. (iv) Summarization : Condensing a lengthy text into a shorter, coherent version while retaining its key information. 1.2 Significant Benefits of Text Annotation (i) Improved Machine Learning Models : Annotated data provides labeled examples for algorithms to learn from, enhancing their ability to make accurate predictions or classifications when faced with new, unlabeled text. (ii) Enhanced Performance and Efficiency : Annotations expedite the learning process by offering clear indicators to algorithms, leading to improved performance and faster model convergence. (iii) Nuance Recognition : Text annotations help algorithms understand contextual nuances, sarcasm, or subtle linguistic cues that might not be immediately apparent, enhancing their ability to interpret text accurately. (iv) Applications in Various Industries : Text annotation is vital across industries, aiding in tasks like content moderation, sentiment analysis for customer feedback , information extraction for search engines , and much more. Text annotation is a critical process in modern machine learning, empowering algorithms to comprehend, interpret, and extract valuable insights from textual data, thereby enabling various applications across different sectors. 2. Types of Text Annotation Text annotation, in the realm of data labeling and Natural Language Processing (NLP), encompasses a diverse range of techniques used to label, categorize, and extract meaningful information from textual data. This multifaceted process involves several types of annotations, each serving a distinct purpose in enhancing machine understanding and analysis of text. These annotation types include sentiment annotation, intent annotation, entity annotation, text classification, linguistic annotation, named entity recognition (NER), part-of-speech tagging, keyphrase tagging, entity linking, document classification, language identification, and toxicity classification. 1. Sentiment Annotation Sentiment annotation is a technique crucial for understanding emotions conveyed in text. Assigning sentiments like positive, negative, or neutral to sentences aids in sentiment analysis . This process involves deciphering emotions in customer reviews on e-commerce platforms (e.g., Amazon, Flipkart), enabling businesses to gauge customer satisfaction. Precise sentiment annotation is vital for training machine learning models that categorize texts into various emotions, facilitating a deeper understanding of user sentiments towards products or services. Let's consider various instances where sentiment annotation encounters complexities: (i) Clear Emotions: In the initial examples, emotions are distinctly evident. The first instance exudes happiness and positivity, while the second reflects disappointment and negative feelings. However, in the third case, emotions become intricate. Phrases like "nostalgic" or "bittersweet" evoke mixed sentiments, making it challenging to classify into a single emotion. (ii) Success versus Failure: Analyzing phrases such as "Yay! Argentina beat France in the World Cup Finale" presents a paradox. Initially appearing positive, this sentence also implies negative emotions for the opposing side, complicating straightforward sentiment classification. (iii) Sarcasm and Ridicule: Capturing sarcasm involves comprehending nuanced human communication styles, relying on context, tone, and social cues—characteristics often intricate for machines to interpret. (iv) Rhetorical Questions: Phrases like "Why do we have to quibble every time?" may seem neutral initially. However, the speaker's tone and delivery convey a sense of frustration and negativity, posing challenges in categorizing the sentiment accurately. (v) Quoting or Re-tweeting: Sentiment annotation confronts difficulties when dealing with quoted or retweeted content. The sentiment expressed might not align with the opinions of the one sharing the quote, creating discrepancies in sentiment classification. In essence, sentiment annotation encounters challenges due to the complexity of human emotions, contextual nuances, and the subtleties of language expression, making accurate classification a demanding task for automated systems. Intent Annotation Intent annotation is a crucial aspect in the development of chatbots and virtual assistants , forming the backbone of their functionality. It involves labeling or categorizing user messages or sentences to identify the underlying purpose or intention behind the communication. This annotation process aims to understand and extract the user's intent, enabling these AI systems to provide contextually relevant and accurate responses. Intent annotation involves labeling sentences to discern the user's intention behind a message. By annotating intents like greetings, complaints, or inquiries, systems can generate appropriate responses. Key points regarding intent text annotation include: Purpose Identification: Intent annotation involves categorizing user messages into specific intents such as greetings, inquiries, complaints, feedback, orders, or any other actionable user intents. Each category represents a different user goal or purpose within the conversation. Training Data Creation: Creating labeled datasets is crucial for training machine learning models to recognize and classify intents accurately. Annotated datasets consist of labeled sentences or phrases paired with their corresponding intended purposes, forming the foundation for model training. Contextual Understanding: Intent annotation often requires a deep understanding of contextual nuances within language. It's not solely about identifying keywords but comprehending the broader meaning and context of user queries or statements. Natural Language Understanding (NLU) : It falls under the realm of natural language processing (NLP) and requires sophisticated algorithms capable of interpreting and categorizing user intents accurately. Machine learning models, such as classifiers or neural networks, are commonly used for this purpose. Iterative Process: Annotation of intents often involves an iterative process. Initially, a set of intent categories is defined based on common user interactions. As the system encounters new user intents, the annotation process may expand or refine these categories to ensure comprehensive coverage. Quality Assurance and Validation: It's essential to validate and ensure the quality of labeled data. This may involve multiple annotators labeling the same data independently to assess inter-annotator agreement and enhance annotation consistency. Adaptation and Evolution: Intent annotation isn't a one-time task. As user behaviors, language use, and interaction patterns evolve, the annotated intents also need periodic review and adaptation to maintain accuracy and relevance. Enhancing User Experience: Accurate intent annotation is pivotal in enhancing user experience. It enables chatbots and virtual assistants to understand user needs promptly and respond with relevant and helpful information or actions, improving overall user satisfaction. Industry-Specific Customization: Intent annotation can be industry-specific. For instance, in healthcare, intents may include appointment scheduling, medication queries, or symptom descriptions, while in finance, intents may revolve around account inquiries, transaction history, or support requests. Continuous Improvement: Feedback loops and analytics derived from user interactions help refine intent annotation. Analyzing user feedback on system responses can drive improvements in intent categorization and response generation. For instance, Siri or Alexa, trained on annotated data for specific intents, responds accurately to user queries, enhancing user experience. Below are given examples: Greeting Intent: Hello there, how are you? Complaint Intent:  I am very disappointed with the service I received. Inquiry Intent: What are your business hours? Confirmation Intent:  Yes, I'd like to confirm my appointment for tomorrow at 10 AM. Request Intent: Could you please provide me with the menu? Gratitude Intent: Thank you so much for your help! Feedback Intent:  I wanted to give feedback about the recent product purchase. Apology Intent:  I'm sorry for the inconvenience caused. Assistance Intent:  Can you assist me with setting up my account? Goodbye Intent:  Goodbye, have a great day! These annotations serve as training data for AI models to learn and understand different user intentions, enabling chatbots or virtual assistants to respond accurately and effectively. Entity Annotation: Entity annotation focuses on labeling key phrases, named entities, or parts of speech in text. This technique emphasizes crucial details in lengthy texts and aids in training models for entity extraction. Named entity recognition (NER) is a subset of entity annotation, labeling entities like people's names, locations, dates, etc., enabling machines to comprehend text more comprehensively by distinguishing semantic meanings. Text Classification Text classification assigns categories or labels to text segments. This annotation technique is essential for organizing text data into specific classes or topics, such as document classification or sentiment analysis. Categorizing tweets into education, politics, etc., helps organize content and enables better understanding. Let's look at each of these forms separately. Document Classification: This involves assigning a single label to a document, aiding in the efficient sorting of vast textual data based on its primary theme or content. Product Categorization: It's the process of organizing products or services into specific classes or categories. This helps enhance search results in eCommerce platforms, improving SEO strategies and boosting visibility in product ranking pages. Email Classification: This task involves categorizing emails into either spam or non-spam (ham) categories, typically based on their content, aiding in email filtering and prioritization. News Article Classification: Categorizing news articles based on their content or topics such as politics, entertainment, sports, technology, etc. This categorization assists in better organizing and presenting news content to readers. Language Identification: This task involves determining the language used in a given text, is useful in multilingual contexts or language-specific applications. Toxicity Classification: Identifying whether a social media comment or post contains toxic content, hate speech, or is non-toxic. This classification helps in content moderation and creating safer online environments. Each form of text annotation serves a specific purpose, enabling better organization, classification, and understanding of textual data, and contributing to various applications across industries and domains. Linguistic Annotation Linguistic annotation focuses on language-related details in text or speech, including semantics, phonetics, and discourse. It encompasses intonation, stress, pauses, and discourse relations. It helps systems understand linguistic nuances, like coreference resolution linking pronouns to their antecedents, semantic labeling, and annotating stress or tone in speech. Named Entity Recognition (NER) NER identifies and labels named entities like people's names, locations, dates, etc., in text. It plays a pivotal role in NLP applications, allowing systems like Google Translate or Siri to understand and process textual data accurately. Part-of-Speech Tagging Part-of-speech tagging labels words in a sentence with their grammatical categories (nouns, verbs, adjectives). It assists in parsing sentences and understanding their structure. Keyphrase Tagging Keyphrase tagging locates and labels keywords or keyphrases in text, aiding in tasks like summarization or extracting key concepts from large text documents. Entity Linking Entity linking maps words in text to entities in a knowledge base, aiding in disambiguating entities' meanings and connecting them to larger datasets for contextual understanding. 3. Text Annotation use cases (i) healthcare. Text annotation significantly transforms healthcare operations by leveraging AI and machine learning techniques to enhance patient care, streamline processes, and improve overall efficiency: Automatic Data Extraction: Text annotation aids in extracting critical information from clinical trial records, facilitating better access and analysis of medical documents. It expedites research efforts and supports comprehensive data-driven insights. Patient Record Analysis: Annotated data enables thorough analysis of patient records, leading to improved outcomes and more accurate medical condition detection. It aids healthcare professionals in making informed decisions and providing tailored treatments. Insurance Claims Processing: Within healthcare insurance, text annotation helps recognize medically insured patients, identify loss amounts, and extract policyholder information. This speeds up claims processing, ensuring faster service delivery to policyholders. (II) Insurance Text annotation in the insurance industry revolutionizes various facets of operations, making tasks more efficient and accurate: Risk Evaluation: By annotating and extracting contextual data from contracts and forms, text annotation supports risk evaluation, enabling insurance companies to make more informed decisions while minimizing potential risks. Claims Processing: Annotated data assists in recognizing entities like involved parties and loss amounts, significantly expediting the claims processing workflow. It aids in detecting dubious claims, contributing to fraud detection efforts. Fraud Detection: Through text annotation, insurance firms can monitor and analyze documents and forms more effectively, enhancing their capabilities to detect fraudulent claims and irregularities. (III) Banking The banking sector utilizes text annotation to revolutionize operations and ensure better accuracy and customer satisfaction: Fraud Identification: Text annotation techniques aid in identifying potential fraud and money laundering patterns, allowing banks to take proactive measures and ensure security. Custom Data Extraction: Annotated text facilitates the extraction of critical information from contracts, improving workflows and ensuring compliance. It enables efficient data extraction for various attributes like loan rates and credit scores, supporting compliance monitoring. (IV) Government In government operations, text annotation facilitates various tasks, ensuring better efficiency and compliance: Regulatory Compliance: Text annotation streamlines financial operations by ensuring regulatory compliance through advanced analytics . It helps maintain compliance standards more effectively. Document Classification: Through text classification and annotation, different types of legal cases can be categorized, ensuring efficient document management and access to digital documents. Fraud Detection & Analytics: Text annotation assists in the early detection of fraudulent activities by utilizing linguistic annotation, semantic annotation, tone detection , and entity recognition. It enables analytics on vast amounts of data for insights. (V) Logistics Text annotation in logistics plays a pivotal role in handling massive volumes of data and improving customer experiences: Invoice Annotation: Annotated text assists in extracting crucial details such as amounts, order numbers, and names from invoices. It streamlines billing and invoicing processes. Customer Feedback Analysis: By utilizing sentiment and entity annotation, logistics companies can analyze customer feedback, ensuring better service improvements and customer satisfaction. (VI) Media and News Text annotation's role in the media industry is indispensable for content categorization and credibility: Content Categorization: Annotation is crucial for categorizing news content into various segments such as sports, education, government, etc., enabling efficient content management and retrieval. Entity Recognition: Annotating entities like names, locations, and key phrases in news articles aids in information retrieval and fact-checking. It contributes to credibility and accurate reporting. Fake News Detection: Utilizing text annotation techniques such as NLP annotation and sentiment analysis enables the identification of fake news by analyzing the credibility and sentiment of the content. These comprehensive applications across sectors showcase how text annotation significantly impacts various industries, making operations more efficient, accurate, and streamlined. 4. Text Annotation Guidelines Annotation guidelines serve as a comprehensive set of instructions and rules for annotators when labeling or annotating text data for machine learning tasks. These guidelines are crucial as they define the objectives of the modeling task and the purpose behind the labels assigned to the data. They are crafted by a team familiar with the data and the intended use of the annotations. Starting with defining the modeling problem and the desired outcomes, annotation guidelines cover various aspects: (i) Annotation Techniques: Guidelines may start by choosing appropriate annotation methods tailored to the specific problem being addressed. (ii) Case Definitions: They define common and potentially ambiguous cases that annotators might encounter in the data, along with instructions on how to handle each scenario. (iii) Handling Ambiguity: Guidelines include examples from the data and strategies to deal with outliers, ambiguous instances, or unusual cases that might arise during annotation. Text Annotation Workflow An annotation workflow typically consists of several stages: (i) Curating Annotation Guidelines: Define the problem, set the expected outcomes, and create comprehensive guidelines that are easy to follow and revisit. (ii) Selecting a Labeling Tool: Choose appropriate text annotation tools, considering options like Labellerr or other available tools that suit the task's requirements. (iii) Defining Annotation Process: Create a reproducible workflow that encompasses organizing data sources, utilizing guidelines, employing annotation tools effectively, documenting step-by-step annotation processes, defining formats for saving and exporting annotations, and reviewing each labeled sample. (iv) Review and Quality Control: Regularly review labeled data to prevent generic label errors, biases, or inconsistencies. Multiple annotators may label the same samples to ensure consistency and reduce interpretational bias. Statistical measures like Cohen's kappa statistic can assess annotator agreement to identify and address discrepancies or biases in annotations. Ensuring a streamlined flow of incoming data samples, rigorous review processes, and consistent adherence to annotation guidelines are crucial for generating high-quality labeled datasets for machine learning models. Regular monitoring and quality checks help maintain the reliability and integrity of the annotated data. 5. Text Annotation Tools and Technologies Text annotation tools play a vital role in preparing data for AI and machine learning, particularly in natural language processing (NLP) applications. These tools fall into two main categories: open-source and commercial offerings. Open-source tools, available at no cost, are customizable and widely used in startups and academic projects for their affordability. Conversely, commercial tools offer advanced functionalities and support, making them suitable for large-scale and enterprise-level projects. Commercial Text Annotation Tools (i) labellerr. Labellerr is a text annotation tool that provides high-quality and accurate text annotations for training AI models at scale. The tool, Labellerr, offers various features and services tailored to text annotation needs. Labellerr boasts the following functionalities and services: Text Annotation Features: (i) Sentiment Analysis: Identifies sentiments and emotions in text, categorizing statements as positive, negative, or neutral. (ii) Summarization: Highlights key sentences or phrases within text to create a summarized version. (iii) Translation: Translates selected text segments into different languages, such as English to French or German to Italian. (iv) Named-Entity Recognition: Tags named entities (e.g., ID, Name, Place, Price) in text based on predefined categories. (v) Text Classification: Classifies text by assigning appropriate classes based on their content. (vi) Question Answering: Matches questions with their respective answers to train models for generating accurate responses. Automated Workflows: (i) Customization: Allows users to create custom automated data workflows, collaborate in real-time, perform QA reviews, and gain complete visibility into AI operations. (ii) Pipeline Management: Enables the creation and automation of text labeling workflows, multiple user roles, review cycles, inter-annotator agreements, and various annotation stages. Text Labeling Services: (i) Provides professional text annotators and linguists focused on ensuring quality and accuracy in annotations. (ii) Offers fully managed services, allowing users to concentrate on other important aspects while delegating text annotation tasks. Labellerr emerges as a comprehensive and versatile commercial text annotation tool that streamlines the process of annotating large text datasets for AI model training purposes. It provides a wide array of annotation capabilities and customizable workflows, catering to diverse text annotation requirements. (II) SuperAnnotate SuperAnnotate is an advanced text annotation tool designed to facilitate the creation of high-quality and accurate annotations essential for training top-performing AI models. This tool offers a wide array of features and functionalities aimed at streamlining text annotation processes for various industries and use cases. Key Features of SuperAnnotate's Text Annotation Tool: Cloud Integrations: Supports integration with various cloud storage systems, allowing users to easily add items from their cloud repositories to the SuperAnnotate platform. Versatile Use Cases: Encompasses all use cases, ensuring its applicability across different industries and scenarios. Advanced Annotation Tools: Equipped with an array of advanced tools tailored for efficient text annotation. Functionalities Offered by SuperAnnotate: Sentiment Analysis: Capable of identifying sentiments expressed in text, determining whether statements are positive, negative, or neutral, and even detecting emotions like happiness or anger. Summarization: Annotations can focus on key sentences or phrases within text, aiding in the creation of summarized versions. Translation Assistance: Annotations assist in identifying elements for translation, such as sentences, terms, and specific entities. Named-Entity Recognition: Detects and classifies named entities within text, sorting them into predefined categories like dates, locations, names of individuals, and more. Text Classification: Assigns classes to texts based on their content and characteristics. Question Answering: Enables the pairing of questions with corresponding answers to train models for generating accurate responses. Efficiency-Boosting Features: Token Annotation: Splits texts into units using linguistic knowledge, ensuring seamless and accurate annotation. Classify All: Instantly assigns the same class to every occurrence of a word or phrase in a text, enhancing efficiency. Quality-Focused Elements: Collaboration System: Involves stakeholders in the quality review process through comments, fostering seamless collaboration and task distribution. Status Tracking: Provides visibility into the status of items and projects, allowing users to track progress effectively. Detailed Instructions: Sets a solid foundation for project execution by offering comprehensive project instructions to the team. (III) V7 Labs The V7 Text Annotation Tool is a feature within the V7 platform that facilitates the annotation of text data within images and documents. This tool automates the process of detecting and reading text from various types of visual content, including images, photos, documents, and videos. Key features and steps associated with the V7 Text Annotation Tool include: Text Scanner Model : V7 has incorporated a public Text Scanner model within its Neural Networks page. This model is designed to automatically detect and read text within images and documents. Integration into Workflow : Add a model stage to the workflow under the Settings page of your dataset. Select the Text Scanner model from the dropdown list and map the newly created text class. If desired, enable the Auto-Start option to automatically process new images through the model at the beginning of the workflow. Automatic Text Detection and Reading : Once set up, the V7 Text Annotation Tool will automatically scan and read text from different types of images, including documents, photos, and videos. The tool is extensively pre-trained, enabling it to interpret characters that might be challenging for humans to decipher accurately. Overall, the V7 Text Annotation Tool streamlines the process of text annotation by leveraging a pre-trained model to automatically detect and read text within visual content, providing an efficient and accurate solution for handling text data in images and documents. Open Source Text Annotation Tools (i) piaf platform. Led by Etalab, this tool aims to create a public Q&A dataset in French. Initially designed for question/answer annotation, it allows users to write questions and highlight text segments that answer them. Offers an easy installation process and collaborative annotation capabilities. Export annotations in the format of the Stanford SQuAD dataset. Limited to question/answer annotation but has potential for adaptation to other use cases like sentiment analysis or named entity recognition. (II) Label Studio Free and open-source tool suitable for various tasks like natural language processing, computer vision, and more. Highly scalable and configurable labeling interface. Provides templates for common tasks (sentiment analysis, named entities, object detection) for easy setup. Allows exporting labeled data in multiple formats, compatible with learning algorithms. Supports collaborative annotation and can be deployed on servers for simultaneous annotation by multiple collaborators. (III) Doccano Originally designed for text annotation tasks and recently extended to image classification, object detection, and speech-to-text annotations. Offers local installation via pip, supporting SQLite3 or PostgreSQL databases for saving annotations and datasets. Docker image available for deployment on various cloud providers. Simple user interface, collaborative features, and customizable labeling templates. Allows importing datasets in various formats (CSV, JSON, fastText) and exporting annotations accordingly. These open-source tools provide valuable solutions for annotating text data, with each tool having its unique features and suitability for specific annotation tasks. While PIAF is focused on Q&A datasets in French, Label Studio offers extensive customization, and Doccano supports diverse annotation tasks, expanding beyond text to cover image and speech annotations. Open-source NLP Service Toolkits spaCy : A Python library designed for production-level NLP tasks. While not a standalone annotation tool, it's often used with tools like Prodigy or Doccano for text annotation. NLTK (Natural Language Toolkit) : A popular Python platform that provides numerous text-processing libraries for various language-related tasks. It can be combined with other tools for text annotation purposes. Stanford CoreNLP : A Java-based toolkit capable of performing diverse NLP tasks like part-of-speech tagging, named entity recognition, parsing, and coreference resolution. It's typically used as a backend for annotation tools. GATE (General Architecture for Text Engineering) : An extensive open-source toolkit equipped with components for text processing, information extraction, and semantic annotation. Apache OpenNLP : A machine learning-based toolkit supporting tasks such as tokenization, part-of-speech tagging, entity extraction, and more. It's used alongside other tools for text annotation. UIMA (Unstructured Information Management Architecture) : An open-source framework facilitating the development of applications for analyzing unstructured information like text, audio, and video. It's used in conjunction with other tools for text annotation. Commercial NLP Service Platforms Amazon Comprehend : A machine learning-powered NLP service offering entity recognition, sentiment analysis, language detection, and other text insights. APIs facilitate easy integration into applications. Google Cloud Natural Language API : Provides sentiment analysis, entity analysis, content classification, and other NLP features. Part of Google Cloud's Machine Learning APIs. Microsoft Azure Text Analytics : Offers sentiment analysis, key phrase extraction, language detection, and named entity recognition among its text processing capabilities. IBM Watson Natural Language Understanding : Utilizes deep learning to extract meaning, sentiment, entities, relations, and more from unstructured text. Available through IBM Cloud with REST APIs and SDKs for integration. MeaningCloud : A text analytics platform supporting sentiment analysis, topic extraction, entity recognition, and classification across multiple languages through APIs and SDKs. Rosette Text Analytics : Provides entity extraction, sentiment analysis, relationship extraction, and language identification functionalities across various languages. Can be integrated into applications using APIs and SDKs. 6. Challenges in Text Annotation AI and ML companies face numerous hurdles in text annotation processes. These encompass ensuring data quality, efficiently handling large datasets, mitigating annotator biases, safeguarding sensitive information, and scaling operations as data volumes expand. Tackling these issues is crucial to achieving precise model training and robust AI outcomes. (i) Ambiguity This occurs when a word, phrase, or sentence holds multiple meanings, leading to inconsistencies in annotations. Resolving such ambiguities is vital for accurate machine learning model training. For instance, the phrase "I saw the man with the telescope" can be interpreted in different ways, impacting annotation accuracy. (ii) Subjectivity Annotating subjective language, containing personal opinions or emotions, poses challenges due to differing interpretations among annotators. Labeling sentiment in customer reviews can vary based on annotators' perceptions, resulting in inconsistencies in annotations. (iii) Contextual Understanding Accurate annotation relies on understanding the context in which words or phrases are used. Failing to consider context, such as the dual meaning of "bank" referring to a financial institution or a river side, can lead to incorrect annotations and hinder model performance. (iv) Language Diversity The need for proficiency in multiple languages poses challenges in annotating diverse datasets. Finding annotators proficient in less common languages or dialects is difficult, leading to inconsistencies in annotations and proficiency levels among annotators. (v) Scalability Annotating large volumes of data is time-consuming and resource-intensive. Handling increasing data volumes demands more annotators, posing challenges in efficiently scaling annotation efforts. Hiring and training annotators and investing in annotation tools can be expensive. The significant investment required in the data labeling market emphasizes the challenge of balancing accurate annotations with the associated costs for AI and machine learning implementation. 7. The Future of Text Annotation Text annotation, an integral part of data annotation, is experiencing several future trends that align with the broader advancements in data annotation processes. These trends are likely to shape the landscape of text annotation in the coming years: (i) Natural Language Processing (NLP) Advancements With the rapid progress in NLP technologies, text annotation is expected to witness the development of more sophisticated tools that can understand and interpret textual data more accurately. This includes improvements in sentiment analysis, entity recognition, named entity recognition, and other text categorization tasks. (ii) Contextual Understanding Future trends in text annotation will likely focus on capturing contextual understanding within language models. This involves annotating text with a deeper understanding of nuances, tone, and context, leading to the creation of more context-aware and accurate language models. (iii) Multilingual Annotation As the demand for multilingual AI models grows, text annotation will follow suit. Future trends involve annotating and curating datasets in multiple languages, enabling the training of AI models that can understand and generate content in various languages. (iv) Fine-grained Annotation for Specific Applications Industries such as healthcare, legal, finance, and customer service are increasingly utilizing AI-driven solutions. Future trends will involve more fine-grained and specialized text annotation tailored to these specific domains, ensuring accurate and domain-specific language models. (v) Emphasis on Bias Mitigation Recognizing and mitigating biases within text data is crucial for fair and ethical AI. Future trends in text annotation will focus on identifying and mitigating biases in textual datasets to ensure AI models are fair and unbiased across various demographics and social contexts. (vi) Semi-supervised and Active Learning Approaches To optimize annotation efforts, future trends in text annotation might include the integration of semi-supervised and active learning techniques. These methods intelligently select the most informative samples for annotation, reducing the annotation workload while maintaining model performance. (vii) Privacy-Centric Annotation Techniques In alignment with broader data privacy concerns, text annotation will likely adopt techniques that ensure the anonymization and protection of sensitive information within text data, balancing the need for annotation with privacy preservation. (viii) Enhanced Collaboration and Crowdsourcing Platforms Similar to other data annotation domains, text annotation will benefit from collaborative and crowdsourced platforms that allow distributed teams to annotate text data efficiently. These platforms will offer improved coordination, quality control mechanisms, and scalability. (ix) Continual Learning and Adaptation As language evolves and new linguistic patterns emerge, text annotation will evolve towards continual learning paradigms. This will enable AI models to adapt and learn from ongoing annotations, ensuring they remain relevant and up-to-date. (x) Explainable AI through Annotation Text annotation may involve creating datasets that facilitate the development of explainable AI models. Annotations focused on explaining decisions made by AI systems can aid in building transparent and interpretable language models. These future trends in text annotation are driven by the evolving nature of AI technology, the increasing demands for more accurate and specialized AI models, ethical considerations, and the need for scalable and efficient annotation processes. The exploration of text annotation highlights its crucial role in AI's language understanding. This journey revealed: (i) Text annotation is vital for AI to interpret human language nuances across industries like healthcare, finance, and more. (ii) Challenges in annotation, like dealing with ambiguity and subjectivity, stress the need for ongoing innovation. (iii) The best practices and guidelines for text annotation and various available text annotation tools. (iv) The future promises advancements in language processing, bias mitigation, and contextual understanding. Overall, text annotation is a cornerstone in AI's language comprehension, fostering innovation and laying the groundwork for seamless human-machine communication in the future. Frequently Asked Questions 1. what is text annotation & why is it important. Text annotation enriches raw text by labeling entities, sentiments, parts of speech , etc. This labeled data trains AI models for better language understanding. It's crucial for improving accuracy in tasks like sentiment analysis, named entity recognition, and more. Annotation aids in creating domain-specific AI models and standardizing data, facilitating precise human-AI interactions. 2. What are the different types of annotation techniques? Annotation techniques involve labeling different aspects of text data for training AI models. Types include Entity Annotation (identifying entities), Sentiment Annotation (labeling emotions), Intent Annotation (categorizing purposes), Linguistic Annotation (marking grammar), Relation Extraction, Coreference Resolution, Temporal Annotation , and Speech Recognition Annotation . These techniques are vital for training models in various natural language processing tasks, aiding accurate comprehension and response generation by AI systems. 3. What is in-text annotation? In-text annotation involves adding labels directly within the text to highlight attributes like phrases, keywords, or sentences. These labels guide machine learning models. Quality in-text annotations are essential for building accurate models as they provide reliable training data for AI systems to understand and process language more effectively. Book our demo with one of our product specialist Sign up for more like this. Writers' Center Eastern Washington University Reading and Study Strategies What is annotating and why do it, annotation explained, steps to annotating a source, annotating strategies. Using a Dictionary Study Skills [ Back to resource home ] [email protected] 509.359.2779 Cheney Campus   JFK Library Learning Commons Stay Connected! inside.ewu.edu/writerscenter Instagram  Facebook Helpful Links Software for Annotating ProQuest Flow (sign up with your EWU email) FoxIt PDF Reader Adobe Reader Pro  - available on all campus computers Track Changes in Microsoft Word What is Annotating? Annotating is any action that deliberately interacts with a text to enhance the reader's understanding of, recall of, and reaction to the text. Sometimes called "close reading," annotating usually involves highlighting or underlining key pieces of text and making notes in the margins of the text. This page will introduce you to several effective strategies for annotating a text that will help you get the most out of your reading. Why Annotate? By annotating a text, you will ensure that you understand what is happening in a text after you've read it. As you annotate, you should note the author's main points, shifts in the message or perspective of the text, key areas of focus, and your own thoughts as you read. However, annotating isn't just for people who feel challenged when reading academic texts. Even if you regularly understand and remember what you read, annotating will help you summarize a text, highlight important pieces of information, and ultimately prepare yourself for discussion and writing prompts that your instructor may give you. Annotating means you are doing the hard work while you read, allowing you to reference your previous work and have a clear jumping-off point for future work. 1. Survey : This is your first time through the reading You can annotate by hand or by using document software. You can also annotate on post-its if you have a text you do not want to mark up. As you annotate, use these strategies to make the most of your efforts: Include a key or legend on your paper that indicates what each marking is for, and use a different marking for each type of information. Example: Underline for key points, highlight for vocabulary, and circle for transition points. If you use highlighters, consider using different colors for different types of reactions to the text. Example: Yellow for definitions, orange for questions, and blue for disagreement/confusion. Dedicate different tasks to each margin: Use one margin to make an outline of the text (thesis statement, description, definition #1, counter argument, etc.) and summarize main ideas, and use the other margin to note your thoughts, questions, and reactions to the text. Lastly, as you annotate, make sure you are including descriptions of the text as well as your own reactions to the text. This will allow you to skim your notations at a later date to locate key information and quotations, and to recall your thought processes more easily and quickly. Next: Using a Dictionary >> Last Updated: Apr 25, 2024 2:50 PM URL: https://research.ewu.edu/writers_c_read_study_strategies 326 COMMENTS What do polls tell us about a Trump v. Harris matchup? President Joe Biden has dropped out of the 2024 race, and there's one question on a lot of people's minds: Can Vice President Kamala Harris secure the Democratic nomination and go on to beat ... Donald Trump fact-check: 2024 RNC speech in Milwaukee full of Later in his speech, Trump said: "I am all for electric. … But if somebody wants to buy a gas-powered car… or a hybrid, they are going to be able to do it. And we're going to make that ... Ron DeSantis speech at Republican National Convention: Watch Watch Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' speech at the Republican National Convention Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was was a featured speaker at the Republican National Convention Tuesday night. Donald Trump fact-check: 2024 RNC speech in Milwaukee full of ... We fact-checked the false and misleading annotations on the chart. For example, a red arrow on the chart claims to show when "Trump leaves office. Lowest illegal immigration in recorded history." Read the Transcript of Donald J. Trump's Convention Speech Thank you very much. Thank you very, very much. And thank you, Dana. Thank you, Kid Rock, sometimes referred to as "Bob." And thank you, Lee, right from the beginning, thank you very much. Fact-checking Trump's RNC speech Former President Donald Trump closed the Republican National Convention by accepting the presidential nomination and offering a speech that began somber and turned combative. Fact-Checking Trump's Speech and More on RNC Day 4 Fact-Checking Trump's Speech and More: Day 4 of the Republican National Convention. A team of New York Times reporters followed the developments and fact-checked the speakers, providing context ... Group Registration of Updates to a News Website As an extension of the newspaper group option, the "news website" definition is modeled on the Office's longstanding regulation defining a "newspaper" as a publication that is "mainly designed to be a primary source of written information on current events, either local, national, or international in scope," that "contains a broad ... Annotation Definition & Meaning annotation: [noun] a note added by way of comment or explanation. How to Annotate Texts Analyzing a Speech Using Annotation (UNC-TV/PBS Learning Media) This complete lesson plan, which includes a guide for the teacher and relevant handouts for students, will prepare students to analyze both the written and presentation components of a speech. This lesson plan is best for students in 6th-10th grade. ANNOTATION Definition & Meaning Annotation definition: a critical or explanatory note or body of notes added to a text.. See examples of ANNOTATION used in a sentence. How to Annotate a Speech Annotation is a function of active reading, with the objective being to think about and respond to what you read. Most speeches are driven by purpose and contain both rhetorical flourishes and emotional appeals, which can make annotations flow with ease. ... Take the time to annotate the speech in two waves: while you're reading it for the ... ANNOTATE ANNOTATE meaning: 1. to add a short explanation or opinion to a text or image: 2. to add a description or piece of…. Learn more. How to Annotate These could be words you are not familiar with or will need to review later. Define those words in the margins. To summarize how you will annotate text: 1. Identify the BIG IDEA. 2. Underline topic sentences or main ideas. 3. Connect ideas with arrows. ANNOTATE Definition & Meaning Annotate definition: to supply with critical or explanatory notes; comment upon in notes. See examples of ANNOTATE used in a sentence. ANNOTATION ANNOTATION definition: 1. a short explanation or note added to a text or image, or the act of adding short explanations or…. Learn more. Annotate annotate: 1 v add explanatory notes to or supply with critical comments "The scholar annotated the early edition of a famous novel" Synonyms: footnote Type of: compose , indite , pen , write produce a literary work v provide interlinear explanations for words or phrases "He annotated on what his teacher had written" Synonyms: comment , gloss ... Annotate Definition & Meaning annotate: [verb] to make or furnish critical or explanatory notes or comment. Beginner's guide to audio annotation Data analysis and insights: Annotation allows us to extract valuable insights from audio data. By labeling emotions, detecting sentiment, or categorizing sounds, we can gain deeper insights to user behavior, consumer preferences, or environmental patterns. This information improves decision-making, strategic processes, etc. 10. ANNOTATION definition and meaning 2 meanings: 1. the act of annotating 2. a note added in explanation, etc, esp of some literary work.... Click for more definitions. How to Annotate a Speech This method is very similar to the Saying/Doing Analysis. In the right column or margin, write bullet point notes about "what" the writer is doing (such as rhetorical choices.) In the right column or margin, write bullet point notes about the "why" or "how.". Doing so helps you plan your commentary. Audio Annotation in 2024: What is it & why is it important? Source: Statista. Audio annotation is crucial for the development of virtual assistants, chatbots, voice recognition security systems, etc. As the figure above shows, NLP is the third most common form of AI used by enterprises. In 2017, 53% of companies used some form of NLP. Consequently, it is a huge market in terms of value. ANNOTATE ANNOTATE definition: 1. to add a short explanation or opinion to a text or image: 2. to add a description or piece of…. Learn more. Annotation Definition & Meaning Annotation definition: The act or process of furnishing critical commentary or explanatory notes. ANNOTATION ANNOTATION meaning: 1. a short explanation or note added to a text or image, or the act of adding short explanations or…. Learn more. annotate verb Definition of annotate verb in Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary. Meaning, pronunciation, picture, example sentences, grammar, usage notes, synonyms and more. ... The text was annotated with her own comments. Oxford Collocations Dictionary Annotate is used with these nouns as the object: text; annotate Definition of annotate. Best online English dictionaries for children, with kid-friendly definitions, integrated thesaurus for kids, images, and animations. ... parts of speech: transitive verb, intransitive verb features: Word Parts. part of speech: transitive verb: inflections: annotates, annotating, annotated: definition: to provide (a ... Annotation annotation: 1 n the act of adding notes Synonyms: annotating Type of: expanding upon , expansion adding information or detail n a comment or instruction (usually added) Synonyms: notation , note Types: show 7 types... hide 7 types... poste restante a notation written on mail that is to be held at the post office until called for (not in the ... The Ultimate Guide to Text Annotation: Techniques, Tools, and Best The V7 Text Annotation Tool is a feature within the V7 platform that facilitates the annotation of text data within images and documents. This tool automates the process of detecting and reading text from various types of visual content, including images, photos, documents, and videos. Research Guides: Reading and Study Strategies: Annotating a Text You can annotate by hand or by using document software. You can also annotate on post-its if you have a text you do not want to mark up. As you annotate, use these strategies to make the most of your efforts: Include a key or legend on your paper that indicates what each marking is for, and use a different marking for each type of information ... assignment essay homework paper phd report review speech thesis