Annotation Is Decision-Making: Metadata between Identification, Visibility, and Power
Annual meeting of the DARIAH-CH Digital Editions Working Groups 2026: Identity, Identifiers, Identifying, University of Bern
Moritz Mähr 
Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 forced Wikipedia, Wikidata, and OpenStreetMap to make decisions about the territory’s representation. Editors separated geographical and political entities, reconsidered country statements, and negotiated an exception to mapping rules. Following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, sanctions also affected participation in scholarly identifier infrastructure. Crossref’s membership policies reveal how institutional classifications can determine access to DOI registration services. Drawing on edit histories, community discussions, and policy documents, this paper compares editorial discretion with legal constraints on infrastructure governance. It argues that annotation involves decisions about identity, evidence, and authority whose consequences extend to the visibility and maintenance of scholarly records. Four practices translate these findings into guidance for digital editions: explicit decision criteria, representative review, documented and revisable assertions, and continuity planning. This deposit contains the keynote slides as a PDF, the same slides as a self-contained HTML presentation including the speaker notes, and the extended abstract as a PDF.
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@inproceedings{mähr2026,
author = {Mähr, Moritz},
title = {Annotation {Is} {Decision-Making:} {Metadata} Between
{Identification,} {Visibility,} and {Power}},
booktitle = {Annual meeting of the DARIAH-CH Digital Editions Working
Groups 2026: Identity, Identifiers, Identifying},
date = {2026-09-11},
url = {https://zenodo.org/records/22706974},
doi = {10.5281/zenodo.22706974},
langid = {en}
}