The following is a case study of manual annotation as used in a large-scale variationist linguist project focusing of spoken varieties of German in Austria. It showcases the technical architecture used for annotation, which unifies different granularities of tokenization through the corpus in a distinct entity designed for annotation. It furthermore lays out the hierarchical stand-off annotation used in the project Deutsch in Österreich (German in Austria) and demonstrates how a semantic model for the hierarchical organization of annotations can bring transparency to the annotation process while also providing a sounder epistemological basis than monodimensional annotation.
Markus Pluschkovits (Fri,) studied this question.