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Quick start

AfriAnnotate is a cloud-deployed annotation platform. Your team's platform is hosted at a URL your hoster chose — typically something like label.example.org or annotate.your-org.com. This guide walks you from that URL to your first labeled task.

Already know what you want to build (a translation project, a speech corpus, NER)? Jump straight to the Recipes — one-minute setups per goal.

Reference deployment

The team that maintains the AfriAnnotate open-source project runs a reference deployment at afriannotate.waraka.org. If you're using that instance, the screenshots and examples below apply directly. If your team has its own deployment, swap the URL and platform name as appropriate.

This page assumes you know the URL of your platform. Ask the hoster (the person who deployed it) if not.

1. Create your account​

  1. Open your platform URL in a browser.

  2. Type your email and click Continue. The platform routes you to either sign-in (if the address is known) or sign-up (if it's new).

  3. Set a password (8+ characters). You'll get a verification email from no-reply@<platform-domain> — click the link to confirm the address.

    tip

    Verification emails are sent immediately at signup time. If yours doesn't arrive within a minute, check spam. Corporate mail filters sometimes block transactional mail — see FAQ → Email + sign-in if you're stuck.

2. Land in your organisation​

After verifying you'll see one of three landing states:

  • First user on the platform: you're auto-promoted to platform owner. The platform auto-creates a default organisation around you. Rename it later in Organization → Settings → Organization name.

  • Invited via an invite link: you join the inviter's organisation automatically. Role defaults to Annotator unless the invite says otherwise.

  • Self-signed-up without an invite: you're a real user but have no organisation membership yet. You land on a home page that lists open public projects you can join and start contributing to right away — no invite needed for those. Joining a private/team organisation still takes an invite from a platform owner.

    tip

    Ask an existing platform owner to invite you from Organization → Members → Invite people. They can also pre-create your account with a role via Platform → Users → + Create User.

3. Create your first project​

You'll need permission to create projects: Owner, Admin, or Manager in your organisation. From the home page or sidebar:

  1. Click + Create Project.
  2. Name the project (e.g. Hausa sentiment v1) and pick a workspace (or leave at Unassigned org root).
  3. Choose a Labeling Setup — start from a template (Text Classification, Image Bounding Box, Audio Transcription, etc.) or write your own XML config.
  4. Upload data — drag CSVs / JSONs / images / audio into the import card. The platform warns inline if uploaded data is missing any field the labeling config expects (e.g. config wants $text but the CSV has no text column).
  5. Click Save — the project is live and you're on its dashboard.

4. Label your first task​

  1. From the project dashboard, click Label All Tasks (or Label Next Task to start one at a time).
  2. Use the labeling interface to annotate. Hotkeys are shown in the right panel — press ? anywhere to see them all.
  3. Click Submit to save the annotation and move to the next task.

5. Invite your team​

From the project, click Members → Add, pick people from your org, and set their per-project role (Annotator, Reviewer, Manager). If the people aren't in your org yet, invite them first from Organization → Members → Invite people — they'll receive an email with a link that signs them in and attaches them to your org in one step.

What's next​