This document describes the first digital steps of Working Group 1 “Grammars of Coercion” (hereafter WG1) towards a common and multilingual cross-corpora annotation model for the semantic analysis of historical sources on coercion in labor. It is the result of four rounds of experiments with Catma (a semantic annotation and analysis tool) held online during the first semester of 2020. The purposes of this working paper are threefold: 1. to (help) keep track of the discussions and decisions that led to designing our initial annotation model; 2. to serve as guidelines for members of WG1 committed to contribute to the project by annotating texts; 3. to serve as a basis for a future methodological article.
