The recent emergence of video annotation relative to existing inscriptional practices for performance analysis and documentation means its value and potential are not (yet) fully understood. The paucity of scholarship highlighting how video annotation articulates knowledge arising through practice, generates new insight, and the way it supports and transforms engagement means that what the method offers is often assumed or implied. This introductory chapter of Video Annotation for Dance and Performance establishes a context for the book’s focus on annotation as a manual practice of working with the audiovisual materials that are commonplace in artistic practices today. This context includes efforts to challenge the dominance of text in performance scholarship, the paradigm shift enacted by the convergence of audiovisual and computer technologies, and the need to construct a new kind of attention for the digital age.