The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) published the beta release of the Ajax XML Encoder (AXE), sponsored by a Digital Humanities Startup grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities on the MITH website on September 1, 2008. AXE is a web‐based annotation tool capable of identifying “regions of interest” in video, audio, and image files located anywhere on the internet, and encoding these regions in an XML file. It can also be used to generate XML documents from texts located on the web. A functional prototype of the code is available at http://mith.umd.edu/AXE, and the source code is available in a subversion repository at svn://khelone.umd.edu/AXE.