PDF documents are designed to display correctly in a variety of apps and across operating systems, so you may be used to reading PDFs downloaded from the internet in common web browsers like Safari, Chrome, and Firefox. In the world of scholarly digital texts, we are likely to come across PDF documents, either through downloading these documents from databases of scholarly articles or as scans of longer works made available through Reed e-reserves. It’s the first in a series, so look for future posts to cover other note taking and annotation apps. In it, you’ll learn how to annotate PDFs using apps you probably already have installed on your computer. As more and more texts are available online, however, tools for rich annotation of online and digital texts have evolved to allow readers to highlight and take notes on digital texts and webpages. Many of us learned to annotate using some old-school tools: pencils, highlighters, maybe sticky notes to physically “tag” our books. Annotation, or adding notes directly to texts, is an important part of scholarly work.
