This video examines some of the benefits and compromises involved in the transition from intratextual to extratextual annotation. The tensions between these modes of annotation are some of the core infrastructural problems of digital scholarship. They raise the question of how we might merge the printed page and the thematic hierarchy so that we might assign multiple categories to works and citations alike and link facsimile texts with more editable versions so that this kind of work becomes more efficient and sustainable in the future.
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This is tutorial on how to annotate PDFs in Adobe Acrobat geared primarily for scholars in the humanities. The chances of actually making use of our notes, as I’ve argued earlier, hinges heavily upon their immanent visibility – being able to see which passages have been annotated within a text without having to cross-reference separate documents. Shifting to digital text not only enhances their searchability and modularity, it also allows us to layer annotation and citation within the text itself.
This is a guided tour of the keyword lexicon I developed while building my personal knowledgebase. I use it to tag the content of quotations taken from a wide variety of sources. My hope is show how what you already know might be tagged in a way that is mutually advantageous for human and machine learning — that you can see how this lexicon models the singularity of my thought even as it differs from your own. I encourage you to take and modify whatever you find useful or create your own from scratch. Either way, I’m fascinated to see where our metadata deviate and converge.