We're all increasingly reading digitally, whether articles online, kindle and ibooks or .pdf documents.

This short presentation looks at how we can incorporate annotations (highlighting and note-taking) that we make on our ebooks into our work.

Let's start with the iBook.

The quality of the screen on my own iPad 4 makes reading longer documents much more pleasurable that it is on a laptop or desktop machine. And while I'm reading I use the highlight functions to markup the text. I rely on different colours to help separate out different types of highlights. So, pink for the ideas I want to explore further, yellow for memorable passages I want to remember for later, and orange for books and articles I want to add to my reading list.

Here are the notes, yellow highlights, on a book I've been reading recently.

What I want to do is to export those notes to a series of index cards - a system which will allow those notes to be categorised and linked so that in the future I can retrieve them easily and incorporate them in my own teaching and research.

By clicking Edit Notes a new menu is introduced which then allows me to Share the notes that I select.

In this case I just have one note to share so I make sure that it is selected and then click 'Share'.

What is available to share to will depend on how you've set up your own services/apps, but here you can see that I have Mail available, which is what really interests me.

[I also have Evernote set up here but the direct sharing function just doesn't seem to work]

I can either email to myself or I can email to Evernote, a collection of notes which I organise in a variety of ways for a variety of purposes.

Evernote gives every use an email address which can be used to send messages which then appear as notes in your collection. Very clever.

And this is what the emailed highlight looks like when it is in Evernote.

In effect, my highlight becomes a text note which I can edit, classify and tag. Inside Evernote it also becomes searchable.

So, from iBooks I can now highlight and take notes and then transfer those notes to my collection (Evernote) of digital index cards where I can edit and include them in my teaching and research writing.

But what about the Kindle? Let's look now at how we can do the same with books we read from Amazon on either a Kindle or, as I do, using the Kindle App for iPad.

Sometimes it's useful to be able to read a number of different chapters and/or articles and collect highlights and notes from them together in one Evernote note.

You can do this by using IFTTT - 'If this then that' a simple automation machine that allows you to create recipes of things you want done. In this case my recipe is:

If I send an email to trigger@recipe.ifttt.com with #highlights in the subject line then the contents of the email will be appended to a single note in my Evernote.

Every time I send an email with this trigger I add to the note created in Evernote.

The process for those using the Kindle is similar.

Here's a highlight made in a book bought from Amazon which I'm reading in the Kindle App on the iPad.

When I highlight text I get a menu allowing me to copy or share the highlight.

When I share I can (unlike with the iBook) do so directly to Evernote. I can also decide then and there where to organise the note and how to tag it for future retrieval.

Here's what the note looks like in Evernote.

This is now a text file that I can further edit, copy, share etc.

Highlights and notes made in the Kindle or Kindle App are stored in the cloud, either as public or private files.

Access to those highlights and notes is through: kindle.amazon.com

You can go to each book you've received through Amazon and dig down into the highlights and notes you've made.

Although the pop-up here suggests you can 'Share Your Notes & Highlights', Amazon doesn't make it easy to export these notes out of its site. Copy and pasting is not ideal here.

Fortunately ...

a bookmarklet exists which automatically formats your highlights and notes and offers alternative file types for exporting them.

It's called 'Bookcision' and is available at:

http://www.norbauer.com/bookcision/

Here are the options available once you have clicked on Bookcision.

I chose the option 'Copy to clipboard' to easily create a new note in Evernote for the highlights to that particular book.

So that's highlighting and note-taking with ebooks but what do we do with web pages and .pdf documents?

How do we create digital marginalia?

Hypothes.is

This tool 'leverages annotation to enable sentence-level critique or note-taking on top of news, blogs, scientific articles, books, terms of service, ballot initiatives, legislation and more.'

Once you paste a link in the annotate box, this is what you get - that layer superimposed on the web page where notes and highlights can be made.

In order to make those annotations you need to sign up and sign in.

Now I'm signed in I can made public or private notes and share notes to a private group.