To date the most useful tool I have picked up through my exposure to the digital humanities has been, without a doubt, the acquisition of Adobe Acrobat Pro. As a student in history I have worked with PDFs for years now and the lack of interaction with them has definitely been an issue. Now I can do all of my note taking and highlighting right there on screen and save it as a part of the file. Not to mention actually being able to search the text now! This is most beneficial. The process of reading and note taking used to be extremely jerky for me. Where I would read and stop to take notes. (I'm clearly too cheap to be printing off all of my PDFs) Now the process has become quite smooth. And when I can actually bring my laptop to class, all the better. There no need for highlighters, pens or paper.
....although I am still going to use the pen and paper method when it comes to essay prep.
Not only can I interact with PDFs on a whole new level I can actually create my own PDFs! I've already done this with a few websites. It's just so much easier to make 1 PDF of the various pages on a website that I can highlight and comment on. This in combination with Evernote could be a particularly formidable combination in the repertoire of a grad student. Although, to be perfectly honest Evernote has not at this point in time made it into my daily useage. I need to make it a habit somehow. It should be something I use without thinking and this isnt the case. I often forget that I have it at my disposal.
And of course there are other methods I utilise, such as dropbox, Zotero and blogging ... and in the future I expect to use in some form or another all of the methods I've been exposed to except the Mac exclusive ones. At time point in time however I award my gold star to.... Adobe Acrobat Pro!
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