Internet is like the Doraemon’s magic pocket. You can get nearly anything from it, including references for your paper assignment. Speaking of reference, people will normally use a highlighter to block a certain sentence in the textbook and use marker or ballpoint to annotate it. How about online reference?

When reading a long article in the internet you sometimes want to highlight and annotate some keywords to be read again later. Actually, there are many tools that you can use to annotate a webpage but not all of them have the capability to manage your annotations.

Managing annotations is important, especially if you are working on an essay or paper that need complex online references. If you are a Google Chrome user you can try using a handy tool called Hypothesis. What is that?

Like I described, it’s a tool to help you annotate a webpage. With this tool you can add as many as you want of annotation within a web page and keep them organized. Take a look at the example below to make everything clearer.

Annotating webpages in Chrome with Hypothesis

You need to have an account in Hypothesis in order before being able to use the tool. Just go to Hypothesis site to create your account in seconds. Once you got your account, install the Hypothesis Google Chrome extension by visiting this page. You will see a new icon in the Google Chrome icon bar once Hypothesis is successfully installed.

To start annotating, please visit a web page that you make it as the reference. Jump to the part that you consider as an important part. For example, I am going to use a Wikipedia page about Linux. Just consider I am working on paper about Linux.

• Highlight the part you want to annotate and click the Hypothesis icon and you will see two options of what you can do. Select Annotate to annotate that part and select Highlight to highlight that part. Since you want to annotate the text so you can choose Annotate.

• Add your annotation by typing it on the available box. As you can see, you can also add additional images or links if you want it. Be sure to add at least a tag to make your annotations be more organized.

You can choose whether want to create a public annotation or private one. Selecting the public option meaning that you allow anyone to see your annotations (can be seen at https://hypothes.is/search). Click the arrow button to select your choice.

To see all of your annotations you can go to the Hypothesis page and login with your account. Click on your username that is located at the top-right corner of your screen.

Hypothesis also allows you to share your annotations and and create a group. You can explore this handy tool further by yourself to find out more features I probably missed.