This week’s dive into curation and annotation really made me think about how we organize knowledge online. I watched Dr. Remi Kalir’s talk on social annotation (which was packed with cool real-world examples, like annotated stop signs and border walls) and also tried out Zotero with the guided activities. Honestly, it felt like I was finally setting myself up for better research habits instead of just saving links in 15 Chrome tabs.

Social annotation, as Remi pointed out, is not just about highlighting stuff—it’s about creating a dialogue. It reminds me of how we use GitHub comments or collaborative code reviews to learn from each other in CS. It was also pretty neat to hear how annotation has existed for centuries in different forms—it’s like we’ve always wanted to leave sticky notes on the world. The mention of Hypothesis and how it enables shared meaning-making through texts also gave me ideas on how to bring this into UVicAI workshops.

Zotero was the real MVP this week. From adding browser-based citations to attaching PDFs and even generating bibliographies in Word, it felt like a full-circle tool for academic workflows. As someone juggling tech docs, research articles, and code references, Zotero helps me keep everything searchable and synced. It’s surprisingly useful even for non-essay things—like remembering which dataset or paper I used in an AI experiment.

What stuck with me most was how Zotero fits into a bigger picture of digital literacy. As a CS undergrad, I rely heavily on well-documented open-source tools, and it makes me think—if we annotate and cite better, we also learn better. These small habits, like curating sources properly, can scale up to large research projects or collaborative tech work. I’m definitely planning to introduce Zotero to my peers at UVicAI, especially when we’re documenting group projects and ethical research practices.