Hypothesis: Getting Started with Annotation Assignments in Canvas

Hypothesis is integrated in Canvas as an external tool so it is available in all course sites. To use Hypothesis in Canvas, you can either:

1. create an assignment in Canvas and select Hypothesis as the External Tool or
2. enable Hypothesis for non-graded web and PDF annotation activities as an “external tool” within a module

Hypothesis guides:

• Creating a Hypothesis annotation assignment in Canvas
• Using the Hypothesis App With Modules in Canvas

Any PDF readings that you assign to students to be read using Hypothesis must be in a machine-readable format. If you open your PDF and you can select a line of text and copy and paste it elsewhere, your PDF is good to go. If not, use the web based converter (linked below) or other PDF editing tools including the Adobe Acrobat DC software (free to Middlebury instructors and students).

• Creating machine-readable texts with Hypothesis optical character recognition tool

Adobe guides:

• OCR meaning: why is OCR software important?
• Edit Scanned PDFs walks through the steps to convert files

Hypothesis doesn’t use the file name to differentiate PDFs. Instead, a unique digital ‘fingerprint’ in the document meta data is used to ensure that annotations are correctly associated with a file. In some cases, instructors may have a large PDF that they want to chunk into shorter reading tasks. Hypothesis advises instructors to use Adobe Acrobat to ‘split’ a larger file into shorter PDFs with their own unique fingerprint. Not doing so, could result in annotations on one file appearing on another that has the same parent fingerprint.

• A Hypothesis-Compatible Way to Use Adobe Acrobat to Split a PDF