Kalani Craig

This post is part of a series about the digital tools I use to assist me in reading, writing, teaching and living.

Combined with a 9×13 piece of 1/2″-thick plexiglas, my Canon SD1000 point-and-shoot camera becomes a lightning-fast scanner. A few pieces of software turn the images into digital documents, for those times when I need a portable digital version of an important source.

Stage in my thought process: One (Information Gathering)

Where I use it: Anywhere I see a paper document that needs to be digital for ease of access

What goes in it: Book excerpts, student assignments, receipts, archival documents I can’t take with me but need to refer to. Photoshop has a “Shadows and Highlights” adjustment tool that, coupled with batch processing, means photo-by-photo contrast adjustment without any actual work on my part. The icing on the cake: Acrobat’s OCR (optical character recognition) turn images with writing in them into text that can be copied, pasted, highlighted (for easy note-taking) and searched.

Why I chose it: Fewer back problems and easier access to my sources. I carry fewer books and therefore a lighter bag, and the sources I refer to on a regular basis are with me all the time, ripe for the picking and citing.