Thinking with Symbols

For as long as writing has been around it has not only been a medium of communication across time and space, it has also served as a mental extension for human thought because it provides a non-decaying substrate with a much larger storage capacity than our working memory. Other than writing in sand however, the stable substrate does not provide flexibility for moving thoughts to see text in different ways, through different views. All it allows for is crossing lines of text out and writing them down elsewhere, should a better fit be found, leaving behind not an empty space but unusable space.
Digital text affords the user to move text and thoughts at will–but only within the constraints set by the software used. So far that has meant the ability to edit freely and have spelling checked in word processors and to move nodes of text representing thoughts in graph programs. It has meant the ability to copy text, to publish text and to one-click share text on social media.
The developers of early software which we use to interact with our text were true pioneers, prominently among was Doug Engelbart. His mission was to augment our ability to solve urgent, complex problems collectively. This focus on augmentation led him to develop Augment (originally called NLS) where the power of the user to get to grips with their knowledge was paramount and text interaction–or symbol manipulation as he referred to it–was key. In his environment the user would learn the ability to follow both explicit links, such as the web links we have today, as well as implicit links, such as the way a word is linked to its entry in a dictionary for example. Powerful views of text including automatic outlining and being able to see text in a freeform graph was also developed at his Augmentation Research Center.
Engelbart's focus on powerful augmentation took a back seat as digital text became mainstream and the the development focus became 'ease-of-use' for the beginner, who was the customer. I admit, the following is a bit of a rant: Instead of commands, the user would click on pictures, much like someone who does not know a language fluently may point on pictures to express what they want to communicate. The corporate development of text systems would go on to change how we work and socialise, with weblink and instant-share social media changing our information and communication landscape. The evolutionary pressure for this development was at core financial so end-user software was developed to appeal to the novice (new) user–not the experienced user who wanted to have more control–since this was the user who would purchase the software. Networks were developed to encourage the easy of feeding social media for news and gossip, benefiting the network owners and advertisers, not necessarily the end user who paid no money to use the system. Much has been spoken about the issues around social media but not as much around the issues of textual communication in general. This is what the notion of augmented text aims to address:

interactions

Starting with the principle that the most fundamental aspect of existence is not matter–nor information–but interaction, and that the human brain is a connective environment, the development of augmented text is focused around developing rich interactions and flexible views to augment human thought.

wouldn't it be nice...

The development is constantly guided by a question of 'wouldn't it be nice…' within the paradigm of augmentation (not simply ease-of-use). Here are so more of the specific questions we have asked so far:
Wouldn't' it be nice to copy text as citations, not just plain text? > With Reader and Author you can do that. And it knows the different between who edited and who wrote the text. And it can link straight to a document on your own computer–even to the section within that document.
Wouldn't' it be nice to click on a citation in a document and have a little pop-up come up with all the information you'd need to evaluate whether its a useful citation and whether you should download it yourself? > You can do this to citations created in Author and read in Reader.
Wouldn't it be nice if the author would not have to elaborate on every term, person and concept they write about, but to do so once in a glossary, in a process taking no more time or effort than writing it once–then have the reader get access to this further information without it being distracting? > This is what we have implemented as an Augmented Glossary. This is possible with our super-simple glossary implementation.
Wouldn't' it be nice to be able to spread out your thoughts free-form, but still have them connected to your main document and Glossary? > This is the Dynamic View in Author and Reader.
Wouldn't' it be nice to be able to look up any text instantly, to check assertions, facts and basic meaning? > That's what the Liquid tool allows you to do.
And a final 'wouldn't it be nice' for this introduction to Augmented Text: Wouldn't it be nice if all of this was possible without inventing a new document format–if it just worked on ordinary PDF documents? > This is why we invented Visual-Meta, which adds rich metadata to a document as an appendix, at the same, visual, level as the rest of the document information, in an open and well established format (it builds on BibTeX).