Matthew Siu and Andy Matuschak; June 2024
sensemaking (i.e. rearranging and elaborating that material for insight) this process isn’t linear
It’s often convenient to do a bit of preliminary sensemaking in the midst of foraging; conversely, observations you uncover during sensemaking will often lead to another round of foraging, and so on, in a loop.
enable fluid movement between these foraging and sensemaking stances.
fluid movement between acting on source documents (which emphasize foraging) and on your working document (which emphasizes sensemaking)
Ideally, you should be able to shift your focus as it makes sense in the moment, and the work you do in each place should remain visible in the other.
two different workflows people might use to capture what’s important from a messy pile of material: highlighting key snippets in a source document, and copying key snippets into a working document.
Highlighting is more convenient when foraging
copying prepares a manipulable canvas for sensemaking
unifies these operations, so that you can use whichever is most convenient in the moment, while retaining the benefits of the other.
working memory overload is one of the biggest problems when distilling these large unstructured documents.
that’s why people in these situations so often try to collect everything important into once place: that way, everything can be viewed at once, and it’s possible to notice connections and themes without relying on working memory. Unfortunately, as snippets accumulate, the working document itself can become quite long—leaving you stuck scrolling around, trying to remember where everything is.
as you work with your snippets—paraphrasing, recontextualizing, and distilling them—you may find that you no longer need to see the full text all the time. Your own comments have superseded the original material.
Shifting from highlights to copying links as structure emerges
They’d often begin by highlighting key passages, letting snippets accumulate without structure into their working document.
Over time, they would loosely arrange the pieces, moving related snippets closer to each other and eventually arranging an outline.
As sections became more clearly defined, users would increasingly paste snippet links directly into specific locations.
People moved back and forth between these two methods as their intuitions developed and changed—leaning more on highlighting when snippets’ roles seemed unclear, and pasting links when snippets fit well within their structure.
Incremental structure. Our test users created structure informally and incrementally as they gathered snippets.
adding extra newlines to separate loosely related groups. As groups developed, many users labeled them with section headings or by creating nested lists. Within the working document, different sections would gain structure at different rates, often with an informal “unsorted” pile left at the bottom.
No bulk operations. Physical space allows you to make loose arrangements: piles and clusters, columns and rows, overlapping and connected. This flexibility can be quite effective for early stages of the process, when the structure of the whole is still unclear. But these arrangements are less flexible when it’s time to refine the structure and articulate new insights. If you want to elaborate on a snippet when working in physical space, you have to make space for it, shifting and moving other clusters aside while maintaining their structure. In a text editor, by contrast, you can just press the “Return” key to create more space for an extra point.
No undo, no copy-and-paste. Another problem is that re-arrangement in physical space is a destructive action. If you want to try a different grouping, there’s no easy way for you to undo it, and no easy way to view the new arrangement alongside your old one in parallel. In a text editor, you can just make a copy and try a new variation without disturbing the old one.
No hypertext. Looking at a snippet copied onto a sticky note, there’s no easy way to quickly view its surrounding context in the source material. Likewise, when browsing the source material, there’s no way to quickly locate the sticky notes corresponding to a particular passage.
snippets: we view them less as “evidence” or “data points”, and more as “kindling” which might be consumed and discarded on the way to insight. In the latter setting, when even the problem being solved is undefined, the only way forward is often to write in circles, until some sense starts to emerge. This writing may weave chaotically between new observations and snippets from old documents.
In the messy situations we’ve described, we rarely know the shape of our categories in advance. Often we’re just reacting: “this seems important”; “this is related to that”; “this makes me think of…”; and so on. Giving a cluster a name can impose formality prematurely, adding friction to the process.
References
Siu, Matthew, and Matuschak, Andy. “Latticework: Unifying Annotation and Freeform Text Editing for Augmented Sensemaking.” Matthew Siu, June 2024, https://www.matthewsiu.com/Latticework.