[Preview] Latticework: unifying annotation and freeform text editing for augmented sensemaking

Longtime patrons may remember the research fellowship I launched at the start of 2023. I spent a year working with the winner, Matthew Siu, on a new sensemaking tool. Today I'd like to share a preview of our report on that work!

✨ Read report preview ✨

Comments and feedback are welcome.

I've excerpted the introduction below, so you can more easily decide whether you'd like to click through:

Introduction

You’re in the middle of a large project, and you’re stuck. You’re staring at a pile of long, unstructured documents (journals, lab notebooks, meeting notes) with a sense that the clues you need are buried somewhere within. But there’s simply too much to keep in your head as you scroll. Instead, you hatch a plan. If you could find the important snippets and gather them into one place, it would be easier to see everything at once, to notice patterns, and to figure out what to do no ext.

So you create a new working document, and as you read through your unstructured notes, you copy and paste key passages into it. But this process is cumbersome and disorienting: you’re constantly moving both your attention and your cursor between these documents, deciding where to put each new snippet, losing your place in your unstructured notes. The snippets in your working document are isolated from their original context, so it can be hard to remember what each means and why it matters. And as snippets pile up, your fresh document can easily produce the same kind of overwhelm you were trying to escape.

If you’d been working with books or academic papers, rather than your own notes, you might have used annotation tools instead. It’s easy to enter a satisfying flow with these tools. When some phrase strikes you as important, a highlighter lets you capture that reaction immediately, without shifting your focus. Likewise, marginal comments let you record observations as they occur to you, in context. The trouble with these tools is that your annotations end up trapped in the pages of the original documents. But when you’re trying to make sense of a confusing situation, you need to get everything into one place, where you can see, rearrange, and elaborate the pieces into a new whole.

Annotation tools feel great to use, but they don’t support the follow-up thinking you need to do. Text editors give you a flexible canvas for making sense of snippets, but their design is often cumbersome and disorienting when used in this way. If you could move fluidly between these tools, you could use each where it excels and, perhaps, get the best of both worlds. In this paper, we present Latticework, a system which unifies annotation with freeform text editing, in the context of personal knowledge management tools.