Authors: Rosemary M. Simpson

Abstract

[]

This paper, Augustine as “Naturalist of the Mind”, is a linear portal to its associated graph-structured Tinderbox hypertext. The hypertext is one component of a research project arising out of a Philosophy seminar on Augustine as the preeminent bridge philosopher between the ancient world of Greece and Rome and the subsequent 1000 years of Western philosophy. The research project explores some surprising insights that emerged during this seminar from a deep study of Augustine’s Confessions: Book 10-Memory. The purpose of the Augustine as “Naturalist of the Mind” Tinderbox hypertext is not only to be a multi-dimensional resource base for the research but also to provide an exploratorium where new materials can be added, new relationships created, and new research directions can be discovered and pursued.

CCS CONCEPTS

Human-centered computing → Human computer

interaction (HCI) → Interaction paradigms → Hypertext / hypermedia • Applied computing → Document management and text processing → Document preparation → Hypertext / hypermedia creation

KEYWORDS

Digital Humanities; Scholarly Research; Scientific Analysis of Philosophical Writing; Representation of Non-Linear Structure in Humanities Literature; Conceptual Synthesis in a Multidimensional Concept Space

ACM Reference format:

Rosemary M Simpson. 2020. Augustine as “Naturalist of the Mind”. In Proceedings of ACM Hypertext 2020 (Hypertext 2020). July 13–15, 2020, Virtual Event, USA ACM, New York, NY, USA, 5 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3372923.3404814

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1 Overview of Augustine as “Naturalist of the Mind” Research

Why Augustine?

Background . Augustine (354-430 AD) was a philosopher and Christian who lived in Roman North Africa at the time of the fall of the Roman Empire. In fact, his work City of God (426 AD) was written to counter-balance and deal with the sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410 AD. He is most famous, however, for his Confessions, written in 400 AD, in which the sections that we would call ‘Chapters’ are called ‘Books”. Perhaps the most wellknown part of the Confessions is the autobiographical span from Book 1 through Book 9, in which he describes his life. Books 1011, however, contain surprisingly astute and ingenious analyses of mind, time, and infinity; Confessions: Book 10-Memory is the subject of this paper. Over the course of his lifetime he was an extremely prolific writer; over 100 books, 300 letters, and 500 sermons have survived. He had a very good classical education in rhetoric, literature, and philosophy that enabled him to became a noted teacher of Rhetoric, which was a major discipline that required a classically philosophical education, before his conversion to Christianity. After that he became a priest and then Bishop of Hippo in North Africa, famous for his writings and for his opposition to the heresies that were popular, engaging most of the Christians in North Africa at the time. (1)

Augustine as a “Naturalist of the Mind”. Most people think of Augustine as a moral and epistemological Christian philosopher, whose philosophy deeply influenced not only the high medieval work of the philosophers Anselm, Aquinas, and Duns Scotus, but also later philosophers such as Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche. However, what is surprising to discover is that his inquisitive, objectively observant, and analytical mind foreshadowed the naturalist scientific approach of Charles Darwin as seen in Darwin’s excursion as a naturalist to the Galapagos that he documented in his book The Voyage of the Beagle [1]. Darwin’s theory of evolution, detailed in his book On the Origin of Species [2], emerged out of the observations recorded in the earlier book. In Augustine’s exploration of his own memory in Confessions: Book 10-Memory [3], he exercises attitudes and skills that are reminiscent of Darwin’s experience as a naturalist on his voyage to the Galapagos, which leads me to describe his strategies as that of a “Naturalist of the Mind.

Related Work

Two different areas of work related to this project are (1) scholarly digital humanities, and (2) knowledge representation and development.

The first category, scholarly digital humanities, has attracted a wide range of historians, archeologists, and philosophers over the years. Among the many projects one could mention, the Perseus Project [4] and the work of David Kolb stand out. Perseus, founded by Gregory Crane at Harvard in 1987, later moving to Tufts University under his direction, is a digital library that has evolved from its roots in the study of the classical Greek world to an increasingly broad embrace of the general problems of humanistic study and research. Philosopher David Kolb has both written about scholarly hypertext [5] and created hypertexts that address issues of how philosophy can interact with graph-structured hypertexts. [6]

The second category, knowledge representation and development, has been from the beginning a core discipline with hypertext research, dating back to the pioneering thought of Emanuel Goldberg, Vannevar Bush, and the hypertext pioneers. At the first ACM Hypertext conference in 1987, in a report on Xerox PARC’s NoteCards project, Catherine Marshall [7] explored some of the representation dimensions and possibilities that hypertext presents. More recent work in knowledge representation and development can be seen in VKB (Visual Knowledge Builder), which “lets users express content via visual or textual means and later formalize that content in the form of attributes, values, types, and relations.” [8]

Guide to the “Augustine as Naturalist of the

Mind” Tinderbox

Structure

The following image shows the overall structure of the Tinderbox “Augustine as Naturalist of the Mind”:

Mind Tinderbox hypertext - https://eastgate.com/Augustine/

The above figure shows the basic structure of the hypertext as separate “neighborhood” components. The following sections of this paper describe the structure and functions of each component. The lines between components are links with link types that reflect the purpose of the link. The square container in the bottom right holds the 70 sections of Confessions: Book 10Memory, which have links to them from within the different component overviews. For example, the Category - Emotions overview text refers to Section 10-2-2, which is then linked to the text pane of Section 10-2-2 within the Appendix container.

Reading the Hypertext

Each note in the hypertext is displayed with just the title of the note. Selecting the note opens the associated text in the text pane on the right of the view.

Sectional Partition of Augustine’s Confessions: Book 10-Memory . The linear sequence of Sections in Augustine’s Confessions: Book 10-Memory can be partitioned into six groups:

Sections 1-11 - Relationship to God, living beings, and reality; Sections 12-28 - Nature of memory; Sections 29-34 - Happiness as goal of everyone; Sections 35-38 - Searching for God; Sections 39-66 Appetites - characteristics and negative aspects; Sections 67-70 Christ as bridge between infinite and finite.

On the Tinderbox Augustine Overview map the Sectional Partition group, described above, underneath the introductory title group at the top of the Tinderbox, contains the six section overviews. Each partition overview links to individual notes in the Appendix that contain the text for each section of Confessions: Book 10-Memory belonging to that partition.

Thematic Categories in Augustine’s

Confessions: Book 10-Memory

Confessions: Book 10-Memory

While other points-of-view might identify different ways to group the 70 sections of Book 10-Memory, the traits in common among the key topics in Confessions: Book 10-Memory group them into nine different category notes: Emotions, Epistemology, God, Inquiry, Memory, Morality, Psychology, Reality, and Senses. On the map the Thematic Categories group is to the left of the Section Partitions group. It contains nine category overviews that link to the specific sections described. Within the

note for a particular category, the associated text describes the context of that category with Book 10-Memory, identifies pertinent Book 10-Memory sections, and links to them.

Relationships among Thematic Categories in Augustine’s

Confessions: Book 10-Memory .

relationships among the nine category themes in Confessions: Book 10-Memory

Four relationships: Emotions - Memory; Epistemology Ontology; Morality - Psychology; and Ontology - God are but a small sample of the 36 possible pairwise combinations among the nine categories described above within the Confessions: Book 10-Memory. Furthermore, depending on the point-of-view and inter-topic attribute sharing, other connections might be considered, such as relationships among different specific topics such as time and infinity, or recognition and curiosity, or selfknowledge and power. On the Tinderbox map the Category Relationships group is to the right of the Section Partitions group. It contains the four category relationship overviews that link to the specific sections described. Within the note for a particular category relationship dyad, the associated text describes the context of that relationship with Confessions: Book 10-Memory, identifies pertinent Confessions: Book 10-Memory sections, and links to them.

Naturalist Skills Demonstrated in Augustine’s Confessions: Book

10-Memory.

Augustine in Confessions: Book 10-Memory

Augustine’s naturalist skills - Observation, Description, Analysis, Conceptual Synthesis - address the topics that interweave the 70 sections of Confessions: Book 10-Memory from different perspectives. For example, his observation and descriptive skills are vividly present when he is describing the nature of memory. On the map the Skills group is underneath the Section Partitions group. It contains the four skills overviews that link to the

specific sections described. Within the note for a particular skill, the associated text describes the context of that skill with Confessions: Book 10-Memory, identifies pertinent Confessions: Book 10-Memory sections, and links to them.

Reflections on Creating and Using a Scholarly

Research Hypertext: Advantages, Disadvantages, and Strategies

Advantages

I have an associative mind and take notes in 2D:

and interpretation of Augustine’s Confessions: Book10- Memory

So, what drew me to graph-based hypertext was that it provided a better way of representing the interconnected way in which I thought and worked than did the prevalent hierarchical tree structures that dominated computer science research and practice. What actually creating a hypertext gives me is a sense of structure over chaos, an increasing awareness of meaningful relationships among my different points-of-view and areas of interest.

Creating this particular hypertext has given me a gratifying experience of controlled mental expansion into many dimensions, of not being trapped in structures that don’t map the way I think at all. This multi-dimensionality is what utterly fascinates me about Augustine’s thinking, so mapping Confessions: Book 10-Memory via building the hypertext and then working with it - in effect “eating my own dog food” - has given me many new insights that I will use going forward with an expanded Augustine research research agenda.

Disadvantages

There is no such thing as an all-in-one tool for any computational task; there are only tools that are optimally effective within the context they work in, a context that inevitably changes over time. Understanding the context in which you are going to use a tool is critical to effective design of the tool, while at the same time once it is available people will use it in ways never dreamed of by the designers - Polaroid Land cameras are a good example, as is the use of social media for communication and convergence in emergency situations.

Furthermore, there are tasks that require structures that run counter to the graph-structured nature of hypertext. The most obvious example is, of course, the need to write a linear paper, such as this one.

Another issue lies in the assertion that hypertext enhances the ability to gain new insights through associations and browsing in a graph-based information system. [9] However, one can question the validity of these insights when compared to the deep reading of the books of an author such as Augustine. [10] Hypertext documents risk the formation of shallow associations instead of the development of deep insight that only comes from focused attention on the whole works of target authors.

In addition to shallow interpretations, fragmentation and lack of coherence can be encouraged by hypertext usage. Teachers of the current generation of college students have been struck by the impact of extensive Web-based experience on the abilities of students for build coherent arguments in written assignments and by their diminished ability to focus on, much less effectively analyze, linear texts. Ironically, rich hypertext structures that provide multiple perspectives, such as the Augustine as “Naturalist of the Mind” Tinderbox displays, may actually work against the understanding of Augustine. Users are able to create personal points-of-view, a context that is vastly different from Augustine’s own perspective. Lost in this process may be an awareness of what Augustine himself was actually trying to communicate.

Finally, hypertexts can encourage mistaking correlation for causation. Proving causation is much more of a linear task than an associative task. Of course there could be special notes or containers that focus on the issues of proof/causation, but the structure of the hypertext per se doesn’t encourage this.

Strategies

A possible solution to this dilemma, which is particularly effective when building a hypertext whose subject is a concept or a specific domain rather than a particular person or literary work, is to provide access to the relevant full works in a linear fashion, such as by importing PDFs or providing URLs to relevant websites. A useful example of a website that reflects this strategy is George Landow’s Victorian Web. [11]

Another approach that is focused on Philosophy is David Kolb’s

[12] hypertext Socrates in the Labyrinth. While acknowledging the philosophical tradition of logical if-then, claim and support structures, he points out the history of nonlinearity in philosophical work, from the Socratic dialogues through Hegel, and the variety of forms that philosophical discussion can take.

As I mentioned earlier, context awareness is critical to both building and working with hypertexts. One key question that can help guide creators and users to build and work more effectively with hypertextual structures is: What is your goal in building a hypertext? Are you trying to gain a deep understanding of a philosopher, such as Augustine, or another target person’s mind, or are you trying to glean insights to help

form your own thoughts? Are you interested in building trails through a complex domain as a tool for building linear narratives? Or, are you interested in building a semantic web that reflects the complexity of your domain? What kind of representation will you use to help to help guide the user in exploring the hypertext? Search engines are powerful if you know what you are looking for, but how will you address the issues of fuzzy inchoate concerns that users frequently bring to exploring a hypertext? The principles of rich indexing [13] can provide guidance for designing hypertexts that support such browsing.

Research Contributions and Issues

One of the fruits of designing the Augustine as “Naturalist of the Mind” hypertext was a deeper realization of the need to identify and represent the many different, subtle, and non-obvious conceptual categories present in a work such as Augustine’s Confessions: Book 10-Memory. More important, and much more difficult, however, is the as yet unresolved issue of how to identify and represent the complex interactions among the different categories. The current work is just the “tip of the iceberg” because the nature of these interactions is a matter of both rigorous analytical and inevitably subjective interpretation, with all the pitfalls they entail. In addition, while the hypertextual structures we are familiar with are valuable tools for some aspects of this process, there remains the complex task of how to represent the change over time of multiple interacting categories as new interpretations present themselves. [14] Finally, modeling the changes in such a way as to show the evolution of both the categories and their context is still an unsolved problem, one that incites the proverbial question “What will you take for an answer”.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First, thanks to Andy van Dam, who for the last 25 years has provided an example, framework, and playpen within which I have been able to both explore my own ideas about hypertext, its semantics, and its uses, and to contribute to his ongoing research in this area. Then, thanks to Bob Zeleznik for his infinite patience with my inchoate attempts to articulate what I knew but what wasn’t in my symbol space; Mark Bernstein, who first SAW what I was trying to do and who has supported it ever since; Mark Anderson, both for his magnificent aTbRef website

[15] and for his support over the last 15 years; and Charles Larmore, for introducing me to the labyrinth that was Augustine’s mind. Finally, ultimate thanks to the LISP programming language, which gave me a fluid tool for developing graph-based structures, and LMI (LISP Machines, Inc.), which provided the environment within which I developed my first hypertext system, Gateway.

Figure 1: Overview of the Augustine as Naturalist of the Mind Tinderbox hypertext - https://eastgate.com/Augustine/

Figure 2: The nine thematic categories that occur in Confessions: Book 10-Memory

Figure 3: Four of the possible 36 combinations of dyadic relationships among the nine category themes in Confessions: Book 10-Memory

Figure 4: Group of naturalist scientific skills exhibited by Augustine in Confessions: Book 10-Memory

Figure 5: Portion of a note page from a lecture on structure and interpretation of Augustine’s Confessions: Book10- Memory

REFERENCES

[1] Charles Darwin. The Voyage of the Beagle. 1839. Project Gutenberg edition,

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/944.

[2] Charles Darwin. 1859. On The Origin of Species by Means of Natural

Selection, or Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. London :John Murray

[3] Augustine. Confessions. Chapter 10, pp 179-220, translation Henry Chadwick,

Oxford University Press, 1991; Latin publication date 400 AD.

[4] Gregory Crane. 1996. Building a digital library: the Perseus project as a case

study in the humanities. In Proceedings of the first ACM international conference on Digital libraries (DL ‘96).

[5] David Kolb. 1997. Scholarly hypertext: self-represented complexity. In

Proceedings of the eighth ACM conference on Hypertext (HYPERTEXT ‘97).

[6] https://www.eastgate.com/catalog/Socrates.html

[7] Catherine C. Marshall. 1987. Exploring representation problems using

hypertext. In Proceedings of the ACM conference on Hypertext (HYPERTEXT ‘87).

[8] Frank Shipman, J. Michael Moore, Preetam Maloor, Haowei Hsieh, and Raghu

Akkapeddi. 2002. Semantics happen: knowledge building in spatial hypertext.

In Proceedings of the thirteenth ACM conference on Hypertext and hypermedia (HYPERTEXT ‘02).

[9] Rosemary Michelle Simpson. 2001. “ConceptLab: An Information Structures

Spatial Hypermedia Environment” in Poster Proceedings of the ACM Hypertext 2001 Conference, Aarhus, Denmark. ACM Press.

[10] Mortimer Jerome Adler and Charles Van Doren. 1972. How to read a book.

[11] George Landow. The Victorian Web (http://www.victorianweb.org/).

[12] David Kolb. http://www.dkolb.org/

[13] http://cs.brown.edu/people/rsimpson/IndexingPrinciples.html

[14] Mark Bernstein. 2010. “Criticism” in Proceedings of the 21st ACM conference

on Hypertext and Hypermedia (HT ‘10) discusses in some detail various critical attitudes towards hypertexts in different domains

[15] http://www.acrobatfaq.com/atbref8/index.html

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