The revealed variation within these analogous cross-document relationships can invite the user’s engagement.

This is the essence of comparative close reading, a dialectical activity that requires repeated deep engagement with the texts to reveal new insights.

By definition, sensemaking and other dialectical activities necessitate engagement.

AbstractExplorer instantiates new minimally lossy2 SMT-informed techniques for skimming, reading, and reasoning about a corpus of similarly structured short documents: phrase-level role classification that drives sentence ordering, highlighting, and spatial alignment.

This SMT-informed approach, which AbstractExplorer shares, tries to give this mental machinery “a leg up,” letting users perhaps skip some steps by accepting reified cross-document relationships identified by the computer.

SMT posits that visual alignment helps people perceive relational similarities and differences more clearly, thereby improving their ability to make meaningful comparisons and understand underlying patterns.

The prior SMT-informed tools in Section 2.3 for both code and natural language corpora suggest that the cognitive process of comparing texts may be no exception to the cognitive processes SMT predicts.

SMT provides a framework for understanding how humans compare two or more objects by finding common structural alignments between objects.

Structural Mapping Theory (SMT) is a long-standing well-vetted theory from Cognitive Science that describes how humans attend to and try to compare objects by finding mental representations of them that can be structurally mapped to each other (analogies).

Theory (SMT) to facilitate seeing both the overview and the details at the same time, facilitating abstraction without losing context.