Exegesis

Exegesis is the practice (originally in religious study) of annotating a text with its historical or other background - currently made popular by RapGenius, a tool for composing exegeses for rap lyrics and, incidentally, other texts.

It's interesting because it treats the text as an artifact that exists in a colossal web of associations and meaning, which can at least in part be explained, commented on, and clarified.  In other words, exegesis is a way of reifying the semantic web behind a syntactic object, making it explicit.

Comments in code are a form of exegesis; textual proximity stands in for explicit linking, though, and the semantic background is in natural language and thus inaccessible to the computer (not the compiler, you understand, which only cares about the syntactic object - but any automated tools we might want to use, and any deep documentation system).

So a rich code environment (like my footnote-and-section scheme) could possibly also include some kind of explicit codification of the semantics of the code. I'm still trying to work out just what it means, but there you go.

I'd like some kind of exegesis tool for my efforts to understand propaganda anyway, so maybe it would be appropriate to build one that could be used for general purposes.