Contextual augmentation is the harvesting of written communication sent through email, social, text and other ephemeral channels into ever-evolving libraries of permanent resources: context that can be referenced in future dialogue to enhance new conversations.
The term comes from 📝Brian Swichkow and 📝Mythos One, where it names the practice of turning each explanation into a reusable memo and linking it into later messages instead of retyping it. Because the memos are living documents, each reuse is a chance to improve them, and shorthand communication becomes possible without losing the underlying information.
Over time the collected memos form a 📝Library of Context, which Mitch Kessler called a 📝Dynamic Anecdotal Information Network: a body of stories and definitions that can be rapidly recompiled to support a new story. Brian describes how he applies the practice in How I Automating My Consulting with Contextual Augmentation.
Contextual Augmentation has enabled us to build a compendium of stories and definitions.