``[E]thnographers are interested in gaining an insider's view of a situation'' \cite[967]{ethnographic}. We can use \emph{ethnographic design} to build a system around the existing behavior of a ``user'', so that they can use the system in their natural state, and it adapts to their natural behavior. 


When looking to build a digital system for expressing diagrams in the realm of mathematics, how can we adapt to their existing behavior? Given than the goal of this project is to support academics, using \TeX\ as a basis makes sense from an ethnographic standpoint, given that it has been around for over 30 years and still remains the {\it de facto standard}. Now, not all of the academic population knows \TeX, however, not all people are authors, either. It only takes one good book to propagate information to thousands of minds.


Going forward with a digital system using \TeX\ as its syntax, it's of paramount importance to understand not only the language of \TeX\ and its syntax, but also how it is structured. This can provide a technology that is engaging and productive for authors. 


This system was genuinely designed to optimize development of structured documents in \TeX. The structure was developed from my experience in authoring \TeX. This project is just as much a project for other \TeX\ people as it is for myself. I strive to be a part of my community, and I am a strong believer that we can use technology for learning. For example, I wrote a database application during my undergraduate years at Berkeley to categorize and store my entire lecture notes and output a structured version in \TeX. I used this program to write a series of useful academic material---a 55-page reference manual for CS61A (The Structure and Interpretation of Programming Languages), a 35-page review for Math 55 (Discrete Mathematics), lecture notes for Math 54 (Linear Algebra), final and midterm papers for a series of liberal arts courses, and later used it to author over 300 pages of signal processing documentation for EE20 and EE120 in the EECS department. 


Admittedly, much of this product was built while authoring textbooks within the platform itself (including \emph{this} text). It was a symbiotic process where I stuck to using \TeX\ as the standard, and even if it made programming more painful, I forced myself to implement it in a way that made sense for typesetting. In fact, the original diagrams were much more interactive in the Objective-C and JavaScript versions of the authorship interface than this current implementation, but they required the knowledge of programming! I believe the success of this platform solely lies on the adherence to \TeX\ as the syntax for expression. My goal with this platform is to deliver tools that will accelerate education from both directions---the professors teaching, and the students learning---so that it stays in step with technology.


Ethnographic Design