Book Brackets

While serving in the Australia Perth Mission (1997–99), I developed a method of annotating scripture by writing short chapter summaries on lined paper then drawing bracket lines to group chapters by theme — marking where a narrative arc began and ended, where the same locations appeared, which chapters shared an author, and so on. The physical brackets made it easy to see structure at a glance without losing your place in the text.

Original bracket annotations from the Book of Alma, made during the Australia Perth Mission (1997–99)

I always wanted to digitize that idea. Book Brackets is that attempt: an interactive visualization that draws bracket overlays on chapter lists, letting you switch between different ways of grouping the same text. The method started with scripture but works for any book with chapters — novels, histories, technical texts, anything with structure worth seeing.