The user's guide project: giving experiential context to research papers

Abstract

This paper was written in 2015, and published in the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics. This paper announces the first issue (2015) of Enchiridion: Mathematics User's Guides, a project to produce peer-reviewed User's Guides as companions to published papers. These User's Guides are meant to explain the key insights and organizing principles in their companion papers, the metaphors and imagery used by the authors, the story of the development of the companion papers, and a colloquial summary appropriate for a non-mathematical audience. Examples of User's Guides can be found at https://mathusersguides.com/