The goal of this book is to bring together three active areas of current research into a single framework and show how each area benefits from more exposure to the other two. The areas are: discrete calculus, complex networks, and algorithmic content extraction. Although there have been a few intersections in the literature between these areas, they have largely developed independently of one another. However, we believe that researchers working in any one of these three areas can strongly benefit from the tools and techniques being developed in the others. We begin this book by outlining each of these three areas, their history and their relationship to one another. Subsequently, we outline the structure of this work and help the reader navigate its contents.