Bill over at Notional Slurry has been wondering whether the mind mapping emperor actually has any clothes. Which is a fine bit of timing, because I’d been wondering the same thing. In all the driving back and forth to Arkansas to help out with Dad, I speculatively downloaded a bunch of different podcasts onto the aged iPod including (nerdly, I do confess) some stuff on software development and project management. Much of it was, sadly, crap, but it kept me awake so I won’t be too harsh.
Somewhere in all that was a mention of mind mapping, so I figured I’d dust that idea off again and see if it made any more sense this time than it did when I poked it a year or so ago. I downloaded Freemind and used it to sketch out some plans for my current courses. It wasn’t exactly a revelatory experience, and while I’ve continued to play with a bit I can tell that “new toy sheen” is beginning to wear off.
One of my main concerns/disappointments/realizations was one shared by Bill: These “mind maps” are really just plain old-fashioned outlined with some pretty (or, really, not so) pictures laid on top. Freemind sorta allows you to break out of the standard outline mode (one parent, zero or more children; a plain old tree in computing parlance), but that bits pretty weak, and in the end you just have an outline with some decorations. As Bill put it:
And I look at the results, and I see: A rooted tree. An outline. A strict hierarchy. A homogeneous classification diagram. A bundle of undifferentiated hard constraints. A simple Venn Diagram made difficult and misleading by the addition of geographical information.
So what’s the point? Why not just make lists or outlines?
So, with a not terribly convinced tone in his voice, I will suggest a possible argument in favor of mind maps: They do (or at least can) have different affordances (in Norman’s sense of the word) than an outline. Sure, I can presumably write an outlining tool that allows all kinds of cool dragging and (re)connecting, but that’s not how I think about outlines. Dragging crap around and playing with the connections comes entirely naturaly (to me at least) in the realm of graphs. And maybe that’s enough of a difference? Or maybe it’s just an argument for writing more drag-around-friendly outlining tools. (Lord knows that Freemind is hardly a rocket science impressive piece of software. It wouldn’t take a ton to equal or better it.)
None of which addresses Bill’s other concern about the planarity of the darn things, but that’s all I got for now. Sorry. I’ll probably keep playing with Freemind for at least a while longer, but it’s not clear if I’ll still be firing it up at the end of the semester. We’ll see.
4 Comments
You could take a look at Topicscape ( http://www.topicscape.com ) it was designed partly to overcome the strict hierarchy limitation that most outlining and mindmapping software suffers from. And also the limitations of the 2D sheet – by allowing zooming and flying.
Another thing they have in their favor, along with outlines and such: they make sense to a lot of people, and thus they have a lot of relevance (in the Sperberian sense). I connect things with lines that way, and it means something to people.
My fuzzy directed hypergraphs, they need acetate overlays, and connect nodes with fields instead of lines, and… well, they a bitch ta draw an splain in our weak ol 3-d world.
So points to the spidery mind map, there.
This kind of relevance waswhat I meant.
I’m afraid that TopicScape is a Windows-only affair, which leaves me out.
Bill: But is the difficult to ‘splain thing just a function of us not knowing how to do it well? Examples in Tufte’s books (for example) make it clear that we can generate highly information rich diagrams that are still accessible.