![]() In many programs using a mind map you have to arrange the branches in an aesthetically pleasing manner which detracts from the time you can spend on other things. In my opinion the fact that the outline can be scrolled in one dimension makes the outline more useful in the navigation of data. There are a number of companies who present Mind Maps as being a really wonderful solution to visualising interconnections between data, and for small data sets this is undoubtedly true but it becomes less so for large data sets.Ī Mind Map is topologically equivalent to a simple hierarchy which could be expressed as an outline. There is a lot of hype about Mind Maps and their use in navigating data. A concept map is just a hierarchy where an item may have more than one parent and so may appear in the outline in more than one place. In the following discussion I will focus on Mind Maps but the points raised are equally as valid for concept maps. The examples which are given to illustrate the usefulness of mapping are usually small and fit on one screen, real uses of mapping would probably be much bigger and consequently less useful. However I think that these are not as useful as they are made out to be by many people. One form of metadata which has been touted as being new with the digital age is mapping, mind maps and concept maps. ConnectedText can also automatically convert the names of other pages which occur in a note into links and it can also show which pages link to the current page (backlinks).Īnother form of metadata used to locate things is the favourites list. One can insert a link by just putting the ] in square brackets which is much less of a break in concentration whilst you are composing a document. ConnectedText is unrivalled in this area. The act of linking from one note to another is arguably the most important aspect of note taking and it should be as quick and easy as possible. Links from one note to another are very important. Try to choose tags which distinguish items rather than tags which just describe it’s characteristics. ![]() In my opinion InfoQube has the best hierarchical tagging system of any program available at the time of writing, closely followed by ConnectedText. Selecting from a list is easier, quicker and less prone to errors than typing search terms. Search can be made easier by the use of tags, particularly if the tagging system is hierarchical and has inheritance. In my experience this break in concentration is obtrusive. If you are in the middle of composing a document or trying to find understanding of some difficult problem then you have to stop concentrating on the problem at hand and think about search terms. Search is less well used than it would be because it involves a break in concentration. Search is often portrayed as the most useful way of finding things but in my experience it is not used as often as the other methods. This is especially useful as it requires less verbal attention and more visual attention, people do it without thinking about it and whilst concentrating on something else which is why it is so often overlooked. One form of metadata which is often overlooked but always relied upon is location, people navigate to where they last saw the item they are looking for. Metadata comes in many forms, not just the obvious ones. ![]() Think of how you would locate this note if you didn’t know where it was, what tags would you search for? What would you expect it to be linked to? What might you search for? Make sure that the terms you might search for appear in the text, if not then include them as a list at the end of the note. Think of it as having a conversation with your future self. These are the clues which will lead you back to this note in the future. It is worth the time and effort to add a relevant metadata to a note as you create it whilst it is still fresh in your mind. ![]() If you have a large corpus of notes without any metadata then they might as well be written in a foreign language for all the good they will be to you. So how can you locate an item of information? It is all in the metadata, the information about information. The art of a good note taking program is providing facilities for the user to be able to locate an item within their notes even though they have forgotten almost everything about it. Things like references (links), indexes (tags) and categories have been used in computer programs to ease the location of information. Over the years librarians have come up with many tools for dealing with this problem and many of these tools have been adapted for the digital era. This is a problem which has existed for as long as there have been collections of documents. If you have a large collection of notes then there will be times when you cannot find the note which you want to find even though you know that it exists somewhere within the collection of documents. ![]()
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