The Copenhagen Project

Mind maps is a great tool for brainstorming and organizing one’s thoughts. But can it also be used for presenting complex information in new and better ways?

What if we add functionality to the concept and evolve the whole idea just a bit?

What it is

The inventor of mind-maps, Tony Buzan, explains in this video what a mind-map is and why it’s useful for at lot of purposes.

Wikipedia defines mind-maps this way:

“A mind map is a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks or other items linked to and arranged radially around a central key word or idea. It is used to generate, visualize, structure and classify ideas, and as an aid in study, organization, problem solving, and decision making. It is an image-centered diagram that represents semantic or other connections between portions of information. By presenting these connections in a radial, non-linear graphical manner, it encourages a brainstorming approach to any given organizational task, eliminating the hurdle of initially establishing an intrinsically appropriate or relevant conceptual framework to work within.”

Mind maps as a tool to create overview in complexity

This mind map about brainstorming shows how powerful a tool it is. In a very clear an intuitive way we get a very good overview of all the complex pieces of information that adds up to the process of brainstorming, even though there’s complexity enough for several books. Note how images are used.

WikiMindMap is an interesting tool that outlines information from Wikipedia into mind maps. Have a look at a mind mapped version of the Wikipedia entry about mind maps.

Clicking on any node in the mind map opens the Wikipedia entry in a new window with an inline link to the specific section of the article. Nodes with + and - signs indicate further sub-sections, and nodes with the green circular arrows indicate a link to other Wikipedia entries. When clicking these entry-nodes, the mind map reloads and reveals a whole range of new connections in all directions.

Why it’s interesting

A mind map structures thoughts and information in relation to each other. There’s a link between each piece. Mapping out Wikipedia in a mind map provides a whole new kind of overview and a whole new way of exploring information.

WikiMindMap is also interesting because it combines the traditional mind map with direct linking. Each node and the connecting lines is a link both visually between the elements, but also to web pages with more extensive information.

WikiMindMaps is a simple tool - it only shows the headings of entries and sub-sections. But what if the model was bigger, if each node actually contained the whole content? What if we used it in context of a online news service, a sensemaking media or a weblog?

Imagine

Imagine a news article encapsulated in a mind map with connections in all directions to extra context. Imagine a node for each person mentioned in the article, each geographical place, each conflict, each company, each website, each non obvious connection, etc. Then imagine that it was done in an intuitive 3D-model where size, thickness of the visual connection and even distance between elements has a meaning. Pretty cool, I think.

Then imagine it being open for user-contributions and digg-like voting on the quality and importance of each contributed node. Add’s a whole new element to it, as it takes a lot of time to build models like this. With 500 people working on one mind map with a news article in the center, this thing could become pretty useful.

I’m just playing with thoughts here - I have no clue how to build it :) And the 3D thing is just a wild thought, even in 2D these functions could work. There is definitely interesting perspectives here that may and may not work well.

One can argue that the web already is a kind of mind map with all it’s links and different artifacts connected in complex ways, but the usual style of presentation is limited to lists of links and in-text linking that only provides the context without exposing the underlying relationship and relative importance of information.

To spice it all up, I have tried mapping out my immediate thoughts on the subject of mind maps. Mind42.com allows collaboration. If you’re interested in adding/editing the mind map, we could do a little experimentation with reader involvement here. Post a comment if you want access to edit it.

We also have an overall mind map for The Copenhagen Project.

Any other thoughts/links on this?

Further reading

• Mind Maps
  - a introduction to mindmaps, some existing software and more

  “The human brain is very different from a computer. Whereas a computer works in a linear fashion, the brain works associatively as well as linearly - comparing, integrating and synthesizing as it goes. Association plays a dominant role in nearly every mental function, and words themselves are no exception. Every single word, and idea has numerous links attaching it to other ideas and concepts. (…) Because of the large amount of association involved, they can be very creative, tending to generate new ideas and associations that have not been thought of before. Every item in a map is in effect, a center of another map.” (My emphasizing)

• VisualComplexity.com
  - a site cataloging and reviewing projects and experiments with visualization of complex information.

  “VisualComplexity.com intends to be a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks. The project’s main goal is to leverage a critical understanding of different visualization methods, across a series of disciplines, as diverse as Biology, Social Networks or the World Wide Web. I truly hope this space can inspire, motivate and enlighten any person doing research on this field.”

• Voyagers and Voyeurs: Supporting Asynchronous Collaborative Information Visualization
  - a paper from Berkeley University by Jeffrey Heer, Fernanda B. Viégas and Martin Wattenberg

  “This paper describes mechanisms for asynchronous collaboration in the context of information visualization, recasting visualizations as not just analytic tools, but social spaces. We contribute the design and implementation of sense.us, a web site supporting asynchronous collaboration across a variety of visualization types. The site supports view sharing, discussion, graphical annotation, and social navigation and includes novel interaction elements. We report the results of user studies of the system, observing emergent patterns of social data analysis, including cycles of observation and hypothesis, and the complementary roles of social navigation and data-driven exploration.”

• Software for mindmapping and information organisation
  

  “Vic’s compendium of software that supports knowledge management and information organisation in graphical form. Includes mind mappers, concept mappers, outliners, hierarchical organisers, KM support and knowledge browsers, 2D and 3D.”