1. In my last article, I talked about the huge benefits we can get from funneling information into an outline. Outlining is helpful for a single person (or sometimes a group) to take a lot of information and make regular use out of it. In this follow-up, I’ll talk about other ways to organize a lot of information or ideas, with pros and cons for each.
5 Comments
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I learned a version of mind mapping from my kids, who learned it in school. I found it very useful when preparing sermons (I used to be in ministry): at the centre of the page I would jot the theme idea, then place around it various bits of research, key points, questions, problems, objections, good quotes, and so on. When I had it all down I could see what did and didn’t belong in that particular message, and the various ways points might relate to each other. After some initial culling, refining and experimenting, I would number the points I expected to use and the order in which I expected to use them. Then I’d start at #1 and write my way through the list. Sometimes I ended up not really following the outline, but if my improv failed I always had the map to go back to. It was a great tool and saved me a lot of time and angst.
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Interesting! I can see how mapping would be a useful approach to picking and choosing topics or pieces of an idea. Thanks for the comment.
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We developed a tool for organizing information that you may find interesting called Dabitat.
Checkout the explainer video: http://youtu.be/WceOr90sHWM
And our Getting Started video: http://youtu.be/MiZiKNPhfxI -
Nice list!
Just to be difficult, I’d argue that to do #6 or #8 you first have to do #5. After you distill the tags into discrete concepts, then either make a list of them (#6) or create links between them (#8). Indexers would probably disagree 😉
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That’s an interesting point, but I’m tempted to say whether or not tagging is needed first depends on your exact approach.
I think of indexing as being a more limited activity than tagging–that is, instead of coming up with all suitable terms that are associated with the item, you come up with a very small number of topics–often just one–that best describe the item. We could consider that a tagging step, but we wouldn’t do it the same way as we’d do tagging for most indexes I’ve seen. On the other hand, it could be argued that a more tag-like approach would make an index more useful or detailed, or that indexes as I’ve just described them are just too miserly with categorization. In an electronic context, where it’s much easier to index and the size of the index isn’t important, this becomes much easier … but then we’re talking about something so similar to tagging that it would probably more appropriately be called tagging, so my inclination is to consider tagging one approach and indexing a more limited and traditional, separate approach.
About linking items, I don’t know that they have to be linked by tags. They could be linked by other considerations, like chronological order, proximity, etc. For instance, we might link Vermont to Quebec, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and New York, but it’s hard to know what tag would unite those five. At the same time, we could also do linking by topic, which I think is closer to tagging, but depending on the linking system, it might make more sense to be more specific and even potentially directional with topics.
What kinds of approaches do you prefer? Do you tend to do tagging as a first step?