Recently recieved You know nothing of my work by Doug Coupland.
I shared this page because mapping the knowlegde, synapses in the brain and thoughts, to try represent the self in some visual and communicable level inspired me in my studies. To present them to provide understanding of my knowledge is what got me into mind mapping. Essays of just long written linear text of roughly 12 words-per-line, 500 words-per-page, just isn't enough for me. Macluhan studied the mapping of the brain and called it Pathogrpahy, and i'm sure i'll be digggin deeper into his research. Dont want to spoil the book but phew, macluhan had an interesting perspective on women... reflected by the times i suppose.
Saw his book from this brilliant documentary here, cant believe you can sit have a coffee while a chosen book is freshly printed. (smell the middle) Long live the printed book!
By the way just found this beautiful tutorial from these: here
Long Live the Printed Book!
Map the Psychogeography
Walk: Poem Pictures 2010 is a beautifully bound and lovely exploration/combination of words and drawings from Ian Mcmillan & Iain Nicholls.
I love these, a visual map, dialogue of their local area. very abstract, quirky collection of drawings and words combined. There are a few and suggest you try contact the creators to see if they have made any more books. Really plays with the space like Mallarme and abstract.
Concrete Poetry. They also eloquently describe their process.
Ian used to say as young lad ' "I'm going in the garden to think"
The garden didnt really help the thinking, though it was more the walking helped and still helps my creative process. Thinking somehow doesnt feel like the right word, its a kind of drifting or dreaming. Somehow the mind is going for a walk as well as the legs'
Ian Mcmillan, http://www.ian-mcmillan.co.uk
Related articles
- My back-to-front life | Ian McMillan (guardian.co.uk)
- An Anxiety-Powered Map (psfk.com)
- Mormon Concrete Poetry (motleyvision.org)
Text 2 Mind Map
This is an excellant, easy to use online mind mapping tool.
Visualise your ideas, thoughts in the text editor on the left, to create a new node/level simply use TAB key and to go back a level, new main node BACKSPACE key, like you do in WORD. Honestly, you need to nothing of design, mind mapping, visualising and it creates the top map that you can view full screen with the controls on the right.
As for the quality of the visualisation, the more TAB levels you create the colours automatically create give you an excellant single tone harmony (faber birren) and it changes in its size both working together to create a very effective hierachy of information. You can change the colours.
The functionality is excellant, simple, clear and to make it transferrable from their site you can easily click Save Map and it generates a flattened jpeg that opens in a new window, so allow popups.
To make changes just tweak your text editor on left and click convert to mind map.
I shouldn't go over the top, but to find such a easy, effective, simple to use online tool is great for those who prefer the speed of digital manipulation, than that of on paper and then having to scan/photog to share digitally, very good.
I just shared some ideas of my research from particular books to test its visualisation effects.
Thanks Arnaud, again...
found here: http://as-map.com/blog/index.php/2009/01/12/1077/
Subway Blogs Map
Names Authors
An excellant visualisation taking another fantastic subway (hary beck) subversion visualisation similiar to the web-trend-map-2008-beta by the information architects, except instead of mapping mapping the internet terrain, mapping claude ashcenbrenner's (at serial mapper) blogs/RSS links archive.
He cleverly structures the content of his blogs using the paris subway map layout of lines by renaming them as:
Visualisation
Teaching
Thinkers
Business Intelligence
Missing In Action
Mind Mapping
Network
Creativity
& Humour
To arrange all these blogs into an easy to follow, complex/diverse/similarities content ordered, clean spatial structure is a real achievement. It has this easy to the eye pink background and beige centre that allows the Blue and Green names easy to focus on and follow along the lines. But if it isnt enough of an achivement to arrnage these complex/diverse blogs in a great connectivist structure, he still added further depth by simply subtly differentiating between French & English blogs without having to compomise his overall layout much at all merely a small key to say:
green - english
blue - french
Making it bilingual to help when navigating.
He was exporting this to pdf so that it is a fully interactive hyperlinks attached to the blog name nodes concept map. make in more engaging yet further.
He breaks it into 2 output version of the authors and one for the names, both using the same spatial location along his different lines so as to easily correlate the authors with their blogs.
I love it as you can probably guess.
Here are cluade's comments (forgive translation, may not be absolutely correct)
'You've probably noticed this blog is somewhat artistic. Indeed unlike the practice you can not find the list of my favorite blogs.In fact I think for a long time, but procrastination also achieved all that we must say that I was not sure how to keep all my RSS feeds in a reasonable space ..
I finally found the solution obviously in the form of a map. You will therefore find below a selection of 70 blogs devoted to mapping information encapsulated in a subway map.
Parisians (and others - °) recognize a part of the metropolitan network to which were added some tram lines. This plan is bilingual French / English including heads of line that I let you discover ... The francophone (in Blue) is represented by nearly 40 blogs, many of which have emerged in the last year ..
This device is designed to encourage you to leave your usual lines by taking paths through it.
Ca n'al'air nothing but a path we must remember that the term method has been built from a Greek word meaning old way .... So Good cognitive walk!
Each blog is associated a subway station. Place your mouse URL appears, click will open a new window to view the blog.'
Love his concept of 'leaving usual lines by taking paths through it', much like my work with the recent http://visualthinkmap.blogspot.com/2008/09/notebook-route-map.html. Could be called Blog Route Visualisation, but Blog Subway Map infer's that quite effectively.
Aa soon as I spot I know a link to Claude's interactive version, trust i will repost this. Great aid to exploring blogs of similiar content/interests/terrain that can be used in an instant, just how you more often then not want a visualisation's performance (function) to do.
Fantastic claude
Enjoy the journey
from here: http://www.serialmapper.com/archive/2008/09/25/mise-en-seine-de-blogs.html
search the web for the titles/authors of blogs, will no doubt bring up the right one as we await pdf concept map
Mastification Visualisation
The trident gum ads caused quite a bit of controversy with their creative, pastel coloured surreal ads surrounded around mastification.
mas·ti·cate Audio Help /?mæst??ke?t/
Spelled Pronunciation[mas-ti-keyt]
- to chew
- to reduce to a pulp by crushing or kneading, as rubber
Trident imaginatively concieve this idea of the mastification lobe in the brain. 'The mastication lobe is the largest member of the lobe family and is the part of the brain responsible for receiving and processing chewing pleasure. When a human man or woman chews, the taste and texture receptors on the upper tongue send trillions of tiny pleasure signals direct to the mastication lobe via an intricate network of neural pathways.'
View the video here (scroll to THE MASTICATION LOBE EXPLAINED)http://www.tridentgum.co.uk/EN/Trident2008/about/movieshtml.htm
It is quirky and uses these crisp pastel colours and graph paper visual along with the tagline 'mastication for the nation' which is where it had problems with ASA (advertising standards authority) here in the UK and subsequently had to stop their campaign, only after it had already been seen in abundance by the public.
Great thinking, mastificate yourself.
Dictionary.com [Origin: 1640–50; mastic, -ate1]
Wireless Brain Mapping thoughts
notebook4 - wireless thoughts
Originally uploaded by visual think map
Technology will be there one day... to boldy go where no one has gone before! Well... its there. What I imagined would be a great way to externalise thoughts, is almost a reality.
'Mapping brain could translate thoughts into speech
Forty-one neurons is a drop in the ocean compared with the hundred billion or so cells that are present in our brains. But those few neurons could help Eric Ramsey talk again. It is eight years since a car accident left Ramsey "locked-in" - aware but paralysed and unable to communicate other than through eye movements. By listening in on a tiny population of cells in his brain, neuroscientists hope to give him back his "voice" - a first for someone with his problems.
Ramsey had a wireless electrode implanted 6 millimetres or so below the surface of his brain in 2004 (see Diagram). The electrode records the electronic pulses sent by 41 neurons that surround it in an area of the brain involved in generating speech. By analysing the signals created when Ramsey imagines speaking, the team has developed software that may one day turn his thoughts into ...' from the New Scientist - access to full article needs subsciption.
PS if somone is subscribed could they send me the diagram featured in the article.
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/health/mg19626304.000-mapping-brain-cells-could-translate-thoughts-into-speech.html?feedId=health_rss20
BrainLand
Wallpaper-1600x1200
Originally uploaded by Unit Seven
The subtle graduation of blue for sea tropically encompassing the Blood brain barrier reef (what wonderful characters they would be in the reef) and a brown, beige 'land' containing Isles of Imagination.
I would like to topographically follow the 'salience trail'.
Wonderful surreal visual map of the mind.
Web Trend Map 2008 Beta
Not all visual maps are prescribed to geographic content. Moving away from the past 3 maps of geography but continuing the theme of technology, there is this wonderful map from the Information Architects mapping popular internet websites.
In its second version they've 'taken almost 300 of the most influential and successful websites and pinned them down to the greater Tokyo-area train map. By popular demand, we enlarged the poster size from A3 to A0' (greber, 2008, web-trend-map-2008-beta).
In the popular style of train/underground maps, first started by Harry Beck’s London Underground map, which he developed from 1931 onwards, they are being subverted into alternative content, like here of websites map. Their clear, clean white space [1] is highly effective for organisation of information.
It is a type of
concept map
that is similar to brainstorms where it connects ideas and to that of mind maps. They are ‘graphical representation[s] where nodes (points or vertices) represent concepts (defined by [Joseph .D] Novak[2] as perceived regularities in objects and events), and links (arcs or lines) represent the relationships between concepts’. These objects and events are the common features which we abstract from our experience. The events form Wordsworth’s childhood memories that are ‘“sources of adult confidence and creativity”’ and helped him when writing Daffodils, or the visual memories in Barcelona of Picasso that inspired the painting of ‘Les Demoiselles of D’avignon’ and the objects could be the Iberian sculpture, or the Monet painting that also inspired him (Coffey, Hoffman, Cañas, & Ford, 2002, p. 2), (Sharples, 1999, p. 48).‘Concept maps are used to form knowledge models by placing them in a hierarchical organization and appending elaborating media onto the nodes within each map’ (Montello, 2002, p.2). An excellent example of this is the search engine KartOO. The elaborate media stated are the hyperlinks, animations that are activated when you click on one of the nodes (website names).
Overall it is an excellant map utilising white space & framing knowledge beautifully, brilliant balance of form/function. More articles will come featuring projects mapping the internet.
Online Clickable links version - excellant concept map
http://informationarchitects.jp/webtrendmap3/trendmap2008.html
[1] ‘white space is, perhaps, the most important, [...] aspect of writing as visual design. According to James Hartley, a psychologist who studied the visual design of text, good use of white space can help a reader to: See redundancies in the text & thus faster reading; See more easily which bits of text are personally relevant for them, See the structure of the document as a whole; Grasp its organisation’ (Sharples, 1999, p.141).
[2] Joseph D. Novak studied the concept mapping technique in the 60’s at Cornell University.
mini bibliography
gerber, matt. (2008). Web trend map. http://informationarchitects.jp/web-trend-map-2008-beta/ Friday, January 25th, 2008
Sharples, Mike. (1999). How We Write: writing as creative design. Routledge, London
Google. (2007). Search – Cognitive Mapping
http://intraspec.ca/12montello.pdf. Montello, David. (2002). Cognitive Map-Design Research in the Twentieth Century: Theoretical and Empirical Approaches. Cartographic and Geographic Information Sciences, Vol. 29, No. 3, pp.283-304
Google. (2007). Search – Cognitive Mapping
http://intraspec.ca/cogmap.php. John W. Coffey, Robert R. Hoffman, Alberto J. Cañas & Kenneth M. Ford. (2002). A Concept Map-Based Knowledge Modelling Approach to Expert Knowledge Sharing*, Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, Pensacola Fl, 32502, viewed 30 June 2007, http://www.ihmc.us/users/acanas/Publications/IKS2002/IKS.htm