Peter Jones also wrote:
"Secondly the move from unstructured to structured information in real-time
would be fine if it weren't so hard to tell the difference between the two
in the QuestMap GUI. The idea is that by the facilitator has finished it
should all be formally structured. I think that misses great opportunities
in the use of GUI technology to actually facilitate the move in concrete
visual terms (Dang! I have to get those GUI ideas typed up soon!)""
This is another good point, and it is true that it can take a practiced eye
to tell the difference. A few comments though on our experiences here:
- the more structured and formal the particular activity is, the more
'regular' (not a jumble of nodes and links) it will appear, even to the
unpracticed eye. Maps employing well-formed templates, for example (many
examples in the various papers on the Compendium Institute website), look a
lot more regular and structured than free-ranging discussions (they are
also a lot easier to read)
- chunking clusters of nodes and links appropriately in separate maps
(rather than loading individual maps up with giant trees) makes a huge
difference in readibility and apparent structure. This is also why I don't
like the word "discussion" to characterize what can be done in a
Compendium/QM/Mifflin context. A good Compendium practitioner/facilitator
knows how to move between free-ranging and structured modes (there are a
dozen mechanisms for so doing), and even identifying chunks that can be
profitably moved (or copied/transcluded) to 'smaller', more focused
containers, is a form of structuring
- it isn't necessarily the case that there is a linear process that ends up
in "all" being formally structured. One of the first lessons we learned
from Jeff Conklin & co. was that you can leave 'messy' maps in their
original and authentic state, copy those nodes that seem of special
interest to new maps (thus preserving through a transclusion their presence
in both old and new maps), and start afresh, in a more structured/focused
way, in the new context. Sometimes it's good to leave a mess as a mess; it
can always be archeologically mined for insights later (see below point
about Mifflin's treatment of transcluded nodes *)
- representational morphing, which I've discussed in previous posts, can
also help create and display structure where it wasn't apparent before. We
have built many particular morphing schemes that look for particular
patterns of nodes, links, and metadata in and amongst otherwise messy maps,
pull out those patterns are re-represent them in another, more easily
'read' form.
Al
=====================================
* QuestMap provided the ability to right-click on a node and see a list of
what views that node was contained in (i.e. transcluded in). This was a
powerful, but unfortunately limited, feature. Mifflin extends that in
several ways:
- this information can be displayed for many nodes at once
- the data about what nodes are in what views is available for further
computational purposes
- the data also includes what the selected nodes are linked to in each view
BTW, of all the commercial tools (besides QuestMap) that I've looked at,
the only one that does similar things (although in different ways for
mostly different purposes) is Intraspect. I'd be very interested to know of
other tools that support these kinds of capabilities.
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0.0 : Fri Nov 09 2001 - 03:13:21 PST