Re: [Phpwiki-talk] mind mapping tool

[Bob A. <apt...@cy...>]

Hi,

On Sun, 11 Jul 2004 12:13:27 -0400 Whit Blauvelt <wh...@tr...> wrote:

> On Sun, Jul 11, 2004 at 11:06:37AM +0200, Reini Urban wrote:
> 
> > PS: I strongly dislike the names "mindmap" and "freemind". It's too 
> > esoteric, anti-rational.
> 
> Me, I like the names better than the products.[...]

The name "mind map" has a historical basis; see Tony Buzan's site
http://www.mind-map.com/ (this is aimed more at Reini than at Whit...)

> So the names are good - justified by current cutting-edge research in
> linguistics and philosophy. Where I'd take issue is with the products.
> Freemind for instance is just a visualization of heirarchy; and much of the
> value in spatial conceptualization doesn't fit with heirarchical
> categorization (see, on this, George Lakoff's _Women, Fire and Dangerous
> Things_). These programs are aids to visuo-spatial thinking, but only the
> narrow aspect of it that shoehorns into their schemes, which are often
> ill-fitting to reality (as the examples given with freemind show, it seems
> to me).

The freemind developers have the honesty to note that they only
implement a subset of Buzan's original vision which is more colorful,
more organic, less hierarchal, and more a graph than a tree, etc.
Freemind only allows labelling nodes, not edges and mostly a simple tree
editor, but I find it completely usable, especially since it works well
under both linux and Win32. I do lament that it's only single-user and
can only be used read-only over the net, but it started life as a
desktop Java application so it's not too surprising. Given I haven't
contributed code or cash to the project, I'm not willing to criticize it
too much. It does its job pretty well.

> A wiki, being more freeform, is more open to representing at least
> implicitly the sort of spatial relations within and among concepts that are
> being increasingly revealed as crucial aspects of human cognition.

I find both to be very useful, freemind for quickly summarizing a
structure and graphically displaying salient points, and phpwiki for
elaborating and relating ideas. One shortcoming of a strictly hierarchal
approach (freemind) is that I can't have multiple nodes refer to a
common structure.

> Excuse the digression here, but the wiki I'm putting together will be to
> serve the field of consciousness studies, so looking at why a wiki in
> particular - or something else - can serve this well is important to me. I
> much like, Reini, your idea of adding structural views to PhpWiki at some
> point down the road, but suggest the heirarchical abstract of the structure
> may not be the most useful or revealing instance of these to bring out.

Agreed.

-- Bob