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Hierarchies or Networks?
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Posted by MadaboutDana
Jul 20, 2021 at 07:46 AM
I agree with @Alexander – hierarchies are more intuitively useful, for some reason.
Having said which, I love the idea of combining hierarchies with a mindmap-like approach: some of the best mindmappers (e.g. XMind) can support mini-outlines or mini-tables in nodes.
I think mindmapping is evolving in much the same way as the recent evolution in task managers: developers have realised that support for graphics, tags and fonts is not enough, and that what users really want is to manage large quantities of information using a variety of methods. The explosion of support for extensive notes in regularly upgraded modern task managers (notably TickTick, Pagico, Todoist and NotePlan) has been interesting to watch – rich-text notes and attached documents have become standard fare, allowing people to put together complete project management “hubs” in a single app. Adding different views is the next step: three of those apps offer various calendar views, and three of them also offer kanban views.
Mindmapping is the next step, perhaps.
Posted by BrainTool
Jul 20, 2021 at 07:35 PM
Thanks folks, this is good food for thought.
I agree that some combination of hierarchy and cross linking is whats needed. You can certainly create hierarchies with bidirectional links in Roam et al as @Luhmann says, and any note taker tool will have nested bullets somewhere. However like @Alexander and @MadaboutDana, I personally tend to think of the hierarchy as primary. That said, like @James, sometimes I like to change the orientation of the hierarchy (eg instead of Projects:BrainTool:Resources:Chrome-Extensions:page.html I might want to see Resources:BrainTool:Chrome-Extensions:page.html).
My thought for BrainTool in the long run is to combine the notions of Topics (aka outliner headings), Tags *and* bidirectional Links. Each Topic is also a Tag and tags are inherited along the topic tree. Making a link between two topics basically adds the other topics tags to its linked counterpart. I can model this nicely in org-mode with the existing tags and links syntax.
So if I save a web page under Projects:BrainTool:Resources:Chrome-Extensions and then link it to the topic Resources:Healthcare:Standards:FHIR then the saved web page and associated notes will be tagged with all combinations of those Topics and (optionally) ‘cloned’ to show up in both places in the tree. BTW Roam and Obsidian support ‘transclusion’ which is, I think, just a fancy name for cloning.
I think the above can make sense in the context of categorizing data and taking notes as you work in a browser in a hierarchical fashion but also support the kind of UIs and visualizations you see in those networked tools. (BTW @Luhmann I like the look of Logseq, I had not realized it was based on org. Maybe I can do an easy integration.)
PS @Stephen I’d forgotten outlinersoftware was in the video! It has become one of my regular reads as BrainTool has started to take shape, so it deserves its moment in the spotlight!
Posted by MadaboutDana
Jul 21, 2021 at 07:58 AM
Interesting; you’re describing something like Excel’s PivotTable function, but for hierarchical setups. Challenging!
Many of us are still mourning the untimely death of the hierarchical outliner par excellence, Tree2, which – while it didn’t do PivotTables as such – could extend outlines horizontally as well as vertically. The resulting flexibility was unprecedented. Dashword (also macOS) is a more recent attempt to do more or less the same thing, and is worth a look, not least because you can organise your horizontal outlines in named columns (they disappear in “vertical” view, but reappear when you switch back to “horizontal” view).
Cheers,
Bill
Posted by Simon
Jul 23, 2021 at 08:37 PM
I think this is an interesting subject. Many of us require both, hierarchy and networking and many tools are heading in that direction. At the moment I find them way to clunky. Obsidian is certainly no thing of beauty! I also find search results and links not easily navigated when there is a lot of content. I’m sure they will improve. There’s also the question of how these apps deal with the file-fallacy where people think it’s in my system and that’s enough. Somehow I need a place to throw every snippet and piece of information I collect and another place to work the ideas. The collection chamber however, needs search on steroids!
Posted by Dellu
Jul 24, 2021 at 07:58 AM
Neither is sufficient, nor even the combination.
it enrages me so much when these guys claim to emulate the brain when they design their applications:
- there was a talk of imitating the way the brain maps ideas when mind mapping tools came out first.
- and now, those hyperlinking tools again start to talk about building the second brain.
That is nonsense.
First, we really know little on how the brain contains ideas. It is very complicated issue: and the most attractive of the theories is “associationism” which is almost impossible to model in a digital system.
Here is the fundamental issue with hierarchies: most of knowledge is hierarchal. If you are studying the biological classification of organisms, there is always well build hierarchy. Mind maps might work in that case. But, in most other cases, ideas have no hierarchal relationships. Their relation is different sorts.
Networks are better, but they cannot replace the usual extended, long text.
The fundamental issue with networks: networks connect the linguistic terms (words and phrases). But, the real link is not between the terms; it is between the concepts. A concept map is different from a lexical map. (And, on the practical side, hyperlinks created within apps are usually dysfunctional once they moved out of that app. You need a lot of complicated programming if you want to transfer the hyperlinks created in one map into another one. )
If you want to drive a complicated concept home, you need a traditional long text writing; not a number of hyperlinked small texts.
Assume you are reading a book; say Chomsky