see below for pictures and the interactive embedded mind map made from a text book)
Very often, we are confronted with an abundance of information. Loosing the overview fastly results in frustration. Lateron you realize that it was not so bad actually, and it was just the way in which you were confronted with it, that overwhelmed you.
Visualization can help a lot. But if it is text, things are more difficult.
Mindmaps are a good to make some structure, but in some cases, entering data in mindmaps is too time consuming and can be a fiddly thing.
Often, you already have a logically structed document, but you would need to enter by hand. That's what you actually will not do at all in the end. But there is a way to do that, without the need to re-type.
If your source has a well made index, which is structured and detailed enough, then it could be useful as a starting point for creating a mindmap. This mindmap can be useful in many ways later.
First you have to make the computer understand the logical structure of your text. The most easy and practical form is by using tabulators. Neither freemind nor xmind list text files directly in their import lists, but it's possible: just copy and paste from a text editor into an existing map!
As a quick example, I took a xy powerpoint of my current subject
and made a mindmap in about 10secs just by copying pasting into the freeware xmind:
(click to enlarge)
In this example, it didnt attribute the headings A and B as parent nodes, because they were not using tabulators. But you can easily modify it yourself in the text or in the mindmap. As long as the whole document is more or less consistent, it can be used (if it's not using tabulators, as in this case, it has to be modified slightly in a text editor first).
This trick of copying and pasting tabulator structured text works in the many other freeware/opensource mindmappers like the very prominent freemind (which i dont like to much), or it's improved spin-off freeplane.
If you are not familiar with mindmaps, you might ask yourself, well, that's so nice, what now?
Well, first it's just a way to store information. You can use collapse and expand nodes and therefore, it helps maintain the overview of the main structure and context. It helps reduce slutter.
Besides this, there are lots of things you can do with mindmaps. You can of course include pictures and links, create links between nodes of different parents, mark topics with symbols, use it as a ToDo/GTD-Manager and much more.
Here's some concrete example of both, a practical application and how to deal with the most frequent problem: text documents that are structured, but can't be imported because they are not using tabulators.
We will first copy an index of an online-book, transform the structure (that's based just on spaces) into tabulators. Copy&paste in mindmapper, and then use this visualised index as a scaffold to fill it with information.
1. On the NCBI bookshelf, you can access many important biomedical books for free online, and do researches on the whole bookshelf which also contains quite up-to-date sources, such as the Madame Curie Bioscience Database.
For our example, there is an excellent book I am currently using, the Alberts it's the old edition but still sufficient for the "rough" index.
2. On that page, click "expand all". Then select all (ctrl-a) and copy to the clipboard.
3. Then open a new document in the most simple Text Editor you can find on your system (in windows this would be the "editor" not "wordpad" or Office) and paste what you just copied.
4. Delete all that's not essential for your index. Hence, everything above "Part I" and everything below "glossary".
5. save as txt, not as rtf or something that allows formatting. This simplies the process
6. Open that primitivated text file in your advanced wordprocessor. You know get an apparently perfect index, with three different indents, depending if it's a main heading or a sub-heading. But you'll have to do some search&replace in order to replace spaces with tabulators, in order that the mindmapper programm can understand.
7. Start with the most indent subsub-heading ("The Universal Features of Cells on Earth"). Copy whats between the start of the line and the first letter (" + "). Paste that in the search field of search&replace dialog.
8. Replace with Tabulators: in Openoffice, you have to click on "more options", activate "regular expression" and insert "\t" as many times, as deep this heading is. In that case, we have only 3 levels of headings upwards: PartI: Chapter1. The first level doesn't need a tab, so here we enter "\t\t". Press replace all (it should replace 136).
9. Repeat with the superior heading (replacing 25 times " o " with "\t")
10. For the top level headings (Part I), remove what's in front of the heading (replacing " *" with nothing!)
11. Now, select all, copy. Open xmind and paste it. At first, you should get this sligthly overwhelming mindmap:
I currently care about the fourth section, so I collapse the rest:
Alternatively, even better: right-click on the the node you care about and click "next layer" in the context menu. This gives you this:
you can return to the entire map by clicking in the little green arrow in the center node.
12. Back on the alberts online website. Copy a title of a section that interests you, let's say "The Molecular Mechanisms of Membrane Transport and the Maintenance of Compartmental Diversity" and paste it into the search field on the top of the page. It then gives me the full text and on the right, there is a frame with the subsections of that chapter. Select, copy. Then in xmind, click on the node of the parent chapter, and paste it direclty. Works!
13. Now, back on the Alberts page, click on an illustration. Right click on that picture, save picture as. In the mindmap, click on the corresponding node, right click, insert: picture from file (one node one pic, so for more than one pic you need to make child nodes). You can insert also the information of a pic, simply as the title of the node containing the picture, or as "note" (you can see the info when you hover over the yellow icon). well just see it here:
14. Optionally, you can then import the map on website like mindmeister which gives you an editable mindmap for graphical online collaboration (free version available). Here you see the test-mind map embedded into the blog post. It's a working interactive mindmap! You can move around, zoom out, click on +/- to expand / collapse or even directly change it here and now, without any login process ( you can do that, i have backups of course). Try it!
