Mapping

The mapping software we chose turned out to be pretty nice. I hesitate to use the term "mindmapping" as it

1. Indicates that we are somehow tracing a topography of Thought. Since we are not using some ridiculously advanced brain scanning mechanism in the classroom (and unless the students have some fat NSF green they haven't mentioned yet) claiming something like this is ridiculous. The brain is made of meat with lightning inside. None of the class's instruments measure anything like this. What we are doing is recording the iterative processes that occur during our attempts to understand a given system--organizing our thoughts in the order they appear and looking for connections that do not necessarily depend on that order.
   
2. Implies a sort of trademark on what I would just call brainstorming. Evidently brainstorming is what helps kids decide on a science fair project but mindmapping is what marketing directors do to motivate their teams to pursue an operational paradigm-shift that strikes strategic brand equity. If you found yourself making air-quotes during either of the italicized phrases, you see what I mean.

What the software helps us do is abstract whatever system we encounter into a sort of "idea space" that we can study independently. This happens every day in physicist's notebooks and dry-erase boards. A man on a bicycle becomes an arrow named 5 m/s, or a falling battleship becomes a sphere of radius r. Potentially troubling details are considered and often discarded. For example, does the man happen to like French cinema? Did the MC5 ever write a soulful but impossibly violent garage rock tribute to this particular battleship? While interesting, these tidbits might not effect a given calculation.

I often mention the act of trying to understand a system as "rotating that system until a symmetry becomes clear." Imagine a poem being mapped, for example, and the concepts sorted or moved around the page until a series of connections becomes clearer. This is the sort of rotation I am talking about. If we could raise the map into three dimensions and rotate it in any direction, it might be easier to spot connections than if it were on the page, the same way relative height is easier to grasp on a 3-d model than a flat map.