Suppose we want to understand a really difficult topic. We have lots of notes, and ideas, or references and abstracts, or paragraphs or other kind of text snippets. And we have to read them again and again to find the relevant connections, again and again.
Which is cumbersome because they are spread all over the place. We wish to pull them all together as closely as possible. We might try to break them up into smaller parts and put them in neat categories -- into pigeonholes.
But this is sometimes dangerous -- if we disrupt and ignore important cross-connections.
This little think tool pulls everything together: All connections, and all detail texts.
Please watch how the texts are already there in the right pane when you flash your eyes that way. Perhaps it is only a quarter of a second faster than a good hyperlink, but this is time where the brain needs to switch into a "wait" mode until the response has arrived, and this probably disables our big picture overview. We throw our eye saccade directly to the fixed corner and the text is already there. All texts are already there when we touch their handles on the visual overview. And it enables an densely packed concentration of details and overview.
I do not know any existing mappping application that enables such immediate detail view, except some that dont't work reasonably with non-hierarchical floating topics, or some that don't allow imports.
How is such a map produced? Well, first we simply paste text into a window. Each paragraph shows up as an icon.
(#1) We can highlight text.
We can label the icon.
(#2) We can paste text into the label field.
And we can combine bold highlighting with labelling.
We can move an icon,
(#3) and when the topics are related we can draw a connector line. Just hold down the ALT key while dragging the mousepointer.
(#4) The highlighted words suggest that this topic of "Phasellus" is related to Lorem ipsum.
(#5) and this is related to Pellentesque. (#6) This as well.
(#7) Another one related to Phasellus.
Number 8 is relate to both 4 and 5. Fortunately we are not forced to pigeonhole it!
(#10) Now we see another commonality: both talk about Curabitur. Let us tag them accordingly, using a new icon: Rightclick the background
Finally we can rearrange the network to minimize overlaps.
and when you are lost, just rightclick the background.