This is an interesting review on the practice of Knowledge Cartography, or mind mapping, and how it has evolved over a very long time to become a useful tool for the construction and sharing of knowledge and how mind maps, once made, can then be built on and discussed.

The main point is that when you externalise ideas in some sort of visual form, it makes you far better able to get a grasp on them. You can immediately begin to see connections between topics in a visual way, and there’s a sense of a bird’s eye view of your own thought processes. Also I think when you begin to create a mind map either on paper or with software such as Xmind, there’s a sense of needing to be organised and efficient with 2d, actual space, which seems to encourage the same discipline with thought processes.

It’s interesting that the point is made that the making of maps actually predates number systems and written language in our species. I’m sure it would be fascinating to trace the stages of how writing systems derived from the making of maps. I also found that the use of colour in some of the examples given really enhanced the meaning. The Argument and Evidence mapping used to study cases in courts used green for positive arguments, red for negative ones and orange for solutions that were found to counteract the negatives.