6.4 CSI-Style Mind Mapping

What Can We Improve on the Mind Maps of Buzan et al.?

To determine whether a map like the periodic table of elements or the Buzan style map of your goals, or any other style, is suitable for your purposes, let’s remember what we want to accomplish with the Mind Map:

1. Our Bibliography is the basic database to the research for the academic writing project.
2. The information in the sources has been extracted by reading. Since we cannot remember everything we read, we use a system called Active Reading and we switch between Deep Reading, which involves underlining, highlighting, summarizing and other forms of interaction with the text that allow us to extract specific data points, ideas, arguments, expressions, quotes, citations and other useful information from the sources and Shallow Reading, which just provides an overview about another source also discussing the general topic or restating similar ideas published already earlier by the same or another author.
3. The problem with extracting the information from the myriad of sources is that we cannot remember even this reduced set of information and we will not see the forest for all the trees if we cannot organize the information. A traditional tool used by hundreds of thousands of researchers to extract and organize the information has been the Card Catalog. Essentially, this involves the creation of relatively small and uniformly sized filing cards for every source or even every argument or quote. A large number of filing cards can then be spread out on a desk or on the floor and we can try to arrange them in a way that corresponds to the outline of our writing project.

Such systems are used not only for academic writing projects but also for other tasks that require the collection and evaluation of large amounts of information. You may have seen something like this on TV in recent times:

Already, this looks more useful. From the central vantage point, you can look at a large collection of sources, ideas, or arguments, and you can re-arrange them to show what belongs together and/or a sequence how you want to present the items in your writing project.

Of course, such an ad hoc floor map is not ideal for projects that need months of work - your roommate or family will object - or for people with back problems. Alternatively, and somewhat more durably, we can put the map on the wall:

What are the pro's and con's of presenting your sources, ideas, and arguments in this format? Does it make sense to organize your thesis like this on the wall in your office or study? Pin the filing cards onto the wall?

Let's face it, such a scrap-book-style Mind Map – let’s call it a CSI Mind Map – still has a number of disadvantages from the perspective of an academic writing project. What we need, ultimately, is a Mind Map that can accommodate a lot more data points while it does not have to be so flashy since it won't be on TV...