Automating Information Gathering For Mind Mapping: A Good Thing?
On the Systems Wiki blog, I read an interesting article regarding a new contextual analysis feature in the online mind mapping service, Comapping. What this feature does is analyze an attached document or URL and creates new branches in your mind map using keywords extracted from the document or URL.
This is an extremely helpful feature for information gathering, but I can't help wonder on the dangers of allowing technology to make these decisions for you, and especially when it comes to a thought process like mind mapping.
Everyday Decision Making
Everyday we allow technology to make decisions for us and influence our decisions. Probably the biggest decision maker today is the search engine. From millions of articles and references on the Internet it decides which results would be the best fit for the query you have entered.
This is okay for things that are clearly impossible for a single human to do, but when it comes to analysing a document or website then use these forms of automation with caution. For example, you don't always assume that the first post returned from a search engine is the best fit do you? Of course not!
Mind Mapping is Your Thought Process
You see, mind mapping is a process of getting information from one place to another. Part of this process is deciding on which information is important to you and should be included in your mind map.
As a long time mind mapper, I have taken a number of different sources of material and mind mapped the information that was important to me. Each time I did this, I made decisions that would be of benefit to me. Some of these decisions were made based on emotion or irrational thoughts. Can a machine make such decisions? Of course not.
Always Review
Tools that automate processes for us are great when we tell them exactly what to do, but when those processes employ a form of decision making in your mind maps, take some time to do a review.
If your software application employs such automation and returns 5 keywords from a business proposal, don't automatically assume those are the right keywords.
Scan the document yourself, and compare the keywords you have extracted with the keywords your mind mapping software has extracted.
You'll more often than not, create similar lists, but there might just be an important piece of information that your mind mapping software has missed.
What do you think? Is the process of information gathering for your mind map something you would rather do, or are you quite happy to delegate this process to your mind mapping software? I would love to hear your thoughts on this!






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