Bins in ADM, was Re: Should Brainstorm

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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 4459

Posted by pma
2005-10-28 17:15:35

Yes, Daly,

Following a hint from Dominik, I found out that I could use the outline topics for long text, (though without rtf and, I think, constraint to one paragraph). This means that I can actually see the whole text, even though it spans several lines, in the topic, in the left pane.

Let me tell a little in detail about how I vision to use ADM:
My problem is that I’ve collected a vast amount of references for my thesis (>500). I have all the source articles in hardcopy, nicely ordered in folder files, as well as I’ve registered them all in Reference Manager. Then I have notes for some of these articles, mainly in TreePad, but also some in Word. But the vast majority of the papers I’ve only skimmed, and I just need a brief mention of them in my review (e.g. empirical findings). I have a pretty firm outline for my review, and, using subject bibliography together with categorisation codes in a user defined field in Reference Manager, I’ve sorted the references into broad categories, following the main sections of the review. What I need now, however, is to get an overview of the references under each main section, and actually write the paragraphs where I refer to those references. I got inspired by the “bin approach” from Maxthink (described in an earlier mail), and found out that I could achieve much the same thing in ADM (just got a beta of ADM4), where I can copy all the references related to a particular section into an outline, (it becomes one topic which needs to be split into topics for each reference). Then I can make the sub sections as outline entries on the top (these become my bins), as I review the references one by one, and sort them into the bins, by drag and drop. When I have the references sorted into the outline, I can write about each set of references (under a subsection), on the page (text field) for that topic.

I would have loved to use Maxthink for this - I really think that it is a genious concept for outlining and categorising stuff into the outline - but it is simply too slow and too unstable (it crashed and disgarded my test data within the first half hour I worked with it, just because I tried to open another file while one file was open).

The question is if Notemap or Brainstorm would do a better job at this process? What I like about using ADM is that I have the sources and notes as part of the outline, and then I can write about them in the separate text window. I just made a test yesterday, haven’t really started working this way yet, but it looked promising, as if it would work. I tried to do the same thing in BrainStorm today, but somehow it didn’t give me the same overview, (probably because of the focused view). Actually, Notemap might do a good job as well. But somehow the interface in ADM seems more intuitive, it is easier to imagine the topics as bins that you could put stuff into, while in Notemap and Brainstorm they are more like text. And then the ability also to write text for each entry - that you have a distinction between topics in the outline and body text - though without being constraint to one line outline topics (like in e.g. TreePad).

Sorry for the lengthy posting. It would be interesting to hear if anybody else uses a similar approach
Peter.

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