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Links connecting items being some kind of items themselves
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Posted by CRC
Sep 18, 2010 at 10:02 PM
Hi:
quant wrote:
>1. It offers many ways to reorganize map, but none of them reorganize data so
>that items connected to the selected item are moved closer to it to see crearly the
>connection on the small map. Imagine a big map, and you connect two items that are far
>way. You can fade away rest of the map, but the link goes through the whole map and
>everything is too small.
>2. no attempt to position items to minimize text/items
>overlap.
I just used VUE for some brainstorming with myself (yeh, I do that sometimes) and found it very helpful. I did tend to lay out the diagram myself, though.
What I did to accomplish what you were trying to do was to use the select mode (those little boxes across the top of the screen) I clicked on the one that selected the nodes immediately connected to my node of interest. I then copied that selected set and pasted it into a new diagram. With a one or two of the layout tools I got a version that just need me to tweak some lines and positions in only a minute or two. This gave me a version where I could focus on that specific set of connectoins.
I, of course would prefer a better solution (perhaps a way to “weight” the connections and then a physics model (springs or other forces) that bring together truly connected items). But, until that comes along, I think I’ll continue to use VUE for this type of work.
Also, the developer is a university. Perhaps they would respond to some requirement statements (gotta keep those grad students busy).
Charles
Posted by Zman
Sep 19, 2010 at 02:33 PM
>1. It offers many ways to reorganize map, but none of them reorganize data so
>that items connected to the selected item are moved closer to it to see crearly the
>connection on the small map. Imagine a big map, and you connect two items that are far
>way. You can fade away rest of the map, but the link goes through the whole map and
>everything is too small.
>2. no attempt to position items to minimize text/items
>overlap.
Using the Exloration Tool (under the Windows menu) in conjunction with the Clustering Tools in the Format menu and the selection tools (and pay attention to the six linked squares on the right side of the menu next to the search field), I’m finding there are several ways to accomplish this task. I’m much more interested by two other things:
1. There is an ability to perform a search and then create a search term node linkded to the search results - effectivey creating a visual tag that you could then roll into each of the nodes manually or leave as a separate link. There is also a tool to auto genreate reachhability matrices that you can use externally to do more detailed analysis, and
2. There is an ability to do data driven diagramming - if you think of your text and tags as data insead of words you can start to reap the benefits of this…
The Exploration tools and the Content tools hold a lot of potential uses.
Zman