Dealing with complexity
I’ve been playing with Inspiration 7 software. They use it at our writing center for clustering activities. The demo is free and fully functional, and I think I’m going to buy it. It is much easier than using a conventional drawing program for visually mapping ideas. The intersecting network of photographers and writers in America in the nineteenth century is difficult to sort out, and looking at it like a map helps me.
Inspiration is fun isn’t it. You might enjoy Mindmapper too if you haven’t already tried it.
I’ve used Inspiration for years. It’s an excellent piece of software for exactly the reason you describe — sometimes the only way one can see relationships clearly is to map them out and make the connections. Inspiration has a “physicality” that other outlining programs lack.
Strangely enough, this is exactly the kind of program I’ve been exploring lately.
I’ve been working with a Mac OS x program called OmniGraffle, and it seems very similar, though it doesn’t convert the graph to an outline.
Of course, I had to download Inspiration, and now the decision has become tougher than ever.
I envy today’s students with all the new tools they have for writing, including, of course, the internet with all its resources.