Since Alan has suddenly decided that he actually likes lists, I’ve decided to throw off my ‘bulleted-list-kindagirl‘ persona and attempt to use a mindmap for something useful.
I’m writing a review, looking at ‘dealing with plagiarism in the internet age‘. I’ve gathered my sources, read the majority of them and inwardly digested and cogitated. I needed a way to get my thoughts down quickly and organise them into a structure, so I used a good old fashioned pencil and paper and drew myself a mindmap. It just sort of happened that way. It occurred to me (having been playing with google wave and wondering what on earth it was for) that it would be great to have a way to organise my papers within this mindmap structure. So, I redrew the mindmap on mindmeister and started going through the papers I had, adding them into the relevant sections of the map. I added notes to each citation to remind me why I’d put it there and what evidence or opinions I wanted to draw from the paper into the review.
This exercise has highlighted places that I need to do some more research and some papers have influenced the structure and content of the mindmap, but it’s getting there and has really helped me to begin to synthesize my thoughts.
Now, what would be really cool is a google wave robot that would crawl my mindmap, pull the citations and link them straight to the Citeulike bookmarks I’ve been keeping for this project and then direct to the DOIs (I’d have like IGOR to come and suggest/ pull up my citations as I was adding them too!) then when I pulled off the outline plan from mindmeister, I’d have an almost rewritten review complete with citations and live links to the references. Readers of the review would then have a clickable resource and a link to the Citeulike bookmarks to share and use.