Visual Bibliographies...

Monday, March 15, 2010

Being a singularly poor `linear' thinker, I like to be able to SEE the connections between the concepts/ideas/theories/books etc I am trying to deal with.

I have used various pieces of diagramming software in the past, mind-mappers such as MyMind and FreeMind, and concept-mappers like CMap Tools or yEd - all of these have been extremely useful to me in reaching decision as to how to structure linear (written in words!) arguments, or at least how to start arranging my thoughts a way amenable to expression in written language.

Yesterday I found (not that it's new, I'm just not that tuned in!), VUE and its associated Firefox+Zotero plugin; the combination of the Zotero referencing software and VUE's ability to diagram the relationships between works/documents, I hope, is going to be very useful to me, especially in creating literature reviews.

I look forward to being able to post a visual literature review for my work on newspaper sales, in the very near future.

Zotero: www.zotero.org/
VUE: http://vue.tufts.edu/index.cfm

MndMappers
MyMind: www.sebastian-krauss.de/software/#mymind
Freemind: http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

I'm sure there are many more out there but these are the ones I've used. All the software mentioned here is free or donation-ware.