Mind Maps Blog
Discussion about mind maps from VeryRelated.com
“Fascinating” mind map – new books by Guundie Kuchling and Madeleine Albright.
Feb 22nd
I just checked out VeryRelated.com’s mind map for the word ‘fascinating’, and the results are pretty interesting. Maybe I’d go as far to say that they verge on being, well, fascinating!
VeryRelated draws upon data from Yahoo’s snapshot of the world wide web (its index used for web search). It automatically constructs mind maps from this data, showing related words and concepts. Bubbles are closer together if the words are more highly related (that is, more likely to occur on the same webpage), and they’re bigger if the words are more popular on the Internet.
When I go to VeryRelated.com and type in “fascinating”, I get the mind map shown below:
Click on a magnifying glass on the left, and you’ll bring up a Google search for fascinating + the related word. Interestingly enough, the most highly related word is “books”.
I browsed through the Google search results for “fascinating books”, and discovered a couple of real gems which I might even buy!
One is See Food by Guundie Kuchling. The book description is as follows:
See Food! By Guundie Kuchling One moment one meal in the chain of life. Do you love the sea? Have you ever wondered what sea creatures like to eat? Inside this book you will see food like you have never seen before. Follow the food chain from the tiniest ciliate (see-lee-at) to the very end. Can you guess who is last in line? There are many possible food chains in the sea this is one of them. This is a great educational book about sea animals that eventually become seafood. With its clever illustrations it makes it easy for kids to understand the sea food chain. It also includes Did you know? section at the end of the book which will provide useful information for any kid wishing to know more. Hard Cover. Ages 2 – 8
I did another search on Guundie Kuchling and found her amazing website where she talks about her many children’s books.
Children just love Guundie’s vibrant, funny and informative picture books. Those lucky enough to come to her workshops, also love her appearance. Mad hats, two wildly different earrings, scarf flying, surrounded by hand puppets, turtle shells and a shaved doll, Guundie enchants her audience by talking about art, animals, books, the environment, food, and other sources for her inspirations. She gives examples how to come up with ideas and to shape them into plots; she demonstrates how to use a lino block for print making; she unleashes the writer and artist in each of the students, young and old, and gets them creating works of their own.
I have found VeryRelated.com often helps me to discover amazing things in not-so-frequently traveled parts of the Internet, such as Guundie Kuchling’s great website about her art and books.
Another is Madeleine Albright‘s new book, Read My Pins – Stories from a Diplomat’s Jewel Box.
From the book description at Harper Collins:
It would never have happened if not for Saddam Hussein. When U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Madeleine Albright criticized the dictator, his poet in residence responded by calling her “an unparalleled serpent.” Shortly thereafter, while preparing to meet with Iraqi officials, Albright pondered: What to wear? She decided to make a diplomatic statement by choosing a snake pin. Although her method of communication was new, her message was as old as the American Revolution—Don’t Tread on Me.
From that day forward, pins became part of Albright’s diplomatic signature. International leaders were pleased to see her with a shimmering sun on her jacket or a cheerful ladybug; less so with a crab or a menacing wasp. Albright used pins to emphasize the importance of a negotiation, signify high hopes, protest the absence of progress, and show pride in representing America, among other purposes.
Part illustrated memoir, part social history, Read My Pins provides an intimate look at Albright’s life through the brooches she wore.
Find out more, and buy Read My Pins at Amazon.com:
Read My Pins: Stories from a Diplomat’s Jewel Box
So that’s it for today. Hope you found this post interesting. Check back soon for more discussions about mind maps and discoveries on the ‘net. In the meantime, feel free to explore VeryRelated.com and the mind maps on any topic you wish.
Click to start exploring the mind maps.
Mind Map about Communication
Feb 8th
Communication is essentially the exchange of information, thoughts, or feelings between two or more people, beings, or devices. But this simple definition doesn’t even begin to delve into the complexities surrounding communication and how it plays a role in our society. In this post, I examine and discuss some of the richness of the interactions and interconnections that envelop the topic of communication. I use as a starting point the Mind Map about Communication that is generated by VeryRelated.com.
First, I will talk a bit about how VeryRelated.com works. It draws upon words contained in Yahoo’s index (or “snapshot”) of the entire world wide web used in Yahoo search. Yahoo allows sites like VeryRelated to access information in its web index, and this information can be analyzed to discover relationships between words. In academic speak, this is called “semantic relatedness analysis” and might be considered a form of data mining or artificial intelligence.
So by going to VeryRelated.com and typing in “Communication”, I get a mind map that looks like the following:
Click to enlarge
The following are the keywords that are most highly associated with the word Communication (in order of relevance):
Community, Control, Technology, Information, Development, Performance, Computer, Education, Presentation, Advertising, Culture, Social, Design, Participation, Leadership, Technical, Fine, Project, Secure, Leading, Enterprise, Access, Transportation, Networking, Wireless, Corporate, Practices, Conversation, Collaboration, Extension, Electronics, Conflict, Cooperation, Mass, Composition, Media, Computing, Competence, English, Journalism, Cultures, Stakeholders, Coaching, Rapport, Passing, Information In, Control Of, Cognitive, Information Systems, Telephony,
Let’s discuss some of the top keywords and think about why they might be related to communication.
Community is fostered through supportive communication. A community needs a communications medium and space, whether it is a meeting in a town hall, an online discussion board, or a protest rally with a megaphone.
Control is, interestingly enough, highly entwined with communication. Media such as TV, radio, websites and newspapers (printed media perhaps less so nowadays) exert the power to shape (and even control to some degree) the thoughts of media consumers.
By communcating a piece of information to someone or to a group of people, the originator is also exerting control by the influence or effect this piece of information has on the recipient. An absence of communcation or the deliberate withholding of information in communcation can also be a form of control. Repeated communcation of messages (such as through advertising) can have measurable effects on individual consumer behavior.
I like to practice this same form of control that media and advertising have on me through communcation on myself, in order to “program” my own mind, feelings, and thoughts. This may sound like a fairly wacky idea, but I find it’s really effective. I consciously design my personal space to reinforce images and messages that I believe are supportive to me. An example of this is a digital photo frame that I recently acquired and placed in my kitchen. I spent nearly an hour choosing a hundred images to display in the frame (which I photographed myself) that reinforce positive things and people in my life, such as good memories of delicious meals that I ate, and special moments with friends and family.
Technology is obviously a key enabler of communcation. It has been inventions such as pen and paper, the printing press, the telephone, radio, TV, the Internet, and digital video that continue to allow new forms of communcation to occur. What’s exciting is that new mediums continue to be developed. Who knows how we will be communcating in 50 years from now!
Information, as already discussed, is part of the core definition of communcation as an exchange. Some other keywords which I think merit further analysis are Education, Culture, Participation, Leadership, Secure, Access, and Transportation.
Click to explore mind map.
So that’s a quick look at some insights given to us by the VeryRelated Communcation Mind Map. Hope you found it interesting.
Check back on this blog for more discussions about mind maps and mind mapping in general. You can visit VeryRelated.com to generate your own mind maps about any topics you wish, or browse more mind maps.
Take care for now,
Geoff Peters
Vancouver BC Canada
Mind Map about Love
Nov 12th
Mind map about love
In this VeryRelated.com mind map discussion we talk about a four letter word referring to one of the most basic human needs, nothing other than love itself. Love expresses sentiment, a strong positive sentiment. But what else can we learn about love?
According to the VeryRelated mind map about Love (generated based on analyzing how words are semantically related on the Internet), the following words are most associated with the word Love on web pages (in order of relevance):
Have, Know, With, Go, Great, There, Life, Music, Would, Which, It, May, Look, Song, Him, To Be, Keep, A Little, Heart, Thanks, Death, Hope, God, True, Special, Children, Woman, So Much, Movie, Thank You, Eyes, Mother, Week, Love It, Father, Sex
The VeryRelated algorithm (discussed here) identifies words which are likely to occur together on web pages. It doesn’t have a conscious “intelligence” to actually know what the words mean, but it does reveal a lot about the words’ meanings by showing which words are their “friends”.
There is a saying that you can tell a lot about a person by knowing who their friends are. Of course, by definition friends are people who you are close with or related to in some way, whether it be through physical proximity or in a virtual way through Internet.
(As an aside, the social network Facebook expands the definition of “friend” to include loose connections, such as someone you may have met once and want to stay in touch with or follow their updates in the anticipation of interacting with them in the future).
Words identified by VeryRelated on the mind map of the word Love are like the friends or close relations of Love. Let’s discuss some of the words and ponder why they are related.
“Have” is a very common word on the Internet, but surprisingly the word Love is even more common. (In the Very Related mind map graph, the word Love is in a larger bubble than Have). This indicates how important Love is to English speakers.
“Have” is also the most strongly related word to Love. This suggests that love may imply (or be associated with) the concept of possession. A wedding vow that is traditionally spoken includes the words “To have and to hold”. To love someone and for them to love you back in return means that you “have” each other’s love.
In some countries today or in some times throughout history, possession in love takes an even more extreme form: marriage or guardianship may imply legal ownership, such as a man “owning” his wife or child as a form of property.
In a non-personal sense, we are often expressing love or positive sentiment for things that we own or wish to own. For example, consider the sentence, “I love that car; I want to have one.”
“Know”, the second word on the VeryRelated.com love mind map, is also no surprise. Wasn’t it the character Linus on the Peanuts cartoon strip who said, “To know me is to love me”? (I had a cartoon pillow case as a child with that quote.) To love something or someone deeply, you have to know the object of interest well. Perhaps lust is love without knowledge of the object of desire.
I won’t discuss all the words in depth, but the following are also interesting to think about in relation to love: Life, Music, Death, Hope, God, Movie, Eyes, Mother, Father, Sex.
It seems strange how Movie is more related to love than Mother or Father. Maybe this is the result of how web page content might be skewed towards commercial promotion rather than personal declarations of love – such as more web pages saying “you will love this movie” rather than “I love my mother”.
Life and death, music, eyes, hope, and God: these are all hugely important words with significant meaning to the human experience that we all share.
Here’s hoping that you experience many kinds of love in your life. Until next time, be sure to explore some of the free mind maps on VeryRelated.com.
-Geoff Peters
Empowerment Mind Map
Nov 3rd
Screenshot of Empowerment Mind Map from VeryRelated.com
In the VeryRelated.com Mind Map about Empowerment, we learn that empowerment is strongly related with the following key ideas:
Education, Being, Participation, Good, Why, Poverty, Involvement, Real, Choice, Collaboration, Democratic, Healing, Equality, Seeks, The Third, Managers.
Wikipedia gives the definition of empowerment as the following:
Empowerment refers to increasing the spiritual, political, social or economic strength of individuals and communities. It often involves the empowered developing confidence in their own capacities.
It makes sense that Education is the most highly related concept to Empowerment because an individual or community gains strength through increased knowledge. The saying “knowledge is power” definitely has some truth. Participation in one’s community is a great way for individuals to empower themselves and their community. This involvement leads to good outcomes for everyone involved.