Mind Maps Blog
Discussion about mind maps from VeryRelated.com
Posts tagged mind map
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