Mind Map Revisited

Gleaning some themes

I redid my mind map completely to capture themes.

I categorized the readings in terms of theoretical frameworks and made these nodes.  Sometimes this meant a separate node for a theorist, like Foucault or Latour.  At other times, I brought together multiple theorists in a single node, like Spellman,Syverson and others writing about ecology.  (In fact, this is roughly the list that my group started with for developing our theory tree.)  I distributed these theorist nodes as radiating from a central list of thematic nodes, such as "Motion in the network," "Complex and self-organizing systems,""The importance of material objects" and so on. This actually proved quite interesting because I saw connections that I hadn't before, like the fact that Foucault and the genre theorists are both working with discourse in a linguistic sense while many others we looked at in the semester are not really focused on rhetoric as language at all.  In fact the reason that I used this system of restructuring to begin with was to capture connections that I was already seeing, like how many theorists were fascinated by the importance and agency of material objects--like Rickert, Bateson, and Latour, for instance.  But once I developed my list of themes, I was surprised at how it pulled things together differently than I had thought about before.

I really like this mind map.  It is a nice summary of the semester for me.