Showing posts with label mind map. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mind map. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 27, 2016

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.

Tuesday, February 16, 2016

894 Mind Map

I am embedding my mind map here. This is my first time tweaking code, so I'm pretty excited that you can actually see SOMETHING here.  Let me know if it isn't working.

April 17 update

For social network analysis, I made connections to “network society,” because computing has made possible the data crunching that SNA depends on, to “relations” because SNA is looking at relations, particularly human-human interactions. I added another node as well, “data analysis,” which I have also connected to “network society.” It is true that it is primarily methodology but is so essential to SNA that it is almost like another concept.

April 3 update

I added a node for Castells and a small web of nodes capturing some of the main features I see in Castells. This is more interpretive than for some other scholars because Castells doesn’t establish a theoretical framework with a set terminology.  However, I decided to look at technological innovation and diffusion as a node and time and space, combined for convenience, as a node, which when bundled with human actors and non-human actants from previous theories, generate a synergy leading to Castells’ network society, another node.  I recognize that I am being redundant in listing “network society” in two places, except in the main node I am using at as a label for a theory and in the second as a concept, or perhaps better, an assemblage.  This node, in turn, connects to nodes for work and identity.  Connected to the work node are also nodes for the micro and macro changes in work, namely, how the network society has changed first, the nature of work, capturing the types of positions emerging and the changing workplace, i.e. the flexibility, stability and managerial climate of the workplace, and second, the structure of the labor force in terms of the economic structure of a country.  To be fai r, I should probably indicate international and global interdependence here, too, but I already have a fairly complex diagram.  I also connected concepts from Castells back to CHAT, thinking in terms of workplace and organizational studies that would probably illuminate Castells, to ecology due to the big picture nature of Castells’ system, and to laminated chronotopes because of the space and time relations that Castells include.  I also included institutions, a node previously associated with CHAT, because sociologists such as Castells inevitably implicate institutions to one degree or another.

March 27 update

I added a node for neurobiology connected to a node for "neural network," to which I attached nodes for "cognition," "emotion," "memory," "motor skills," and "sensory perception." These I connected to "mind."  The idea behind this addition was to see the entire neural capabilities of human beings, i.e. the brain and nervous system as part of "mind," through which human beings interact with the world in any of the other ways implied by other theories.  Bateson's theory, therefore, is in a sense compatible.

March 14 update

Even though I was inspired by Megan's mind map to make mine better, I haven't yet been able to come up with a better strategy.  I'll keep thinking about it. In the meantime, I added Bateson with connections to "ecologies," "actor," "non-human actant," and "mind."  I have the connections to the other nodes pass beneath "mind."  I really should have them link through it, but that was an afterthought.

March 4 update

I had the impression that I had added Latour with the last update, but I later realized that wasn't the case.  At any rate,  I added a node for Latour along with connections to ecology, actor, non-human actants and relations.  Actors and actants are obvious choices, but I think that Latour's approach, by focusing on tracing connections, makes relationships more explicit than some theories, though relationships are implicit in all network approaches.  I also added "plasma" as a new node and "black box".

February 26 update

I  added hypertext as a node and connected it to concept and rhetor/actor.  Concept was associated with Foucault, but I'm repurposing it here because hyperlinked terms are usually key concepts operating within a text, and this is somewhat similar to concepts that organize discourse in a Foucauldian sense.  I also connected hypertext to Vatz because of Vatz's claim that the rhetor generates the exigence for discourse.  In hypertext, the assumption is that the rhetor (the user/reader) makes meaning by the links that are made.  This is analogous, in that meaning is being generated by the operations of selection and connection.

February 21 update

I added CHAT as a node and connected from CHAT to actors (=people, in terms of CHAT), and actants (i.e. objects).  I also added "laminated chronotope" as a new node connected to CHAT, but also to genre, speech act, and event, since I see these as connected to the concept.  I also added "ecology(ies)" because this appears two places in the CHAT list.  The mind map doesn't allow me to handle this in the way that I'd like.  If I could do so, I would color-code connections to group nodes and connections into subsets, or I would draw boundaries around varies nodes.  Ecology, to my mind, would be better treated in this way than as a separate node.

Earlier updates

Because I didn't initially realize that I needed to put my mind map in the blog and trace my additions as I went along, it is a little hard for me to reconstruct exactly what I did when.  However, I know I did the following at different points:

  • I added Foucault to the mind map and put the discursive formations as a block of nodes connected to Foucault. 
  • I added Spinuzzi and genre theorists to the mind map and made appropriate connections to these as well as back to aspects of the rhetorical situation.