Musings on musings on third year projects

Finally the term is drawing to a close. We have handed in our last piece of work, and I have given myself permission to start relaxing, even if I have not really started that process. Actually, perhaps I have, a bit. I'm home, and I have poured myself a beer, and I found myself spontaneously singing some kind of religious chant-like song. Walking home from the tube a cacophony of thoughts erupted in my mind, on the subject of my third year project, which I had been discussing with another student who is just finishing off her third year

The truth is, I have so many ideas but it's very difficult to decide what to do. The remit is quite large with several different types of projects available. There are some suggested ones, but you can also come up with your own ideas. And ideas are something that I am not short of. In fact, in just rehearsing some of my ideas, I came up with a new idea, or rather, came up with an idea for a tool that will be particularly useful in brainstorming and planning my project.

It's actually quite a simple idea, that fuses two already existing technologies. What that is a is a fusion of Mind Map technology with speech recognition. As you may know, I'm dictating my blog, although I'm not dictating it straight into the text area within the browser, but using Wordpad, which enables all of the voice recognition shortcuts in Windows Vista, and then pasting it into the browser.

(Going contentedly in my usual way against the grain, I'm recommending Windows Vista to anybody that will listen. This is partly due to its prettiness, partly as a reaction to the torrent of abuse which has been hurled at it, and in no insignificant measure to the ease of use of the voice recognition software built in. The main difficulty that I am finding is, as I've mentioned above, the fact that some software has very good built in support for this technology, while others does not. I don't yet know why, but the fact that the good compliance is found within Microsoft software might give us a clue.)

Mind mapping is a way to collate or present information in a nonlinear way. When a policeman writes down notes in his little notebook, I'd be surprised if he did not write it down in a linear way: in other words as the information came to him he would add it after the previous chunk of information. In some ways this makes sense, because it does not waste space in the notebook. But the information is hardly likely to come to him in an ordered way.

Policeman: " Could you tell me what happened to you, starting with the details that will be crucial in our investigation, and leaving out anything irrelevant. I would prefer it if you gave it to me in chronological order, preferably with times of individual events." Well, it seems a little far-fetched.

So that information in the policeman's notebook is most likely written from left to right and from top to bottom, filling the pages. Very little structure. Of course, I'm making some assumptions about the policeman here. Apologies to any police who have much more effective ways of taking notes. I'm just making a point.

Now in contrast to that linear way of taking information, mind maps allow us to write down chunks of information in the order in which they appear, and make links between them. This is as simple as drawing each idea in its own little bubble and drawing lines between the bubbles to represent links. I have used this technique to plan essays, and found it to be very useful.

You might start with a central idea of your essay, or thesis, and as ideas linked to that occur to you (as will usually be the case, if you're a human being) you write them down in a linked bubble. As you have more ideas, more bubbles will appear with lines between them, and a spider-like structure appears on the paper in front of you. This explains another name for mind maps, spider diagrams.

(I have had quite a lot of ideas for new pieces of software over the last year or so, and a disturbing number of them have appeared on the market in that time. A part of me is hoping that simply by putting these thoughts down on paper I will cause the program I am imagining to exist.)

And what that program is, is simply a tool to make mind maps using one's voice. It is a very simple idea, and I can fully visualise the software in my head. If it does not exist, it is a definite candidate for a third year project, as I think it would be both relatively simple to implement and highly marketable. But the amusing thing is, that the reason I thought of it, was that I was thinking ahead to getting home and putting my ideas for my third year project into the computer.

Just like the policeman's notebook, this article is being written linearly. It actually puts a rather a dampener on some aspects of the creative process. Writing in this way is rather like deciding to go for a drive but your car turns out to be one of those small self-propelled vehicles on a railway track. You see some scenery but there's no way of turning off and exploring side avenues. Actually, I should qualify that, by the obvious assertion that I make so many asides and it's hard to tell what the main stream of the article is about. But in any case, you may see what I'm getting at.

So I sense another avenue of Internet research opening up before me. And of course, the Internet is the ultimate nonlinear information receptacle. I can start looking for one thing, but before long, I quickly find myself in a fascinating but completely unrelated area. It may be stretching a point but perhaps we could say that the Internet is the ultimate Mind Map.