This is the start of my mindmap about my thesis topic. As I’ve been reading and researching, I’ve been adding nodes and making new connections. I don’t think this is anywhere close to being “complete” (is a mindmap ever really complete?), but it’s definitely a good start at organizing my thoughts.
This mindmap was created using Scapple. I tried some other mindmapping tools, but the main thing that attracted me to Scapple was the simplicity. Many of the mindmapping tools I played with required that you express your ideas in hierarchical order. That’s not really the way my brain works, and it was extremely frustrating. They also wouldn’t always allow you to draw connections outside of the hierarchical order. That was also really obnoxious. So, I ended up with Scapple. It allowed me to “word vomit” all of the ideas that have been floating around in my head, in no particular order. After I had things out on the “page”, I started organizing into clusters of similar/related ideas. Then I drew connections, both within the clusters and to other clusters of ideas that were related. I’m sure I’ll continue adding to this map as I move forward with my research, but overall, I’m really happy at how this exercise how helped me organize my thoughts.