langreiter.com plain, simple: comment-2002-05-23-9

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comment-2002-05-23-9

CREATED BY David Ness • LAST EDITED BY David Ness 8002 days AGO

Alex_S, Chris and Traumwind raise interesting points that (a) deserve answer, but (b) I'm not quite sure if long answers fit well into this format. So I'll make my remarks terse, not out of disrespect for the points, but just to avoid going `on and on'.

Alex_S and Chris both set me right about using `TopicMaps' as a generic category when it actually refers to something quite specific. I changed my paper to refer to `maps of topics' (hopefully clearly generic) instead. My remarks about the `TAO of TopicMaps' I let stand because they were about the general subject of mapping.

Alex_S suggested I should have provided more links. I'm not sure if the suggestion was specific to the situation or more general. In any case I do not like links when matters are being written about `in depth'. Links are wonderful, of course, in a Blog like Chris', where an important part of the objective is, presumably, to act as a `gatekeeper' to other material. However, I find them distractive and desultory when attempting to deal with matters in depth. _All_ of the good journalists that I regularly read on the Net make scant use of links. And I think they're right.

Alex_S seems to want to put words in my mouth with things like `I think that you would have to concede that still makes TouchGraph a very usefull technology.' But I don't. For the life of me, I can't figure out anything useful whatever about it.

Again: `Real maps give you a sence of the overall picture. Without maps you would never know the shape of any continent' Has knowing the `shape of any continent' ever been of any use to you? It surely hasn't to me, and indeed the `sense of shape' that I get from maps has, I find, led to gross misunderstandings about relative size and direction.

Finally, `religious testimonial' responses are (mildly) interesting but not, in my experience anyway, of much real help. `They help me discover relationships' is a statement that I wouldn't challenge. But then if someone said `Looking at the sky on a cloudy day helps me discover relationships' I wouldn't argue with them either.

What _would_ be helpful is a more detailed description of some of the things that were `discovered' and what the `process of discovering them' was like. So far what I have seen is at levels of generality and non-specificness far removed from that.

As to Traumwind's question: `If one states that 'maps' (or TG like visualisations) are a sub- optimal representation of the underlying relationships - because of the misleading nature of their visual representation - then why should a textual representation be superior?' I guess my response would be that textual representations allow for conceptual complexity that we simply have no clue about how to present in any pictoral form. Painting `love' is hard enough. Painting more complex concepts (like `referential transperency' perhaps?) is mind-bogglingly difficult.

And while I would agree with Traumwind that `Expressing relationships in words has very often lead to more confusion than it was any good. 'I don't have words' is a very comon saying when we are dealing with dificult concepts, be it emotions or be it multidimensional relations.' I would suggest that---for the most part---trying to describe them any other way is _even harder_.

`I'd conclude with saying: each representation has its very own strenghts and weaknesses. Depending on the intended use one might be superior to the other.
Let's just always keep in mind that a representation is exactly that, and not the thing itself.' And I'd agree with that, particularly if we add the caveat that what is `superiority' may also depend on the individual.