Recently, I’ve adopted an open source hunger: every time I want some software made, I figure someone has already made it and someone has already made it open sourced. For those that don’t know, open source basically means that the software’s underlying code is openly available and can be changed and redistributed. (Software like Microsoft Word or Microsoft Vista does not have its code available for anyone to use.)
It so happens that many developers of open source software also want to distribute their software free-of-charge. This is where I come in.
I’ve been thinking about the power of visualization, inspired in a large part by Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. I thought to try and visualize all sorts of things, from my academic schedule to geometry problems. (Actually, this came up for a project I was working on at school.) So I searched for open source and free-of-charge software to do so.
Two of them worked out particularly well: GeoGebra and XMind.
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As you can imagine, GeoGebra is a software for mathematics users, particularly those interested in geometry and algebra (the kind taught in high schools). I just recently used it to solve a puzzle posted by Jason Zimba. But don’t worry, I don’t want to go into the math, just the story behind drawings. So, why is this software so great?
Well, in geometry, we’re concerned about lines, distances, and shapes. If it’s a circle you’re drawing, it has to be curved like a circle. If it’s a line, it needs to be straight. And, if it’s too small to see the details, you need to redraw it again.
I had I hated this part of geometry. It seemed like a waste of time. Couldn’t you just calculate it somehow? There must be some other way besides drawing. I avoided drawing the diagrams every time I could get away with it (and often more).
What this really meant, though, was that I didn’t know how to draw nicely, and I hated having to redraw a diagram because I messed up one part. I just thought that I hated the diagrams because that process of drawing and revision was tied into the use of the diagrams.
Thanks to GeoGebra, I am now able to happily make geometric diagrams, and enjoy their use, without having to worry about the details of drawing. You could say that I’m a supporter of the separation between drawing and visualization.
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XMind has a different intention. Billed as a “mind-mapping software” it is supposed to help you organize your thoughts. You know those “bubble” charts that you’re taught to make to brainstorm or take notes? That’s what this is supposed to do.
How is this different than geometry? Certainly, in both cases we care about drawing, and it’s in the visualization that we retain the information. But, instead of preserving specific distances and shapes, it wants to preserve relationships, ie. connected or not connected.
As you might guess, I hated using bubble charts. I always struggled to organize it so that my ideas would fit on one page. Some branches would take up more space than others and it was hard to keep items of the same level of importance together. Why not just make a list? Or even better, an outline?
Well, I decided to give XMind a shot anyway. It couldn’t hurt, and it was free-of-charge.
As it turns out, once I learned the keyboard shortcuts, I thoroughly enjoyed using the program. The computer managed the spacing and hierarchy for me. I could delete or undo instantly. And the keyboard shortcuts actually made this process faster than drawing on a piece of paper. Lastly, I was able to add or remove a bunch of different smaller symbols, such as relationships, surrounding bubbles, or labels that might name the priority level or status of completion.
And here it was again, the separation between the visualization and the tedious drawing. The computer took care of all the incidental actions, such as differentiating levels of information with different size and font. I just typed in what was important—the items and their relationships.
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What does this mean? Well, I decided not to review either software above in terms of its own genre. I didn’t seek out other geometry software or other mind-mapping software. What I did want to pay attention, though, was the place of computers in visualization.
I think a lot of people have used Excel to make visualizations such as bar graphs, but there are other sorts of visualizations as well. Before using either software above, though, I didn’t think I’d be convinced of their usefulness in their own visualizations.
But after using both, I’ve been able to separate the tedious activities from the substance of the visualization and gratefully letting the computer take care of the tedious work. Then, both visuals seemed natural and intuitive.
I wonder what place the computer has in future kinds of visualizations. Can we design machines the way Tony Stark, the protagonist in the movie Iron Man, designs his powerful machine suit? Can voice commands and 3-D motion be incorporated into a program so that a user has even more flexibility in design? What tedious work can we weed out next, so that can we can focus on the essentials? And how much more productive and creative would we be?
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