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Post New Requests Here / Re: For Serious Research: Cadillac of "ClipBoard Managers" vs. "Info/Data Manager"
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on February 15, 2014, 09:54 AM »Tomos, would you please share how outlines seem limiting? Outlines are what I've been thinking of doing. If there is some other approach I'd love to learn about it.-nkormanik (February 13, 2014, 09:14 PM)
Outlines (hierarchical tree-based organisation) is fine for relatively small number of items or if it's mostly for long-term static storage.
However, if you want to work with a text database on an on-going basis dynamically (e.g. by constantly analysing, re-organising and synthesizing it, such as to write a number of articles, books etc. over a lifetime), then the hierarchical tree can become an obstacle to developing new understandings of the material. E.g. it requires you to decide up-front how many hierarchies up or down an item should reside, which later may prevent you from seeing connections between that item and another related item at some other deep location in the tree at a faraway branch. ...
Another way to think about tree-like organization is that an item e.g. at level 7 in a hierarchy is actually in a box within 6 other boxes. If you were to do this with paper and real boxes, it would be a real pain to locate such material and relate it to other similar material. Of course in a computer we also have labels and categories these days, as well as search, but even then a hierarchical system trains you to think in a particular way that may not always be the most fruitful for creating new knowledge.
P.S. Outlines are very useful for organising the output (writing up an article), but not necessarily for organising hundreds or thousands of text items.-dr_andus (February 15, 2014, 05:48 AM)
I think I slightly disagree. These topics were in my criteria when I went looking for my own solution. Many of the tree programs allow you to move the text structures around. So yes, you do decide *the first time* how you want to think about data, including our case opener Nick K "Not at all". But then if you don't like what tree level something landed in, just move it! Deeper, Shallower, or even "Clone" it!
I find that when organizing big data, once you get past pure "anything with anything brainstorming", there are only a fairly small number of coherent ways to organize the data.
The next feature of programs like MyInfo is that they let you expand and contract the outline like an accordion. So let's say you're working on medical material for topics related to the Dopamine transmitter. You can spend your week on your new 50 entries going all into Parkinsons, Elder Care, Tremors, and even the movie Awakening. Then the following week when you care more about caffeine and Energy Drinks, you just shrink the entire Dopamine subtree into "its box" and let it sit there.
So to find anything is one of two ways:
A. If you know where it is: "Shrink All Nodes", then expand your way right to your topic, maybe with a couple of mis-steps.
B. If you forgot or are just being holistic, you can "Expand All" and then search.
I'd say that with these and a couple more tricks, an outline can easily handle up to 10,000 items with a little forethought.
So Shrink All then 5 clicks expands right to any data element that you recall, or Expand All and Search gets you the 15 occurrences of something.
I became a convert to big widescreens one day on a lark at my old job I bought my own monitor after the usual pennywise-poundbitching typical nonsense, and I'll never go back. 
