Saturday, July 11, 2020

Content has fooled us for way too long; hasn’t it?

Content has fooled us for way too long; hasn’t it?

The knowledge manager knows all about content. It’s the substance of meaning and the quality that gives purpose to what we wish to communicate.

As we choose a tool to create the framework for the content of our communications; it may be linear or even non-linear. The tools equip us to get the job of communicating the purpose and meaning of the growing content we use and exchange.

Taking a look at many of the works of fellow visual mappers; I’m rather verklempt, and not in a recoverable way when I see some of the overwhelming content of visual maps shared.

I hope I’m not alone as I say that; It’s an indictment against the arena that many create and publish a lot of extremely poor quality visual maps.

I want to be clear; This is an observation and not a judgment. The judgments come from those who look at published works and say; WTF can that do for me?

From the plate of spaghetti mind maps to the hashtag reference overload to the downright WTF mind/visual maps, I scratch my head in disbelieve and wonder if we (yes me too) have gotten our strategies all wrong for sharing and promoting the benefits of visual mapping.

A colleague of mine recently spoke of his continuing work using a mix of mind maps and info graphics with clients to get points across succinctly. He spoke to me of his success using a wall within a meeting or conference room to physically hand draw on the whole wall to create a story line of his clients system issues and potential solutions. I’ve even tried this and it actually works very well; the engagement success with participants works very well too and the information content sticks with all involved.

Of course we know this method is admittedly old school, wasteful of time and resources and harps back to the flip chart days that worked very well back in the day (that day being a long time ago). It actually got rather messy though; didn’t it?

Yet here we are in this part of the 21st century and many of us are using rather impressive technology relating to graphical mapping and expressiveness to continue to create messy WTF visual communications that have a load of content, yet lack something important.

I see this in particular with my favourite products from the overpopulated mind/visual maps via MindManager (and every other competitor) and the same deal applies to TheBrain and also the recent addition of Thortspace. There’s just a natural tendency for users (you and me) to cram a whole load of shit into our graphical structures that screams content yet lacks context.

So that important thing is CONTEXT. It does seem there’s a semantic misunderstanding for many when we speak of content and context. Just like in the QMS field, procedure and process are often misused and interchanged to mean one and the same thing.

We do come across many visual mappers who make pretty damn awesome yet huge (WTF) and extremely useful visual maps for us to view. They have a ton of content yet the map is so large that it becomes that plate of spaghetti and the context of the original quality and purpose of communications is lost along with any level of client/audience engagement.

Content may be king; yet the king is naked without being clothed in context.

Indeed there may exist much relevant content in our mapped communications and surprisingly even some useful context; we must however continually remind ourselves as to what gives content meaning by way of context.

Contextual extraction is key; yet from the get go we should really be practising good creation and management of content and adding context as we go.

To extract context would be awesome; yes there are tools out there that can take a written article and extract the relevant context for the user to analyze and choose what is relevant for further use.

The seminal work of Henry Lewkowicz and his Contextual Extraction tool can be found at http://www.contextdiscovery.com/index.aspx Go take a look

I personally use my own T.A.P method for doing it right from the get go.





Regardless of how we add or extract context, we should really have good practices that build up from a good foundation that can take the stress of our further adding and building upon content.

Regarding the content we build; there’s a fine line between brilliance and stupidity relating to the outcomes of the work we do as knowledge architect. If at all we ignore the equally important function of context; we become like that king who may have much content yet is completely naked without context.




So the further misunderstanding or; complete understanding and willing ignorance of how information is aggregated data and that information is merely instructional at many levels; and that when context is added to information, we end up with relevant knowledge.



Much more to say of course; I’ve blithered enough and look forward to your feedback and comments. Fire away!










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