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Background

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Mindmaps

Background

Mapping textuality and visuality in a rhyzome model curriculum.

A concept is a word or group of words that summarises or classifies certain facts, events or ideas into one category. Graphical frameworks may be adopted to hold the conceptual parts (i.e. the concepts) together as a whole. These mindmaps are constructed by linking concepts, representing different attributes or classes of information, and also by developing statements to define relationships between such concepts. The resultant concept map structure defines a ‘subject’.

Within a rhyzomatous subject, it can be seen graphically that routes exist between ideas, facts, principles, insights and circumstances, which are all related to each other. Another analogy is that of an ideational scaffold where concepts (topics and subtopics) are the bricks from which a coherent body of knowledge is accessed non-hierarchically through the scaffold.

"Conceptualisation" is now a well-established process of thinking and organising ideas textually across disciplines. Mind maps grow from adding new facts to extend a cluster of concepts or develop a new cluster. The actual business of making the maps is aided with mind-mapping software.

Visuality is the key skill of visual studies, which entails arranging images in multi-dimensional combinations to tell a story. The meaning of the details in each image is not so much the capture of an historical event, but the discovery of traces and clues within the image that lead the interpreter beyond the aims of its maker. The detail is not only a sophisticated, personal quotation of the arranger’s ideas, it is a link to cultural history. The arrangement is a mindmap, but with reference to the assembly of images in slide shows and movies it is often described as a storyboard, although users need not progress through it in a linear fashion.

http://www.culturalecology.info/curriculum