Peter P. Jones wrote: (01)
> But there's a problem with graphs that is the same as for everything
> else - there's an infoglut barrier, a lot like the sound barrier or
> (heaven knows) the speed of light. (02)
I like the sound and light analogies.
Made me think of Shannon's communication theory, how much information
can be stored in bits, I don't know much about it.
I wonder if graphs imply a different kind of way of packing information
that is more mature, and hence, more restricted and for practical
purposes packs less than simply sequential, because we're not just
talking about processing bits, we're choosing quality over quantity. (03)
Andrius, http://www.ms.lt, ms@ms.lt (04)
> With visual graphs it's the screen size vs. font size vs.
> representation complexity.
> Something like,
> 1/comprehensibility = (font_size/screen_area) * rep_complexity.
>
> 2) I could reach for non-graphical representations, but then users
> lose all capacity to track their location in an overview, and it's
> hard to consider loading folk's heads up with all the link tracking
> as being an augmentation.
>
> 3) I could combine the approaches but I'm not sure that does anything
> much beyond leaving users flicking between tabs all the time.
>
> So I'm left thinking that unless I'm building a tool for building
> very controlled models it seems like there's a point at which the
> total management of interconnectedness from the user's mental
> perspective has to be abandoned. That's like saying that I can never
> manage my own knowledge collection properly beyond a certain point:
> everything becomes piecemeal when the graph gets big.
> Which seems worrying for any idea of augmented problem solving.
>
> That in turn sounds really controversial, so I'd be interested to
> know what other people think.
>
> Thanks,
> (05)
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