{"id":22556,"date":"2013-05-21T19:58:42","date_gmt":"2013-05-21T19:58:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=22556"},"modified":"2013-05-21T19:58:42","modified_gmt":"2013-05-21T19:58:42","slug":"mind-map-usage-example-john-boyd-papers-index","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=22556","title":{"rendered":"Mind map usage example: John Boyd Papers Index"},"content":{"rendered":"

[by Lynn C. Rees, with points from John Boyd]<\/p>\n

Earlier this year,\u00a0Scott<\/a>\u00a0kindly shared a PDF index of the John Boyd Papers (see tail end of PDF here<\/a>).\u00a0While PDFs are good for preserving document layout, they’re poor at storing clean text data. Since I wanted the index in a spreadsheet to facilitate searching and sorting, this was a issue.\u00a0<\/span>Data extraction into machine readable formats remains painful. Data extraction from PDFs remains even more painful: the priority of PDFs is prettiness for the human eye not prettiness for the machine.<\/span><\/p>\n

Fortunately, <\/span>pdftotext<\/a>\u00a0can extract the text data to <\/span>plain text<\/a>. But, even then, the John Boyd index text was misaligned and out of order due to its formatting in the original document. It also needed <\/span>to be broken down into useful chunks that could be mapped to spreadsheet cells. I decided to use <\/span>Freeplane<\/a> to reformat the text into a form appropriate for piping into a spreadsheet since it has elements of asynchronous text editing.<\/span><\/p>\n

I don’t know if a true asynchronous text editor exists. I’m not sure I know what one would look like. But I have some notion of what it isn’t. Most text editors and word processors are good at sequential editing of text. They only sort of approach asynchronous text editing where text is moved around and reordered freely without copy and pasting. Asynchronous text editing was what I wanted and Freeplane kind of does it.<\/p>\n

I pasted the plain text into Freeplane and started breaking it down. Progress was slow. A lot of awkward and time-consuming cutting and pasting was required and this \u00a0was annoying. I had to create additional\u00a0text manipulation tools<\/a> for Freeplane. Then things moved along nicely.<\/p>\n

Due to intervening time constraints, the Boyd Papers index hasn’t made it to spreadsheet form yet. However, it is broken down in Freeplane. Though mind maps are most commonly used as a brainstorming tool, they are also useful for rearranging existing text data in a hierarchy. Since the John Boyd index mind map is a useful example of this, here’s what’s done so far:<\/p>\n