I’ve just come across VUE, Visual Understanding Environment, a cross-platform, open source information manager and mind mapper.

It looks pretty cool (although because these sorts of apps are ported cross-platform, they never really fit in, visually, in Mac OS X).

As I understand it, you can do a regular mind map to organise your research, and then plot pathways through that information, for particular lines of argument or for leading someone through the information in a lecture or seminar.

The real power of this kind of thing is two-fold. First, you can link directly to resources, whether they’re PDF, web sites or images, so each node can be associated with a resource (or resources). Second, you can see up meaningful relationships between nodes. I don’t mean honest, other-person-centred friendships, but rather giving the nodes and their links an ontological connection, so the representation is not just visual.

That means, you don’t have to keep the relationships in your head.

I haven’t started using it for a particular project yet, but it looks promising. If you use it, and have an opinion, leave a comment.

For Mac users, don’t forget to check out our Mac apps page for more research and teaching options.

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