Graphic Presentation of Subjects

Status: For a while now I have been trying to find out how to present subject information in a graphic way that shows the relationship between subjects. This graphic is the farthest that I've gotten, partly due to time and partly due to not knowing how to arrange the subjects.

One arrangement of subjects is Dante's combination of "ancient and medieval systems of education" in his Convivio (II, 14, 15). This reference is taken from Thomas Davidson's book Aristotle and Ancient Educational Ideals, 1892, page 247.

                            Grammar
               Trivium      Dialectic or Logic
                            Rhetoric
LIBERAL ARTS
                            Arithmetic
               Quadrivium   Music
                            Geometry
                            Astronomy

               Physics and Metaphysics
PHILOSOPHY     Moral Science
               Theology

In After the Storm: Considerations for Information Visualization -- a Compressed PostScript file, M. Pauline Baker and Colleen Bushell write "Proximity has been shown to be effective in graphical displays when multiple information elements must be integrated." They also mention that "empirical studies of the capability of various design strategies to support integration of related pieces of information bear out the intuition that color is effective in grouping items together."

In How to Make a Better School Finlay McQuade and David W. Champagne talk about Horizontal Coherence, "when what is learned in one class is related to what is learned in another, students should also learn about the relationship." Vertical Coherence says that "the experience of learning from year to year should also be coherent, so that students can apply what they learned in eighth-grade math to problems they meet in tenth-grade science."

Though my interest in these topics preceeded seeing them in a commercial product, Grollier's 1995 CD-ROM Multimedia Encyclopedia has the following options: Knowledge Tree, Knowledge Search, and Search. I haven't seen an explanation of the options.

It seems like a "tree of knowledge" would help to relate subjects, and that the idea that someone's starting point might be from a branch suggests that the relationship of ideas should not be designed for searching only from general to more specific. That brings in the idea of an extensive subject network, and the "Knowledge Search" picture on the envelope of the Grollier's announcement suggests a search in any direction from a given point.

One Library of Congress subject that relates to the topic of subject arrangement is Categorization (Psychology).

Edward E. Smith wrote The Organization of Factual Knowledge, Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, 1980, pages 163-209. In the essay, he talks about the results of experiments that measured people's memory of statements and says that people remember information better when they categorize it. There are three types of categorization mentioned. Quotes from the essay are emphasized.

Facts that Subdivide into Distinct Groups

For example, the car is new, and the car is very economical.

Facts that can be Integrated by Prior Knowledge

For example, when I hear that Jim caught the throw to third, I know that the topic is baseball and that Jim was probably wearing a baseball glove.

Facts Containing Perfectly Correlated Predicates

For example, Jim has a bike and Sue has a car, and Luke has a bike and Sally has a car. Since the information has parallel arrangement, it is easier to remember.

One remaining question is, how helpful is it to categorize information for other people? In an email communciation, one researcher said that organization of information for oneself was where learning took place and that presenting the organized information to someone else wouldn't be the same learning experience.

Nevertheless, it seems evident that categorization is very typical of communication, whether it be categories of business responsibilities, household tasks, or items needed from the store. Maybe the real question is, how helpful can it be to categorize information for other people?

ISWorld Research and Scholarship - "research and scholarship in the field of information systems"