Understanding Concept Maps

Abstract

Research into creating visualisations that organise ideas into concise concept maps often focuses on implicit mathematical and statistical theories which are built around algorithmic efficacy or visual complexity. Although there are multiple techniques which attempt to mathematically optimise this multi-dimensional problem, it is still unknown how to create concept maps that are immediately understandable to people. In this paper, we present an indepth qualitative study observing the behaviour and discussing the strategy used by non-expert participants to create, interact, update and communicate a concept map that represents a collection of research ideas. Our results show non-expert individuals create concept maps differently to visualisation algorithms. We found that our participants prioritised narrative, landmarks, abstraction, clarity, and simplicity. Finally, we derive design recommendations from our results which we hope will inspire future algorithms that automatically create more usable and compelling concept maps better suited to the natural behaviours and needs of users.

Step by Step: Promoting Understanding of Scientific Texts through Gradually Built-Up Concept Maps in Informal Collaboration (Pre-Print)

“…When concept maps are used, two essential design choices need to be made: their type of visualization and their type of content creation. Several publications suggest different design principles for concept map visualizations (e.g., Cañas et al, 2005;Novak, 1993;Padilla et al, 2017), for example, minimizing concept label length (Cañas et al, 2005) and enough blank spaces between (groups of) concepts (Padilla et al, 2017). Another example is using different relation types as relations can be directed or undirected, labeled or unlabeled (Schaal et al, 2010).…”

“…Another example is using different relation types as relations can be directed or undirected, labeled or unlabeled (Schaal et al, 2010). Overall, the design choices taken regarding the visualization need to be tailored to the context of the application and the target users of the map (Cañas et al, 2005;Novak, 1993;Padilla et al, 2017).…”

“…The design principle underlying this stepby-step approach to concept map construction was intended to avoid overwhelming study participants with a concept map representing the entire content of the scientific text right from the beginning. The design features of the concept map followed selected design principles as described in previous literature (Cañas et al, 2005;Padilla et al, 2017), that is, short concept labels, no duplicate concept labels (Cañas et al, 2005); proximity, similarity, and connectedness in visualization; and customizable complexity of visualization (Padilla et al, 2017). Two authors of this paper manually developed the content of the concept map, including concepts, their relations, and their definitions (later referred to as concept map authors).…”