TALE: Thematic Network Diagram
A new type of diagram for mapping thematic connections and mental moves
In 2021, I worked on the D as Diagramming project and produced two books (drafts).
- Diagram Blending
- Diagram as Practice
Today I am going to introduce a new type of diagram for TALE Center and the Thematic Engagement project.
TALE stands for Thematic Analysis Learning Engagement. I launched TALE Center to host the Thematic Engagement project in Jan 2023. In the past serval months, I explored several types of activities of Thematic Engagement. During the journey, I found a particular type of diagram that is very useful for mapping thematic connections and mental moves.
I used “Thematic Network Diagram” to name this particular type of diagram. This article will introduce three examples of Thematic Network Diagrams.
Example 1: Once Upon A Whiteboard
In March 2021, I wrote Platform for Development: The Ecology of Adult Development in the 21st Century and introduced the concept of Supportance.
In April 2022, I changed my focus from theoretical development to empirical research in order to test the Ecological Practice approach and its sub-frameworks.
I selected Virtual Whiteboard and related platform-based practice for my first empirical research project.
Why?
In fact, my primary interest is studying Virtual Space Affordance. The term Affordance comes from James Gibson’s Ecological Psychology. It means “what environment offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill.” I consider Virtual Whiteboards as a new kind of environment, so I coined the term Virtual Space Affordance for studying Virtual Whiteboards.
The Once Upon A Whiteboard was born in April 2022. It is an independent project and adopts a lean study approach. It has a clear goal for testing my theoretical approaches and frameworks. However, the plan is not clear. I worked on both matching frameworks and platforms and researched real work cases one by one.
Though my original intention is testing my theoretical concepts and frameworks, I changed my mind and embraced multiple aspects of objects. I used the Sub-project method to capture some aspects I want to explore.
I created the following 10 sub-projects for the Once Upon A Whiteboard project:
- Sub-project 1: Milanote (BACK TO W.E.C.)
- Sub-project 2: Structural Engagement Theory (SET)
- Sub-project 3: Digital Space Affordance (DSA)
- Sub-project 4: Boardle (Social Diagramming)
- Sub-project 5: Platform Supportance
- Sub-project 6: Prezi v.s. Miro
- Sub-project 7: The Knowing-for-us Practice
- Sub-project 8: The Kanban Practice
- Sub-project 9: The Miro Classroom
- Sub-project 10: Platform Curativity
What kind of aspects of virtual whiteboards do these sub-projects refer to? See the diagram below. I listed two groups of aspects of virtual whiteboards and related platform-based social practices.
The Blue group is about the theme of “environment” and the theme of “activity”. I pay attention to the environmental aspect of virtual whiteboards. I also considered “using virtual whiteboards” as a work-type activity.
The Green group refers to the spatial aspect of virtual whiteboards and related social aspects, especially knowledge-related user experience.
Sub-projects are divided into two groups too: the Grey group refers to theoretical concepts or frameworks while the Yellow group refers to real examples. Some sub-projects refer to several aspects of virtual whiteboards and related social practices.
Let’s use the “Milanote (BACK TO W.E.C.) — Creative Curation” connection as an example for the present discussion.
The term “Creative Curation” is pretty interesting because there is a paradox behind the term: Curativity against Creativity. Creators tend to think and act without any frame. However, Curators tend to give a frame to think and act in order to make a meaningful whole.
Virtual Whiteboards make a balance between Curativity and Creativity. For example, Milanote is understood as “the Evernote for Creatives”. It also uses “Get organized. Stay creative.” as its slogan. See the screenshot below.
I also found the theme of “Creative Curation” from the BACK TO W.E.C. program which can be understood as an example of platform-based social practices. The program was designed as a two-month program. After one month, the program host discussed the progress with me and told me that they struggled with the style of program curation: open v.s. control.
This is interesting because the theme of “Creative Curation” appears in both the technological environment and the social environment.
You can find more details about the Once Upon A Whiteboard project in The “5A” Slow Cognition Model.
Example 2: Appropriating Lui’s Theoretical Sociology
Ping-keung Lui is a theoretical sociological theorist. He was the Principal Lecturer (retired) at the Department of Applied Social Science at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
Lui aims to build a brand new theoretical sociology as a candidate for the paradigm of sociology. In 2007, Lui published a Chinese book titled Gaze, Action, and the Social World in which he presented his account of theoretical sociology. He continuously developed his account of theoretical sociology with various activities such as writing books and papers, teaching courses, and curating academic discussions.
I read Lui’s papers and articles online many years ago. In April 2022, I contacted Lui and started learning his theoretical sociology. From April 2022 to April 2023, I read Lui’s papers and books. We had email conversations and Wechat discussions. While learning ideas about sociological theories from Lui’s approach, I also considered his 15-year journey of developing a brand-new theoretical sociology as a case for the Slow Cognition project.
In May 2023, I reflected on my journey of engaging with Lui’s Theoretical Sociology. In fact, it was a 3-week “Creative Life Curation” project.
- April 25 to May 12: Collected email conversations and wrote summaries
- May 12 to May 15: Designed diagrams to map the conversations and wrote the final report
On May 15, 2023, I finished the “Creative Life Curation” project with a 65-page thesis.
In order to discuss the ideas that I learn from Lui, I wrote a section titled Appropriating Lui’s Theoretical Sociology in the thesis. Originally, I wanted to write case studies one by one with a model for the Mental Moves project. However, I thought that it could be too cumbersome for the project.
I decided to summarize all my ideas into one Thematic Network Diagram. See the diagram below.
The above diagram summarizes the major mental moves between Lui’s knowledge center and my knowledge projects.
The left column lists 7 knowledge elements of Lui’s theoretical sociology while the right column lists ideas under my four knowledge projects.
The middle column uses a few words as clues of connections between the left column and the right column.
It represents the landscape of moving knowledge elements between two knowledge centers.
You can find more details in Value Circle #2: Engaging with Lui’s Theoretical Sociology.
Example 3: The ECHO Trip
One month ago, I had a wonderful 10-day road trip with my wife and two little sons from June 24 to July 3.
During the busy trip, I couldn’t write notes with details. In order to record exciting moments and engaging experiences, I used short meaningful keywords to capture some insights while taking pictures. These short meaningful keywords are Situational Themes of my life.
During the trip, I found several ECHOes between Immediate Movements and Creative Projects. After returning to Houston, I listed 21 situational themes of the trip and conducted a “Thematic Analysis Learning Engagement” activity.
- Thematic Analysis: I used 21 situational themes as data and analyzed the patterns of these themes.
- Learning Engagement: It’s a great experience to connect situational themes with other themes of my life.
Eventually, I decided to use the ECHO Way model to reflect on the trip and conduct a case study of Creative Life Curation.
The above picture is the overview of the project.
- Project (Actions) → Stories (Notes) → Model → Creative Work
The 10-day road trip was a project that includes a series of actions. After the project was completed, it became my life Experience.
I use “life as continuous flow” as a metaphor to describe Life and Experience. This metaphor is inspired by William James’ metaphor “Stream of Thought.” You can’t use a knife to cut a stream, you only can use a container to contain it.
If I do nothing with my subjective experiences of the 10-day road trip. It is only my memory. If I want to share it with others, I have to write notes, take pictures, record the trip, etc. In this way, I made Stories of the trip for social communicative context.
Though I didn’t write notes with details, I made 21 situational themes of the trip. These themes are Personal Signs which refer to my Subjective Meanings of the trip. These themes can be seen as micro-stories.
As a “Thematic Analysis Learning Engagement” activity, it goes beyond normal storytelling and social media sharing. It moves from the Story level to the Model level. I adopted the ECHO Way model as a tool to analyze the deep structure of these themes.
In this way, I ran a “Creative Life Curation” project and turned pieces of life experiences into meaningful Creative Work. I also used The ECHO Trip to name a possible book about the project.
As a “Creative Life Curation” project, The ECHO Trip used thematic analysis and thematic mapping to represent a thematic dialogue between Individual Situational Themes and Individual Life Themes.
I used a method called “Meaningful Keywords” to capture my ideas. Since my mother tongue is Chinese, I used four Chinese characters to name each idea.
Eventually, I made 21 four-character meaningful keywords as the “Situational Themes” of the trip. In order to conduct thematic analysis and thematic synthesis, I renamed these 21 themes in English. See the diagram below.
For one particular Situational Theme called “Route of Actions,” I wrote 2–3 text notes in order to record more details for further research. This theme is about the dynamic relationship between my mind, my route, and my environment during the trip.
The theme of “Route of Actions” appeared over several days (See the diagram below). I noticed that we really couldn’t act as our original plans. We often changed our plans due to different situational changes. This insight led me to name this theme and started collecting related evidence.
I created several Thematic Network Diagrams for “The ECHO Trip” project. One diagram is about ECHOes between Situational Themes and Creative Themes. See the diagram below.
The left column lists 21 situational themes while the right column lists a set of creative themes which come from my four knowledge projects.
The middle column uses a few words as clues of connections between Situational Themes and Creative Themes.
For example, the Ecological Practice Approach is my primary knowledge project. I list five creative themes about the approach. There are eight situational themes that connect to these five themes. See the diagram below.
We should notice that one Situational Theme could connect to more than one Creative Theme. Also, more than one Situational Theme could connect to one Creative Theme.
You can find more details about the ECHO Trip in The ECHO Trip: A 10-day Road Trip and Creative Life Curation.
Multiple Connections between Multiple Themes
There are many activities under the notion of “Thematic Engagement”. One typical activity is called Mapping Thematic Network.
What does Mapping Thematic Network mean? It refers to using visual tools to display connections between a set of themes.
There is no standard model for representing the relationship between a set of themes. Each case is unique.
In general, Thematic Network Diagrams are used to discover multiple connections between multiple themes. Since themes are refers to meaningful keywords, we can consider many types of diagrams as Thematic Network Diagrams.
For example, the diagram below is found in the Wicked 7 project. You can find more details in Mapping COVID-19 as a Wicked Problem.
The Wicked 7 project develops the above diagram to map the chain of causality. According to the authors of the diagram:
One way to map a wicked problem is to begin with a process of discovery. Begin with the current, observable facts and ask “why?” — going backwards in time to create a chain of causality. Remember, each cause is also an effect.
To predict what will happen going forward in time, ask “what next?”
By asking what next and continuing the chain, we get a set of future consequences — the “domino effect” of our present actions.
In order to make a distinction between the Wicked 7’s diagrams and TALE’s Thematic Network Diagrams, I call the former Wicked Chain Diagrams.
In this way, I can restrict “Thematic Network Diagrams” as a particular type of diagram which are represented by the above three examples.
However, the above three examples are concrete things, what is the abstract generalization behind these things? How can we know if a diagram is a Thematic Network Diagram?
Name, Form, and Content
In March 2023, I developed the following model for the Mental Moves project.
The term “mental elements” is adopted from Dean Keith Simonton’s Chance-configuration theory (Scientific Genius,1988).
What are mental elements?
According to Simonton, “In scientific creativity, the predominant mental elements are cognitions of some kind, such as facts, principles, relations, rules, laws, formulae, and images. Yet immediate sensations may also play a role in laboratory experimentation and field exploration, and feelings may figure in scientific thought and discourse as well (Mahoney 1976). Sometimes these mental elements can be evoked voluntarily (e.g., the deliberate retrieval of a stored fact from memory); at other times these elements enter mental processing involuntarily (e.g., via a conditioned emotional association). Moreover, these mental elements do not have to be fully conscious, but rather, many enter information processing at the periphery of consciousness. ” (1988, p.6)
I highlight some keywords from Simonton’s description of mental elements. It looks like this is a rough definition. And, it is very hard to give an accurate definition for such things.
For the present discussion, we can claim that a Diagram is a Mental Element. In this way, we can apply the three aspects of mental elements to discuss the above three examples.
- Name: Thematic Network Diagrams
I use Thematic Network Diagrams to name this particular type of diagram because 1) it is part of the Thematic Engagement project, and 2) it aims to discover connections between multiple themes.
- Form: Three columns and the Left-to-Right flow
The above three examples use three columns as their primary layout. Example 2 and Example 3 use the Left-to-Right flow as the information structure. However, Example 1 doesn’t follow this definition. We can consider Example 1 as the seed of Thematic Network Diagrams.
- Content: Resources, Converters, and Objects
Example 2 and Example 3 share the same information structure: the Left-to-Right flow. The left column lists some themes as Resources while the right column lists some themes as Objects of my creative projects.
The middle column uses a few words as clues of connections between the left column and the right column. We can see them as Converters.
By defining Name, Form, and Content, we set the abstract generalization of Thematic Network Diagrams.
The Genidentity of A New Type of Diagram
In order to establish a new type of diagram, we have to compare Thematic Network Diagrams with other types of diagrams and find the Genidentity of Thematic Network Diagrams.
What’s Genidentity? Let’s quote a short piece from Wikipedia:
- As introduced by Kurt Lewin, genidentity is an existential relationship underlying the genesis of an object from one moment to the next.
- What we usually consider to be an object really consists of multiple entities, which are the phases of the object at various times. Two objects are not identical because they have the same properties in common, but because one has developed from the other.
- Lewin introduced the concept in his 1922 Habilitationsschrift Der Begriff der Genese in Physik, Biologie und Entwicklungsgeschichte. It is today perhaps the only surviving evidence of Lewin’s influence on the philosophy of science. However, this concept never became an object of widespread discussion and debate in its own terms. Rather, it was extracted from its context by philosophers such as Rudolf Carnap, Hans Hermes, Hans Reichenbach, Adolph Grünbaum, and Bas van Fraassen who incorporated this concept into their own theories such as the topology of the universe or the axiomatization of mechanics.
- Lewin’s idea was to compare and contrast the concept of genidentity in various branches of science, thereby laying bare the characteristic structure of each and making their classification possible in the first place.
Though Genidentity was originally developed for discussing the difference between various branches of science and their dynamic development, it is about a “topology of identity” and temporal dynamics from my perspective.
I developed an operational definition for the concept of Genidentity: A thing’s Genidentity is defined by Essential Differences with Situated Dynamics. In this way, we turn a philosophical concept into a practical concept for empirical research.
How to find the Essential Differences between Thematic Network Diagrams and other diagrams?
We can use the typology of knowledge diagrams (v2) as a tool to help us answer this question.
From the perspective of Activity Theory, I consider the Means v.s. End issue within concrete activities. For a particular activity, a diagram might be an end, I call it Thought-to-Diagram. For another particular activity, the same diagram might be a means, I call it Diagram-to-Thought. If we combine these two situations together, we can develop a Means-End Spectrum and use it to present various instrumental values of diagrams.
The above diagram offers a spectrum with six types of diagrams. The left side refers to Means (Diagram-to-Thought) and it stands for a weak ontological position of diagrams. We don’t have to require a perfect form of diagrams if we use them as means for our thinking and private discussions since we don’t make diagrams as final products.
The right side refers to End (Thought-to-Diagram) and it requires a strong ontological position of diagrams. In order to make diagrams as final products for others to use, we have to work hard to produce ideal diagrams.
Based on the spectrum of ontological positions of diagrams, I identify six types of diagrams:
- Inspiration
- Canvas
- Map
- Skeleton
- Notation
- Framework
The weakest position is Inspiration which refers to drafts, sketches, private notes, etc. The strong position is Framework which refers to formal knowledge models.
Since Thematic Network Diagrams are about discovering connections between multiple themes, they should be placed between Map and Skeleton at the right side of the spectrum.
There are two extreme examples of diagrams in the typology of diagrams.
- Semiotic System Diagrams: remove the spatial structure from normal diagrams.
- Meta-diagrams: remove all texts from normal diagrams.
It indicates a new dimension for thinking about diagrams and diagramming: the Langue — Space dimension.
Semiotic System Diagrams are found in Ping-keung Lui’s books and papers. Below is an example of Semiotic System Diagrams.
Thematic Network Diagrams are similar to Semiotic System Diagrams because they are about connections between meaningful texts. However, Thematic Network Diagrams use the Left-to-Right flow to set the spatial structure.
We could place Thematic Network Diagrams between Semiotic System Diagrams and Framework at the top side of the vertical axis.
The above diagram is an updated version of the typology of knowledge diagrams.
Mapping Thematic Network
Why do we need Thematic Network Diagrams?
On Jan 27, 2023, I wrote an article titled TALE: Possible Configurations of A Theme Network and mentioned the complexity of a thematic network:
A Theme Network is a dynamic complex. We can perceive many possible configurations from a theme network.
If we perceive a configuration and believe it is very useful for the present situation, then we can turn this configuration into a situational framework.
If the situational framework is not only useful for the present situation but also suitable for other situations, then we can turn the framework into solid knowledge for a community of practice.
Thematic Network Diagrams are used to discover thematic connections between Resources of environments and Objects of our creative projects.
By using Thematic Network Diagrams, we can see the landscape of a thematic network and find Possible Configurations between multiple themes.
We can also find particular themes for further exploration.
