7-12-03

 

BOX WORLD SAGA (or BLOCK DIAGRAMS RULE)

 

GETTING STARTED

 

THE PROBLEM (A WHOLE LOT OF LEARNING GOING ON)

 

The question of how to take notes effectively is one which I've personally struggled with during all my academic and work experience which is quite extensive.  I've also found that since I'm a technical person in rapidly changing technologies, it's been a frequent requirement that I quickly learn new things.  So the whole issue of how to study and do only what is absolutely necessary to learn new material as quickly as possible ¾ this issue has been very dominant in my life.

 

I think if you're going to be successful in Computer Science, you'll run into that same kind of issue all the time.  When I started programming computers, for example, the C programming language, the Pascal programming language and all the other languages even BASIC did not yet exist.  Each of these has gone through many changes introducing new versions every few years.  Indeed I've come to expect some very major shift in focus of Computer Science approximately every seven years and with computers continuing to obey Moore's Law, one can expect this pace of change to continue for at least another twenty years and maybe a great deal longer.  Thus your working life of forty years or so will see five or six of these watersheds.  If you have not developed a method of quickly studying and extracting material from sources you will find it difficult to keep up with the pace.

 

WHAT I'VE DONE

 

I have as a result of my need, developed a method of taking notes which I call colloquially: Box World.  It has two versions, one more graphical and one more textual, although both use some graphic and some textual elements.  I'll call the textual variant Tree World just to distinguish it from Box World and because it uses branching trees with labels as its primary symbology. 

 

BOX WORLD RUDIMENTS

 

Whenever you are trying to understand things it comes down to the things themselves, how they are composed internally and how they related to other things externally.  So there are to things these two aspects (and it doesn't matter what kind of things they are, ideas and concepts and other abstract things as well as more material and tangible things).  So this idea that there are insides and outsides of things means necessarily that there is also a boundary of some sort which divides the inside from the outside.  When I'm thinking about a thing I'll often draw a box and label the box with the thing's name, like for example a CAR.

 

THE EXAMPLE OF A CAR

Now I can make statements about a CAR ¾ it HAS A set of wheels, usually four, it HAS An Engine, a Transmission, Tires, a Radio.  It also has a Color and a Top Speed.  All of these things that have a HAS A relation to CAR tend to be either PARTS or PROPERTIES of the CAR entity.  All of these are in a sense INSIDE the concept of a CAR, the deeper inside they are the more likely it might be that you don't even know about them.  Things like the ALTERNATOR or the MANIFOLD might be parts you are uncertain of.  What do they do?  Some parts of the car interact with the world that is outside the car.  The HEADLIGHTS cast light, the ENGINE makes noise and generates EXHAUST gases.  The WHEELS actually roll on the road.  This brings to mind the issue of visibility.  Some things might be completely invisible in the sense that we are not commonly aware of them, but they are still there.  The ENGINE MOUNTS for example.

 

So let's summarize a little.  We have a box or some other enclosed shape which we use to represent a thing and we put into the box those things that are either PARTS or PROPERTIES ¾ the PARTS often have parts of their own so they would be little boxes inside our big box.  The PROPERTIES are often not parts but are attributes of parts and should be written as a sort of label inside the boxes of which they are properties ¾ so COLOR might be in the BODY box and TOP SPEED might be in the ENGINE box, although I've only put it there because the engine power is likely to be one of the aspects of the CAR that determines how fast it can go.   Touching the edges of the CAR box are those things that are visible or interact with the world outside the box.

 

So far we've only talked about boxes and labels, inside and outside, and the boundary.  We've also mentioned Parts and Properties and distinguished them as things that you can further reduce or that are simply characteristics of either the CAR or its PARTS.

 

USING THIS MUCH (BOXES AND LABELS)

 

At this point we've only got boxes and labels.  What can we do with that?  Well if we're listening to a lecture we can draw a box and label it whenever the speaker talks about a concept we think is intended to be important.  Then when the speaker talks about another concept we draw another box.  Each box can be elaborated with its parts by putting other boxes or labels inside the box.  Sometimes a box will affect other boxes.  For example, a CAR might influence a DAIRY QUEEN by getting into the DRIVE-THROUGH.  The DRIVE-THROUGH is part of the DAIRY QUEEN and the CAR comes into the DRIVE-THROUGH and driver who is inside the CAR and hence a sort of part of the CAR, although a transient part because the CAR can be unoccupied, in any case the DRIVER places an ORDER.  The ORDER is also transient because it comes into existence when the DRIVER generates it, and it goes out of existence, except as a record of the transaction, when the ICE-CREAM or whatever other product, is given to the DRIVER of the CAR through the WINDOW of the DRIVE-THROUGH.

 

LINES AND ADORNMENTS

 

At this point our paper is probably getting a little crowded with boxes and we're not sure what's inside or outside or whatnot.  Enter the use of LINES and ADORNMENTS.  A LINE (at least a straight line) can be thought of as a very long skinny and wiggly rectangle because if we got out a microscope and looked at a line it would look like a sort of fat sausage that is very long.  The line is a thing in itself, a very very skinny box and may have a label which has to be outside it because it is so skinny.   Now an ADORNMENT is something that is added to the line.  It might be an ARROWHEAD or a BULLET, or little bars perpendicular to the direction the line is going, etc.  The LINE may also have PROPERTIES like COLOR, WIDTH, TEXTURE or PATTERN, ex. dotted or dashed or solid.  The trick of course is to think of logical things for the lines to represent.  Generally I use lines for RELATIONS, thus they show some sort of connection between the two things that they stretch between and I use the ADORNMENTs to represent some information about the relation.  An arrow head generally shows that the two things communicate is some way.  So information goes from one thing to the other or back and forth from one thing to the other and the arrow head shows that. 

 

USING BOX WORLD

 

The uses of a Box World can be jotting down or doodling ideas about a software design where the boxes become parts of the computer programs and devices that make up the design.  Lines show how the elements communicate.  You may also need an associated narrative that explains what the boxes and lines and labels indicate. 

 

Another use of Box World is in taking notes.  Each time the lecturer mentions an idea, write down the name of the idea and put a line over it with corners that turn down after you've made the line long enough to leave room for other stuff.  This is the beginning of a box, but you don't finish it because you don't know how much more the lecturer is going to say.  If he talks about other ideas typically make a horizontal move and draw the top of another box with a label.  If on the other hand the lecturer starts to talk about the ideas that have already been mentioned, then decide if they are PARTS or PROPERTIES.  If you're not sure, assume they are Properties and just write the label inside the partial box.   If the lecturer relates the two or more things for each relation draw a line between the two things being related and label it.  If the information is too much to fit on the line then grow a box out of the center of the line or make an DOT adornment and connect it with a line to a box which will hold information about the interaction of the two ideas.  If you keep doing this you end up with not only a set of ideas, but the parts and properties of the ideas and lines which express the way the ideas are related.  You may also end up with a bit of a mess since unless your lecturer is very organized, your diagrams may be all over the place.  By the way this general way of taking notes is often called Mind-Mapping.  After you're finished with the class, you might want to take your Box-World/Mind Map and structure it in a neater way.  Once you have done this for a while you'll develop methods to keep your maps quite neat as you go along. 

 

TREE WORLD

 

What I'll call Tree World is a variation on Box World.  It is more text based and can even be done with a word processor usually using underlining and indentation.  It is similar to Box World in the sense that you can transform ideas expressed in Box World to Tree World rather easily.  Tree world is often easier to use when taking notes, especially if you don't have very good drawing skills.  Of course if you don't have either drawing skills or writing skills you might want to consider a tape recorder and trying to do the best you can in the time available and go back and fix up the result later.

 

Where Box World starts with a Box for an idea or concept, Tree World just writes down the name of the idea or concept and underlines it.  You could also overline it if you wanted to change it into something more like Box World later.  Remember that whatever you decide to do, it is your notation to do with as you please.  My way of doing this isn't something you have to conform to.  You may come up with better ideas or maybe you're more comfortable drawing circles than boxes or some method you've picked up in your life is one you're very happy with because it is effective.  The idea here is not to make you adopt any particular method, only to expose you to the idea that you will need a method and the one I personally use has been effective for me.

 

So now we've captured an idea or concept by writing down its name and underlining it or overlining it, whichever.  If the lecturer never says anything more about it we've at least captured the name.  But usually the lecturer will say something about parts or points or steps or some name that suggests that this thing has some sort of structure.  Remember that we're concerned with internal and external structure.  Internal structure is those parts and properties and I capture those by drawing a vertical line connected to the left side of the underline or extending up to connect to the leftside of the overline (in either case we now have the left hand side of a box) and then for each part I copy down the name of the part or property.  You can see that these things are sort of related.

 

Of  course the outside of the thing connects to other things.  The connections among things can be spatial or temporal, i.e. SPACE STRUCTURED, or TIME STRUCTURED.  There are some other possibilities but they are related.  For example something might be EVENT STRUCTURED where the events are opportunistic, coming along in an unexpected and unpredictable order like the ORDER's at the DAIRY QUEEN.  We don't know how many or exactly what will be ordered so each day is different.  But even when the events are different they are Time and Space structured.  This tends to be a distinction between what a thing IS and what a thing DOES.  The IS-things tend to be persistent in time and we therefore think of them as fairly permanent while the things one does, the DOES-things are transient in time.  We do one thing now and another thing later.

 

Diagrams are pretty good at expressing structural things, but not as good at expressing time things.  Luckily the time-like things we usually want to talk about are repetitive.  They go around and around in a cycle, so all we have to do is capture the elements of the cycle.  Another possibility is that they go from a fairly well defined beginning to a fairly well defined end and there are only a few variables in between.  That sort of thing is generally not very persistent.  It starts and stops and then you're done with it.

 

The only way that I've found to capture time-like things is with a line with callouts on it.  One could suppress the line and call the callouts a list of time events which is intrinsically what we do as we make a schedule putting the time and the thing to do in a list.  If we have to move around when we're doing that we often use a map and put callouts at particular places on the map: 12:00 Jess's for Lunch, might be a label on the map located in downtown Harrisonburg.  I might have a line on the map showing my route to the mall with a callout 1:00 Look for a book on Java Swing at Barnes and Noble.  This kind of line is a form of ADORNMENT one can put on a MIND MAP showing how one might travel among the ideas on the map.

 

Any time you write something you are locked into LINEAR WORLD which means you have to write one thing after another.  It's like being stuck on a particular railroad line or track.  Even if it isn't where you want to go, you have to go down the track segment by segment.  Skipping around isn't easily done.  A line is like linear world ¾ it goes from place to place in order, so it's like the map with my travel plan on it.  So if I'm going to write a narrative about something, I often do it by taking a piece of paper and writing down all the ideas that I think I will want to write about.  I'll use Tree World if I know I'll want to write about the parts or properties of the ideas.  When I have all the ideas down on the paper then I'll try to figure out where the narrative ought to start and I'll put a circle around that idea.  Then I'll try to draw a line to all the ideas on the paper in the sequence that I think makes the most sense.   Sometimes I have to leave out ideas because there is just no sequence that makes sense.  They are like diversions of the main narrative thread that would make the story less interesting so that visiting them would be a little pointless.  I leave them for another time.  The point is that time is like a line that travels through space, whether it is concept space and the journey is a story, or whether it is physical space and the journey is a travel plan.

 

Now a really good story needs a good beginning called the HOOK.  The hook is like a fishhook that catches in the mouth of the fish.  Of course it isn't very nice imagining your reader is a fish, but it is the same sort of idea.  The story also needs a PUNCH LINE or as the English folks call it a denouement, the final resolution of the plot.   You also might want to use PLANTS or SEEDS scattered through the narrative that give the readers some idea of where you're going to end up.  That makes your readers feel pleased with themselves when they discover that they had it figured out all along.  Between the HOOK and the PUNCH LINE is the STORY.  All good writing is a story, only some stories are more boring and so harder to write than others.  If the story is long then there might be quite a number of hooks and stories and punchlines since there have to be little stories in among the long ones.  Often when you are writing a short essay it is fun to use the BOOKENDS strategy.  You use a PLANT or SEED or even state a PROBLEM in the HOOK to give the reader a sort of TENSION that is unresolved and you present your story as trying to solve the problem or understand it or something of that nature and you come back to it at the end, possibly after a number of sidetracks where you explain the parts of some of your ideas or how they are related to one another.  The story is always a journey either in an imaginary world, like Oz in the Wizard of Oz, or in a world of ideas where one visits a series of ideas to make an argument or an explanation.  At the end if the PUNCHLINE echos the HOOK in someway, then we've got what I call a BOOKENDS strategy. 

 

	Figures

Now if you can write a story using this Tree World or Box World strategy adorning it with a line of narrative (of course the line of narrative is just the line along which you expect the narrative to develop), then it seems quite reasonable that you can do the inverse, that is you can listen to a narrative or you can read a narrative and create either the set of boxes or labels and structures or scenes or events, whatever you want to call them, that make up the narrative.  If you do this in a nice summary way you will have a good set of notes.  A simply transcript is almost never a very good set of notes.  The only time when it would be is if the speaker was totally disconnected in what he was saying, but then the notes might be relatively worthless anyway.