The Literary Machine (LM) is a tool for organizing, recalling, and recombining information. Any information — Web links, sound files or pictures — not just text. Some like the program as a tool for immediate planning. Others use it for keeping thoughts and fragments of work or information that could be valuable someday. In other words, you can use it for memory or organization or both.
The beauty of LM, however, is that it works the way the mind does, with words. Conventional mind mapping and concept mapping programs impose an artificial structure on thought that keeps it "within the box." (Mind mappers are further limited to just one root concept.) LM's consistent focus on words breaks down these walls.
|
Working with the mind's natural flow, LM illuminates an idea's connections in any context. Your database becomes a network, or keyword matrix, that points out relationships and actually stimulates new ideas.Yes, The Literary Machine can help you be smarter. |
I invite you to test it and see if you can find anything quite like it or better.
The Literary Machine's breakthrough approach to creativity is outlined below. Then, to see it in action and see how it teams with other applications, follow the links at the bottom of this page.
LM's tremendous flexibility stems from its innovative, dual-classification system: one an optional, traditional data tree of well defined topics, the other a powerful underlying conceptual network that forms the keyword matrix of LM's revolutionary "fuzzy thinking kernel." It's where you discover relationships, where you find something you filed too long ago to remember what topic it's in, where you dredge up past bits of writing or thinking on a subject, where you go to get an idea.
It links words, concepts, and "ideas." ("Ideas" are represented by items in the program.)
Words are the basic building blocks of The Literary Machine. They comprise your Dictionary, and you link your higher-level constructs to them. A word can consist of letters, numbers, or any combination thereof. It can even consist of several words.
For example, you can make Bob Jones a Dictionary word. Then you can link to it his address, his telephone number, his birthday, and your notes on conversations with him.
Again for example, you can make love a word. Whenever you have a random thought about love, see a quotation about love, find something to read about love, download a song about love or think of something to research about love, you can connect the note or file to the Dictionary word love. Later you can see all the stuff you've gathered and associated with "love" by selecting the word love in your Dictionary and dragging it to the LM desktop.
In LM, a concept comprises one or more Dictionary words. For example, you can connect the words love and acceptance. Doing so creates the concept love and acceptance. Use this hybrid concept as a category for ideas you have that relate to both these Dictionary words.
LM helps you by supporting and complementing your own ability to associate. Imagine that the ideas "love" and "acceptance" come to mind. What do you do? Probably you associate or recall instances of love and acceptance, one after the other. In comparative analysis the essence and relationship of love and acceptance become clear. This is what I designed LM to help us do — not to do our thinking for us but to reveal and illuminate unexplored paths.
The texts, graphics, and media files you store about love and the concepts you connect to love appear as items whenever you drop the Dictionary word love on the LM desktop. You can use many other program devices to put you on the love track as well. Thus, LM mimics the flux of your mind and your tendency to revisit past thoughts.
The Literary Machine was made to store all your notes on all your projects for the rest of your life.
The ideas you build into a concept by assigning two or three Dictionary words to it generate interesting results. Just as Eskimos have many words for "snow," you probably need many concepts to sort out your thinking on "love." Yet sometimes this "extra" hybrid concept level of relationship seems irrelevant. When that happens, you just use your basic Dictionary word as the concept attached to that item. In fact, as a shortcut, LM does that for you by default.
If you make a note (i.e., item) for which you have no concept, simply make a word or word-combination suitable for it as a concept and connect to it!
Dragging a concept to the LM desktop produces a deck of (note) cards. Each card is an item you connected to that concept, and the information it contains could be text, an image, a sound, or all three.
When dragging a Dictionary word to the desktop produces several word-combinations (e.g., concepts), you should review each before opening the connected items. Otherwise the desktop could get so full you couldn't sort the appropriate items from the inappropriate ones.
Working on the three levels of the Literary Machine — words, concepts, and items — you'll never lose a thought, idea, plan, or bit of information again!
|
|
