The question of how to display the different nodes has been one of ongoing thinking since it’s easy to add icons but it’s harder to simplify and I do not want to build messy views. Having developed the dynamic view and being able to use it and ‘feel it’ I have decided that any and all text in the dynamic view should appear in the same way.
In the dynamic view text which appears in the document–or which have a glossary term associated with it–bold and white. Special text, such as that for a citation, an author’s name or a web address, will all be treated the same, except the URL will be underlined.
There will be no special icons or type treatments for different elements-users will know what they are and interactions will remind them.
To Add Nodes (Text)
just type
Keyword: Double-click on the canvas and type. If the keyword is in the document it will be white and bold. On double-click it will open with a list of occurrences in the document.
Glossary Term, same as above. If it is in the document or in the list of glossary terms it will be white and bold. On double-click it will open with definition above the list of occurrences in the document.
or cmd-shift-k (or drag from desktop) or cmd-k
Citation: cmd-shift-k to choose from the list of cited documents or drag a PDF document from the desktop. On double-click it will open with citation information above the list of occurrences in the document. In the dialog there will be options to select all and also to automatically keep adding citations to the dynamic view when they are added to the document.
Image: cmd-shift-k to choose from the list of used images or drag an image from the desktop. On double-click it will open in the document if it was taken from the document and is still present.
Heading: cmd-shift-k to choose from the list of headings used in the document. On double-click it will open to that section in the document.
Web Address: Paste a URL or cmd-k on selected node. On double-click it will open that page in the user’s browser.
Define Nodes
To define a node, for example to define a node as being the name of an author, means creating a glossary term. To do this the user selects the node and ctrl-clicks and chooses ‘Define’ or keyboard ‘cmd-(something)’ or controls will be visible on click–this is not yet decided.
Define Glossary Term Relationship
Drag one node onto another and a dialog will ask:
- Connect
- These Are The Same (only appears if at least one node is a glossary term)
‘Connect’ will then ask the user to describe the relationship in both directions, same as making a new glossary term and connecting it to previous terms.
‘These Are The Same’ will add the non-Glossary term to the aliases of the Glossary term (by adding it to the ‘Name’ field after a ‘,’) if one is a glossary. If both are glossary terms a second dialog will ask which one to keep and which one to delete and if the user wants the definition from the deleted one to be moved onto the kept one.
Glossary Term Click for Related Terms
Click to highlight and if it’s a glossary term it will show any connected terms in small boxes, which the user can snap away from the node to drag anywhere (Chris Gutteridge Weblaux style):
If the user chooses to drag another term out of that list, the relationship is indicated by a san-serif font in all caps, aligned along the connecting line. User can click on this text to reverse it (using the relationship definition from the other term, such as ‘invented by’ and ‘invented’) and hide it and only have the line:
The user can drag a term onto other text and the system will prompt the user to specify a relationship or to state that the terms are the same.
Double-Click-For-More View
The user can double click to see all occurs of that text, as usual, but with the glossary definition or citation information on top:
