Early Idea Database category tree, split in left & right halves
I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to present the Idea Database in the most direct way.
I'd hoped to come up with a single picture, but there was too much information to make the result any stronger than, say, the pages of a book pinned to the wall. I could make it look good, but the actual information and structure would still be buried.
I guess it's obvious that some forms of information cannot be directly expressed. From simplest to most complex:
1) A picture is all there, all at once. Good one give you a feel for the sum of its details.
2) Film and video play out in front of you, and you take as much as you want.
3) You have to walk through each word of a book and recreate its world in your mind.
4) A database can be pictured as a diagram, but with enough encoded structure and detail to make your eyes glaze over. Any "sum of details" is just hinted at.
The diagram on top here is from a very early version of the Idea Database's categories (minus the ideas that would hang from categories); note that they were built from the ground up to fit my interests, and not taken from some general scheme.
The difficulty of positioning the armada of boxes on a page -- forget reflecting what they mean -- was enough to make me give up on the picture, and is why the tree on the home page here turned out to be the closest I could get to a meaningful picture: at least it shows how a selected item fits in the overall structure.