Re: Information Mapping
What is Information Mapping all about? how useful it is for a Technical
writer?
Information Mapping is group of techniques and guidelines for structuring and displaying content. It claims to be based on results fo cognitive psychology, meaning that it is intended to structure and display content in a manner optimized for human cognitive abilities. (I say 'claimed' because I have never checked these claims, but I have no reason whatsoever to doubt that this claim is true.)
The basis of Information Mapping are a handful of principles such as grouping related content into units of appropriate size, properly labelling all such units, separating different types of content (e.g., trying not to mix rules with facts) and more. To this are added some application guidelines like fairly specific layout recommendations.
Some of these principles may seem obvious (and indeed may be), but it still helps to have them formalized and put in a framework.
Information Mapping is also trademarked, and the company tries to keep a fairly tight rein on everything: No books about information mapping are publicly available, you need to have taken a course with them to be allowed to use Information Mapping for your own documents - and that means only yourself, not others in the company -, etc.*
This somewhat esoteric approach may make Information Mapping seem somewhat dubious, but from a purley technical point of view, I have no doubt that it is very useful for technical writers, although it is not a complete solution. For one thing, it does not tell you anything about gathering content - the method assumes that all the content is already available. Also, it does not cover things like indexing. But as a tool for one part of the tech writing process, I feel that it works well.
Hope this helps
Jan Henning
* I have no idea whether any of this has ever been tested in court.
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Jan Henning
ROSEMANN & LAURIDSEN GMBH
Am Schlossberg 14, D-82547 Eurasburg, Germany
Phone: +49 700 0200 0700, Fax: +49 8179 9307-12
E-Mail: henning -at- r-l -dot- de, Web: www.r-l.de
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References:
Information Mapping: From: Beena V Katekar
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