organising literature & practice review

I have been almost the last four weeks ‘diving’ into my literature & practice review. One thing that I found extremely helpful was to have a previous organisation of authors, subjects and fields, and, at the same time, from different points of view.
As I did a very systematic and well-organised material classification, I realised this approach can be applied as a research method. This research method is also another manner to show how powerful diagrams could be, as they are the main tool used to organise the huge amount of references.

So, the 5-variables method (as I called it) consists in ordering raw material (e.i. references, including books, articles, journals, thesis and websites) following five variables: who, what, when, how and where.
The images below explain each variable.

1) who? Alphabetical order. This first approach is the more common one, and it is usually used to find alphabetically and easily each author.

A-Z order.

2) what? Thematic order (themes, subjects, fields and disciplines). Sometimes, it is not easy to remember the name of the author, but, instead, it is easier to remember his/her specific subject. First of all, it is essential to define general thematic categories related to the research subject, to be aware of all the points of view covered (or that have to be covered). If the research theme is quite complex, it could be also beneficial to define sub-categories from each general category and distinguish them by colour-saturation.

Once I have all references divided into two main groups: literature and practice review references; I define thematic categories directly related to my theme (diagrams): history/context, diagrams/underground, psychology/perception, linguistics/semiology, methodology/research process, graphic/information design, and thesis. I attached a colour to each category.

3) when? Chronological order, following year of publication.
This is a useful approach for historical research, where knowing which period has been covered is key.
Having references chronologically ordered would help to notice if we have many new references, or that we are not taking into account previous authors. In addition, it can be noticed in which periods of time, a theme was most or less discussed.

Timeline. Each box represents an author/book, and it is organised following its year of publication.

4) how? Interdisciplinary order. Design is an interdisciplinary discipline, where many references come from academic disciplines beyond graphics, such as psychology, informatics, cartography, and so on… This approach shows the connections between authors and subjects from different disciplines (usually this approach follows the categories defined for the what variable). In a glance, it can be seen which disciplines are related to each other and which ones are not.

In the image, each box corresponds to one author, its colour matches with a theme, and its saturation indicates where within the theme this author is placed. A box has more than one colour when it is representing a theme related to another (the second colour). The more colours a box has, the more themes it is related to.

5) where? Geographical order (authors’ countries, cities). This is a useful approach for cultural research where, for example, the bias of a theme is crucial.

In this case, the circles are depicting quantity of author from each theme. The smallest circle is representing less than 10 authors for a specific theme that comes from a same country. The medium circle represents 11-15 authors and the biggest more than 15 authors from the same country. Again, this approach follows the categories defined for the what variable.

Of course, this classification can vary as more material is added, but it can be a useful starting point!

how would you define a diagram?

Yesterday, a friend, who is also doing her PhD related to diagrams (University of Granada), sent me an email asking me that question. She also sent me a kind of research she has been done in Google images. She introduced the word ‘diagram’ in English, Spanish and German in Google images and the results were quite interesting. See below some of the images.

Spanish results of the term 'diagrama' (Paloma Lopez)

English results of the term 'diagram' (Paloma Lopez)

German results of the term 'diagramm' (Paloma Lopez)

Analysing the images, it can be seen that in Spanish the term ‘diagram’ seems to be denoting more complex structures, while most of the English images are linear and simpler layouts. In German, images related to the term ‘diagram’ are basic diagrams, such as pie charts, bar charts, flow charts.

Undoubtedly, what is common in the three languages is that a diagram is composed by a visual (graphic or typographical) structure that employs synthetic and schematic language to represent connections between components, quantities, directionality, functions. In terms of diagrams layout, there is a long list of parameters that can define diagrams structure, for instance the kind of information represented, the media where the diagram is going to be, the purpose of the diagram, its audience, among others.