Mind Mapping with the Visual Understanding Environment

March 20, 2010 6:52 PM

The Visual Understanding Environment (VUE) is a free, open source program developed at Tufts University. It lets you create concept (mind) maps and analyze them in various ways. One very useful thing it can do is generate concept maps from .CSV files. Here’s an introductory screencast (length: 6 min 9 sec). You can watch all related videos here. The program runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux.
posted by Jasper Friendly Bear (10 comments total)

This looks pretty cool, and I may actually have something to use it for at work. Which means I can probably get paid to mess around with this long enough to figure out if it's what I'm looking for. Excellent.
posted by FishBike at 7:09 PM on March 20, 2010

I'm a veteran Novamind user (it's the first app I fire up to start work on a new project) but this looks nice. Novamind is not very intuitive when it comes to non-tree structures.
posted by unSane at 7:41 PM on March 20, 2010

I have used the IHMC cmaptools, which I thought was going to be a lot like Vue until I watched this screencast of version 3 (the one in the FPP is to v 2.2). The semantic tools look really cool, and having just started playing with Prezi in my presentations, I can't wait to check out the presentation tools.
posted by cgk at 8:28 PM on March 20, 2010

Maybe Glenn Beck can use it to tie Obama to Hitler.

(Sorry, had to pop on over from the Health Care thread to jump in for moment).

That said, I really like this idea... Have to look at the screencast yet. I really want to see a world building tool with timelines, geographies, relations between key actors, etc... I've never seen something, but I know that mindmaps are related to the idea, so anything that is new in that front I have a definite interest in.
posted by symbioid at 9:22 PM on March 20, 2010

I am gonna have to download this and try it. The research brainstorming ideas are... wow.

Now I can't wait to use something like this with a touch screen. Damn.
posted by symbioid at 9:27 PM on March 20, 2010 [1 favorite]

Cool, thanks! Now I need snow leopard.
posted by carter at 9:42 PM on March 20, 2010

OOOoh ... Zotero Vue plugin!
posted by cgk at 11:03 PM on March 20, 2010

Now I can't wait to use something like this with a touch screen. Damn.

_{Not to gloat, but that's exactly what I'll be doing as soon as the download ends. :)}
posted by the cydonian at 11:35 PM on March 20, 2010

Carter -- there is a download link for pre-Snow Leopard versions of OS X (10.5, 10.4).
posted by jabah at 7:46 AM on March 21, 2010

I just starting using FreeMind for some stuff of my own. This looks much better. Nice find.
posted by chairface at 10:41 PM on March 22, 2010