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A Brief History of Simplifications

Later, there will be a verbal description of the changes in thesediagrams.
For now, you can do a visual comparison to see how the diagrams have changed.


Links to other "Brief History of ISM" pages:
ISM       colors      IDM


1990-1991

In response to feedback that ISM-diagrams were "too complexto cope with comfortably,"
in 1991 I began to verbally describe a "one part at a time" approachto understanding the diagram,
and sketched rough drafts that showed how to split the whole diagram intosmaller parts;
two computer-drawn versions (from June 1993 and October 1995) are shownbelow.


June 1993

 


October 1995

There are two versions below: one that'sbeen reduced to half-size (it's tough to read the text,
but you can see the separation into 4 parts), and the original full-sizedversion that is huge!

 

 

 

 


When I moved the dissertation online, the major change was toadd COLOR.
This doesn't simplify the diagram (in fact, it increases the complexity),
but it does make it much easier for the mind to COPE with the complexity,and
this is the goal -- communicating complex ideas so the viewer's mind canunderstand.

But the regular ISM-diagram is too large to fit on some computerscreens, so for this website
I also drew a simplified "compact diagram" to use on the SCIENCE-pageand ISM-page;
two versions are shown below.

June 1997

 

 


July 1997

 


In January 2000, on the "Overview of Scientific Method"page
I began to use "isolations" (to highlight part of the diagram),
such as the one below:

 

 


Links to other "Brief History of ISM" pages:
ISM       colors      IDM
 


URL of this page is http://www.sit.wisc.edu/~crusbult/methods/simple.htm

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