This is a brief overview for the Shared Reality newbie, so that you can know what you are looking at when you visit an argument map. Watch the video for more, and also browse our other articles.
When you visit an argument map page, you will see something like this:
There should be a description on the right, along with a button that allows you to donate to the map – this money will be used to offer experts and thought-leaders funds to join the debate, and devote time to improving the debate map.On the bottom left-hand corner of the box, you can see a plus, a minus, and a square. The square makes the map full-screen, and the plus and minus can be used to zoom, or you can use your mouse-wheel. You can move the map around within the canvas as well.
This is just for yourself, for convenience, nobody else will see the change. It is helpful when the map has many nodes, and when you expand and collapse a node’s children using the square on the bottom left of a node.
On the top right corner you can see the name and verified Twitter handle of authors invited to own particular nodes – arguments for or against a specific claim, including the primary claim of the map. The square on the bottom right expands any “children” of that node – pro and con arguments relating to that argument.
Here, the argument against the primary claim of this map (the “con” node) has five direct “pro” children – reasons supporting it – and a total of seven descendants.
You can see the descendants for any node expanded after clicking on the box. If it looks like a lot to take in all at once, don’t worry.
You can click on whichever argument you are interested in, and the unrelated nodes will become shaded so that you can ignore them for the moment.
You will just see the direct line from the initial claim to the argument of interest to you.
You can also collapse the children of other nodes, as seen above - so, whether authoring or just viewing a map, you can control how much of the map you see. As someone just viewing a map, you will not be making changes that anyone else can see, so feel free to move the nodes around to make it easier to view the parts of the map that interest you.
There is also a little link icon on the left of each node which you can use to get a link to the node so you can share it.
On the right of each node is a red icon, which you can click to suggest improvements to the node. This will take you to a contact form with some information already filled out about the map and the node. You can let us know if you are an expert in this area and the node is missing something important or has something wrong. This is a great way to contribute if you are not an author on the map, so you cannot (yet, until invited) create a node to object to a claim, but you can see that there is a problem with one of the arguments.We at Shared Reality are always looking for ways to improve – the system and the argument maps themselves – so we always welcome feedback.