Maps of Content is a concept I heard of from Nick Milo, the genius PKM Creator behind linking your thinking. He said it’s like a workbench for your ideas, and I loved that metaphor.

Every iteration of a MOC I’ve ever seen and created myself has been a linear list of links to other notes, like an index of your notes on a broader topic.

This format didn’t inspire me as I’m realising I like a more visual representation of my knowledge, so one day, realising I needed a higher-level way of organising my Capacities notes on the Early Modern Era, I created a visual map of content in Capacities.

What I did

I created an object called ‘Map of Content’ where I thought I’d put all visualisations of my ideas, collected by theme. Now typically in Capacities I do this with a tag, as I’ve written about previously. However useful the tag implementation is in Capacities, I wanted the opportunity to arrange the results in a way I wanted to. I wanted to be able to add text and choose the layout.

So I combined the two. A blank page in a Map of Content object, with tags embedded across the page, laid out how I want with the appropriate headings.

How I did it

First you need to make sure the content you want to appear on the page is tagged with the name of the MOC. So I wanted a MOC about the Early Modern Period, so I created an Early Modern Tag, and used the object dashboard to review my content and make sure everything was tagged how I wanted it. I have a lot of content but I actually really enjoyed this process. Then from that point on, I just made sure to add tags to new pages I created.

That means my Early Modern tag is full of entries from across my space, across most objects. If I click on the tag, I can see all of these, but as mentioned I wanted to more flexibly view this information.

So, I opened the MOC page and started embedding this tag.

I created headings per object, embedded the tag (@{tag name}, click on the three dots at the end of the blog and click embed), and then filtered for the content type the heading refers to. I also added a green background to the heading.

I repeated this for all the objects I wanted to show, then arranged them into a column layout (/column) and chose the view I wanted the entries displayed in. I love the wall view, but sometimes the list is better which is what I decided with the events.

This is a super simple process (you can watch the video here) but it gives me flexibility that comes with a growing number of notes. All notes are categorised in Capacities per its organisational structure, but this very structure along with the embedding/filtering options still gives me enough flexibility to organise and view information how I want. It feels like the best of both worlds which gives me a long term solution to knowledge management, that I get a LOT of joy from.

One realisation

This was the first MOC I made and I soon started creating more, but in doing so I came to the realisation that the way of organising I’ve described above doesn’t have to just exist in a Map of Content object. I am keeping this object as a general collection of MOCs, but actually any page I have a lot of content on across all objects could be organised in this way.

The example that made me realise this is America. I have lots of notes across all objects about America, and I made an America MOC to organise it. However, I already have a page called America in my Country object, which has some good metadata that I would want to see in a MOC anyway. So I had the non-ground-breaking realisation that I could simply tag things with ‘America’ and then embed the tag in the America Country page, rather than creating a MOC too.

I am not sure if my views on MOCs are correct, but whatever I’ve been doing under the MOC heading is meeting the note-taking and information organisational needs I currently have, and that’s the priority!

Let me know what you think/if you have any questions, I’d love to chat! If I change my mind about anything here I will be sure to update you all :)

If you want to watch the video demo I did, you can watch here: