The Gettysburg Address as a mind map

I’m sure that some of you have seen Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address – a moving speech from U.S. history that is a marvel of brevity and impact – converted into a PowerPoint presentation. Created by Peter Norvig, his goal in creating it was to demonstrate how this visual presentation medium can often obscure rather than enhance the point. I just stumbled across it again this morning. Something compelled me to wonder: What would Lincoln’s oratory would look like as a mind map? So I created one, based on Norvig’s PowerPoint of the Gettysburg Address (PDF format, 54KB).

What do you think? Unfortunately, the mind map format doesn’t create much more clarity than the PowerPoint version. It just goes to show that not everything can or should be captured in a visual map!