How to Develop Ideas with Networks

At its core InfraNodus is a tool that helps discover patterns, hidden connections and gaps in data. You can use it both during the process of writing and ideation — as a live visual feedback tool — or to get a different perspective on any subject, something you've written, or something you're interested in.

Our studies have found that having direct visual feedback on the process of ideation helps think in terms of connections. This means that if you are writing using the graph you are more likely to think of connecting the parts of your discourse which would not otherwise be connected. The additional feedback you get using the Analytics tool on the top topics and the most influential nodes helps you see the patterns and meanings that emerge in your work. The Insight feature helps you discover and bridge the gaps between the different ideas. 

Let's use "artificial intelligence" as a topic that we would like to develop to demonstrate how you can use InfraNodus as an ideation tool. It may be more interesting for you to follow this with your own instance of InfraNodus running, so you can try it in real-time.

Stage 1: Developing an Idea

Step 1: Create Your First Knowledge Graph:

Start by logging into InfraNodus.com and access the main interface. 

Type your initial concept into the text input field (bottom left area): 

For example, let's start with: "Oceans cover more than 70% of Earth's surface and are the foundation of our planet's ecological health. They regulate climate, produce roughly half of the world's oxygen, and support an extraordinary diversity of life — from microscopic phytoplankton to the largest animals on Earth. Yet human activity, through pollution, overfishing, and rising water temperatures driven by climate change, is putting these ecosystems under severe strain. Protecting ocean health is not just an environmental concern — it's essential to the survival of life on land as well."

You will then see the graph: 

Step 2: Use the Discourse Analytics Panel:

On the right side of your screen, you'll see the Discourse Analytics Panel: 


This tool provides different analytical lenses for understanding your knowledge graph:

• AI Insights - Strategic recommendations for developing your ideas
• Main Ideas - The central concepts and their prevalence in your discourse
• Content Gaps - Structural holes where ideas could be better connected
• Relations - How different concepts relate to one another
• Sentiment - The emotional tone and valence of discourse
• Stats - Network statistics and text complexity metrics
• Trends & Structure - Temporal patterns and hierarchies

Step 3: Check the AI Insights:

Click on the "AI Insights" tab: 

It analyses your text graph and surfaces information about your content. 

Use it to extract main ideas, detect content gaps, explore how concepts relate to one another, and assess the overall tone and structure of your text. The built-in question generator also suggests angles worth exploring further, making it useful for research, writing, and critical thinking: 

Step 4: Reveal Content Gaps: 

Navigate to the Content Gaps tab: In the example shown, you can see a gap between Climate Strain (climate, strain, driven) and Oxygen Diversity (roughly, world, produce). 

Use the AI: Question or AI: Idea buttons to generate prompts that help you bridge these gaps, or click Show Another Gap to explore further.

You'll also notice a Conceptual Gateways section below, which surfaces concepts such as life, concern, environmental, and phytoplankton. 

10. Let's continue writing our text, based on the Insight > Action Advice: Bridging the Gaps. In this particular instance we can talk more about predictive capacities of AI that are ecological at their core (linking the topics identified in the Structural Gap and shown on the graph). For instance, how can AI have a certain notion of ecological in its decision-making and analysis process? How can it detect deviations from the sustainable course of events and alert the decision-makers in the markets?

We then reiterate this process several times. The basic idea to oscillate in a system of coordinates with 2 types of strategies — dispersion of attention vs focus, each of which has two polarities — receptive vs proactive.

The image above is also used in the political and social theory of Panarchy, which is an ecological view of development where the objective is not constant growth, but, rather, acceptance of all the important cycles, including the crisis.

It also represents the essence of a creative process: bringing things together and letting them fall apart, listening and acting.

Using the network as a live feedback mechanism on this process we can observe where we are in this cycle at every moment of time and readjust our dynamics accordingly.

Stage 1: Receptive to the existing information, multiplicity towards focus

1 > 2 transition: increasing the specificity of your focus and proactive effort — steps 1-3 above

Stage 2: Proactively creating the information, focusing on a certain subject

2 > 3 transition: focusing, but now becoming receptive — step 4 above

Stage 3: Receptive to the new things, but still focused

3 > 4 transition: listening and then proactively exploring different perspectives — steps 5-7 above

Stage 4: Proactive in dispersing attention and learning new things
 

4 > 1 transition: letting the gaps in the multiplicity we explored reveal themselves — steps 8-9 above

reiteration

1 > 2 transition: focusing on a certain (new) aspect again, developing a new idea.