Short definition

A note that lists, for a book or a source, the notes drawn from it and the place each one holds in the book's reasoning.

Full definition

The term belongs to the family of maps of content (MOC) in note systems: pages that orient rather than assert.

In the articles on this blog, a reading map is attached to a specific source — a book, a report. It does not summarise the work: it points to the atomic notes and glossary entries the work has fed, with each one's relation to the book's argument. It is a navigation node and, in a computed graph, a highly connected node.

Usage in the field

Used in a wiki fed by books, when ingesting a source and, later, when analysing the knowledge base's graph.

Synonyms and variants

"Book MOC", "book map".

Not to be confused with

• book summary — a summary of a work in the order the work says things, which keeps the ideas inside the source. The reading map keeps the ideas in the notes and only connects them to the source.
• Thematic note — a synthesis that assembles several notes around an angle and states a thesis. The reading map assembles around a source and states nothing.

Examples

The reading map for April Dunford's Obviously Awesome, linked to 180 notes in a marketing wiki.

Ambiguities / debates

Depending on the system, a page per book is sometimes a navigation map, sometimes a book summary enriched with links; the boundary depends on whether or not the page summarises the content.