In Scapple, I’m trying to create complicated historical family trees, like Queen Victoria’s or the Julio-Claudians. Scapple is useful for this because you can move the ideas (people) around to find the best way to show how they’re all related.
I could just connect both parents to the child, but that adds a lot of extra lines, which makes the relationships less clear, rather than more clear. Also, you can only choose one parent to connect to the child, and if one person has children with more than one partner, it’s not clear who are the parents are.
Is there a way to connect two things (parents) and then connect that connection to a third thing (child)?
Not really, Scapple doesn’t really use links in a hierarchical sense like that, nor does it consider them to be entities. They are more like collective attributes shared between two designated notes. It probably makes more sense in light of its designed goal of allowing one to easily capture thoughts. Pressing it to create a diagram might be difficult, in light of that, as its visual tools are designed to be thinking aides, not drawing aides.
Yeah, that’s the “really” part of “not really”. You can also use a background shape for the intermediate node, which compacts down nicely into a circle… or other intriguing possibilities.
