Section 71 Appendix: previous work
Here are some things I’ve already written as steps on the road to understanding causal mapping. If you’ve read any of these, you might be interested in how “theories” relate to “causal maps”.
71.1 From “Theorymaker” to “Causal Mapping” and from “Theories of Change” to “Causal Maps”
Previously I was mostly interested in “Theories of Change” from the planning approach of “how should we draw a diagram for this organisation’s theory of change”. The semi-formal logic and associated app is called “Theorymaker”. That question overlaps with the question which most interests me now: “how should we encode this causal statement”, and I believe the first is anyway just a special case of the second. So I’ve previously written about “Theories” as models of causal reality, now I’m referring to them as “Causal Maps” – it comes to pretty much the same thing.
71.2 Articles
- The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect. Pearl, Judea, and Dana Mackenzie. 2018 – Book Review This is now out at JMDE.
- Visualizing Theories of Change – how not to confuse causes and definitions”. In: eVAL, Online Journal of the Evaluation Society in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
- Value in Theories of Change. JMDE.
- Additional notes on the definition of “Theory”. Journal of MultiDisciplinary Evaluation, 15(32), 37-52
71.3 Presentations
71.4 Poster
71.5 Longer blog posts
- When an interview beats an RCT (with cartoon!)
- Scandal or yawn? Simpson’s Paradox hits the IFRC
- Value for Money My first take on the VfM approach by Julian King and OPM, from a Theorymaker perspective.
- Evaluation Paradoxes – blog post at AEA365
- Various posts on LinkedIn
71.6 Resources and apps
- The new app (online version, somewhat behind the development version)
- The app at GitHub
- Slides
- The original Theorymaker app
- Help for the original Theorymaker
- Theorymaker 3, the experimental version of Theorymaker – all the causal maps can be specified with typed text
- Causal Explorer