Araucaria

The Internet is filled with all sort of applications and programs that you could use in order to manage your files. One of them is Araucaria.
It's a software solution designed to build argument diagrams by selecting phrases of text to represent the premises and conclusion of an argument and building a tree diagram interactively using the mouse.

Lightweight and clean graphical interface

The application doesn't take long to install and it doesn't come with a complicated setup that you would need to complete before you can actually use it. It sports a clean and intuitive graphical interface with many nice tools at hand.
Araucaria is a software solution designed to build argument diagrams by selecting phrases of text to represent the premises and conclusion of an argument and building a tree diagram interactively using the mouse.

Explore various sections

The argument text may be loaded from a disk file, and is displayed in the blue panel on the left. Araucaria supports different diagramming styles, currently the Standard "box-and-arrow" approach, and the Toulmin approach.
The application shows summary statistics concerning the current argument analysis, and provide access to the source and comments fields. The program comes with the option to create schemes. It allows you to edit, add or delete argument schemes.
You may select an existing scheme for editing, create a new scheme, or delete an existing scheme. Within each scheme, premises and critical questions may be edited in a similar way.

More features and tools

You can save the current schemeset as an AML file, but with a .scm extension (to distinguish it from saved arguments, which have an .aml extension). It also displays evaluation lables on the main diagram (and also in the full text diagram). Evaluations appear as small pink labels next to the nodes they evaluate.
All in all, Araucaria is a very useful software solution designed to build argument diagrams by selecting phrases of text to represent the premises and conclusion of an argument and building a tree diagram interactively using the mouse.