Bret Victor Redesigns Classic Strogatz Paper (2011)

First, I have to say I love the redesigned paper. It&#x27;s extremely intuitive and easy to read even for people with very little background. In text form I imagine it would be accessible to ten times fewer people at least.<p>I don&#x27;t think all papers should be done this way, but it would be fantastic if more were. Pop-science explanations of papers are almost always too simplistic and almost nobody&#x27;s going to read plain study texts unless they have to.<p>How to explain (somewhat) difficult concepts and ideas has been a sort of hobby of mine for a while, everything from contributing to simple.wikipedia to Reddit comments explaining new studies.<p>I&#x27;m actually thinking of starting a website to create &quot;comic-style&quot; (as the author calls them) explanations of important papers and ideas in science. Would anyone here be interested in writing or explaining papers or ideas? My email&#x27;s in my profile. Even just doing a bit of illustration or writing would help.<p>I&#x27;m also trying to figure out papers and ideas that are important. I&#x27;d like to also include some important things that aren&#x27;t well explained on the internet already, or are only well known within a specific field. Anyone have any suggestions?

No doubt this “sequential art” and “comic-like format” notion was at least partially inspired by Scott McCloud’s “Understanding Comics”[1]. By Bret’s own admission, the book is one of the works that had “an extraordinary effect on [his] life or way of thinking”[2].<p>I agree. That book is phenomenal.<p>[1]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;scottmccloud.com&#x2F;2-print&#x2F;1-uc&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;scottmccloud.com&#x2F;2-print&#x2F;1-uc&#x2F;</a><p>[2]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;worrydream.com&#x2F;#!&#x2F;Links" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;worrydream.com&#x2F;#!&#x2F;Links</a>

I love it when people do take the time to do good information visualisation, especially when it helps everyone understand a complex idea.<p>However, I do think that those who believe that all academic papers should take this form fundamentally misunderstand the purpose of academic papers. Sadly, most of these papers are not about improving universal knowledge - instead they are simply attempting to convey to their peers some insight into a commonly understood problem or question. Because they are aiming at such a small target audience who have a deep understanding of the problem domain, shorthand and skimping on explainatory visualisations is not only an acceptable choice - it can make the difference between a paper being published or not. Few academics have the time, experience or funding to make beautiful visualisations - and those that can afford to spend them on that aspect often do so in exchange for depth of insight - and thus they are often seen as less valuable.

Wouldn&#x27;t it be nice if research teams were able to publish their work in easily accessible html5 interactive applications? Such as ConvNetJS for no sweat browser based CNNs:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cs.stanford.edu&#x2F;people&#x2F;karpathy&#x2F;convnetjs&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cs.stanford.edu&#x2F;people&#x2F;karpathy&#x2F;convnetjs&#x2F;</a><p>But even with libraries such as D3.js for visualization. Or Tensorflow.js for WebGL accelerated learning. Many scientists simply lack the front end skills necessary to create usable demos. Which can mean an opportunity to reach out to a team if you are looking for projects to work on.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bost.ocks.org&#x2F;mike&#x2F;algorithms&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bost.ocks.org&#x2F;mike&#x2F;algorithms&#x2F;</a><p>We can also see where this is ultimately headed with the rise of electronic lab &quot;notebooks&quot; such as JupyterHub for data science. We want an intelligent interface, that could even understand human language to design experiments. It needs to be scalable and distributable to large enterprise research teams spanning multiple locations. Results have to be repeatable, obviously. And with a single click, publishable to the entire scientific community and general public.<p>What the future looks like is science &quot;as a service&quot;

Sure and that&#x27;s why we have science magazines like New Scientist, National Geographic, Nature etc. They read papers most of us won&#x27;t understand and translate them into a form that is more approachable.<p>I would&#x27;t want the actual scientist to also have to worry about the &quot;design representation&quot; of their research. If their work is important enough, others will do it for them.

I think this sort of things are good for scientific divulgation, for the general public, but a poor choice for communication between scientists. The design choices that make for a great popular science article make for a bad scientific paper. Plus, many ideas simply aren&#x27;t amenable to simple pictorial explanation like this one. Good effort nonetheless, but not something of general applicability.

There was a recent interesting paper on the arXiv which argued that the ubiquity of small-world networks was vastly overstated.<p>Can&#x27;t find the paper anymore - did anyone else see this &#x2F; have a link?

I will add that organic chemistry regualarly uses sequential art in the form of chemical reaction mechanisms.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Reaction_mechanism" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Reaction_mechanism</a>

This should have a (2011) tag.

I&#x27;m not sure what point Bret is trying to make here. Of course interactive explanation can be powerful. As a complement to the actual paper, this can be very valuable, similar to how the HTML version of a paper is useful in many contexts.<p>But every scientific paper ever published will be around until the end of humanity, whereas this interactive web page will surely disappear within a decade or two. The scientific paper - a self-contained entity that can be moved around, printed out, archived, searched and annotated - is an incredibly powerful entity.

And of course, Chrome on Android uselessly offers &quot;Simplified View&quot; which breaks the new visual flow of the document.

perhaps the point is also &#x27;code to learn&#x27; - i always thought archiving these constructions would be an interesting way of seeing how tangentially educated people can get themselves from their area of expertise to this result and a fantastic resource for students or life long learners.

nice

Speaking of Victor, this was just posted today:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;worrydream.com&#x2F;NotesOnResonance&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;worrydream.com&#x2F;NotesOnResonance&#x2F;</a><p>HN article:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=16837654" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=16837654</a>

Was this grey text on a white background for most people? I found that it made me squint rather.