Visual density

Your blogger is extra busy this week, and only has time to steal this cartoon from Red Pen / Black Pen on Twitter. Click to enlarge!

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Search engines for technical graphics

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How important are academic graphics? A new pre-print in arXiv argues, “Pretty damn important.” This news summary of the technical article says: (T)heir most remarkable discovery is that the most successful papers tend to have more figures. By plotting the number of diagrams in a paper against its impact, the team concludes that high impact ideas tend to be conveyed visually. Lee and co say there are two possible explanations for this: “That visual information improves the clarity of the paper, leading to more citations, and higher impact, or that high impact papers naturally tend to include new, complex ideas that require visual explanation.” The team has a search engine for scientific graphics called Viziometrics. My first pass, for “crayfish,” gave a mess on non-intuitive results (click to enlarge): Things improved markedly when I selected only for diagrams and photos, however. Speaking of searchable graphics databases, Atlas looks promising for some purposes. I tried searc...
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Link round-up for December 2017

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Critique: Demonic

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Today’s poster is from Christian Casey, and it won first prize in the student poster competition at the 2017 ARCE Annual Meeting . Click to enlarge! My first reaction when I opened this file was, “Oh, that is cool. ” My major concern was the reading order. Do I go across, or down? I wanted to make sure I understood Christian’s intent before shooting my mouth off, so I emailed him, and got this generous reply: That was probably the biggest problem I wrestled with while creating the poster, and I don’t think that my solution is perfect. I understand the story as a branching tree of related concepts, which doesn’t lend itself easily to projection into the one and two dimensions of papers and posters, so I struggled to come up with a way of presenting things that conveyed the way I see them. The idea is that you can read through in more than one direction, depending on what interests you and the amount of prior knowledge you bring, and still experience a coherent story. If you know what pr...
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