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by brut 3360 days ago
I'm curious, did the author write the whole article including figures, or did someone else give life to the figures?

I can see this type of interactive journal becoming very popular in other fields, but not if the author has to create the diagrams him/herself.
1 comments
gabrielgoh 3360 days ago
Author here - I've created all the diagrams, though I've received really helpful editorial input from Shan Carter and Chris Olah. If you feel like doing some archeology, you can see for yourself the really ugly drafts in the github history - it isn't pretty!

I think these visualizations are deceptively easy to create. Javascript is a powerful language with many libraries, and in my experience, it just took a few nudges at exactly the right spots from Shan to go from an idea in my head to fully fledged diagram in distill. The tricky part has always been figuring out what to visualize, and if you're a researcher with an clever idea for a visualization, I recommend you reach out to the distill team.

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plafl 3359 days ago
Thank you very much for the article, I'm really enjoying it. I have a few comments:

- When hovering over some notes I see the citations perfectly, but when there is math involved like for example the one about spectral decay the math is not rendered (I'm using Ubuntu, I have tested both in Firefox and Chrome).

- I see you can open issues on github to send corrections. I wonder if there are other channels of communication also to, for example, address problems like the previous one and also to discuss the article.

- I see people like a lot the figures. I think too they are great but what I really love is the writing and the math exposition.

- I think that a default animation for the figures, if they are meant to be manipulated, would be great.

I will say it again: great article. I have bookmarked the journal and I will proceed to read everything published which looks very promising too.

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colah3 3360 days ago
As Gabe said, we mostly expect authors to produce diagrams and us to help edit them into outstanding articles. This is one example of the editing:

https://github.com/distillpub/post--momentum/issues/1

We've also had a few designers volunteer to work with researchers on visualization. So, in special cases, we may match-make researchers with designers to produce a great article.

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