Comment by colah3

9 years ago

Thanks! We're just lucky to have authors like Gabe (@gabrielgoh) come to us with incredible articles. :)

9 comments

colah3

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stared  9 years ago

How to know if an article would fit there? For example, I was thinking about adjusting my http://p.migdal.pl/2017/01/06/king-man-woman-queen-why.html (already with some interactive components) or writing about RoI polling (https://deepsense.io/region-of-interest-pooling-explained/ - by my colleague, but more interactive).

Would it be on-topic? (After changing style accordingly.)

  • colah3  9 years ago

    Please check out our journal policies page: http://distill.pub/journal/

    In brief, Distill needs to see three things to publish an article: outstanding communication, advancing the dialogue, and scientific integrity. Distill often works with authors to help them bring their articles up to our standards.

    Additionally, as a primary publication, Distill will not republish content already published elsewhere, or publish "translations" of papers where someone rewrites the content of a previous paper. (This relates to advancing the dialogue.)

    If you reach out to editors@distill.pub, we're happy to discuss pre-submission inquiries about journal scope and related topics.

    • stared  9 years ago

      Thank you! Of course I read it, just (as it is a new thing) still guessing what is a good fit, and what isn't.

      (For some reason I though that this t-SNE article was published elsewhere. Now I see that it was on Distill, but just before its big start.)

      2 replies →

brut  9 years 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.

  • gabrielgoh  9 years 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.

    • plafl  9 years 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.

    • colah3  9 years 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.