Machine learning gets a journal for interactive figures

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Distill wants to be a sandbox for what a scientific paper can be

By Anna Nowogrodzki

Sometimes it’s hard to understand someone else’s research through a static scientific paper. Across countless universities and companies, at whiteboards and cafeteria tables, you’ll find scientists in animated conversations explaining their research to one another, asking questions, playing around with each other’s data: in short, interacting. Across the internet in recent years, people have extended these explanations to include interactive graphics and code.

Now a web-only machine-learning journal called Distill aims to provide a formal home for these interactive graphical explanations, which in recent years have expanded to blogs and other online fora.

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TechBlog: Interactive figures, a mea culpa

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{credit}The Project Twins{/credit}

For the 1 February issue of Nature magazine, I wrote a Toolbox article on interactive figures. Unlike static PDFs or JPEGs, these figures allow users to explore the underlying data and code used to create them, for instance to zoom in on a crowded region of interest, or to probe the robustness of a computational model.

It’s an exceptionally broad and growing field of tech development, and my article name-checks more than a dozen tools. Inevitably, omissions were made, one of which was pointed out within hours of the article going live.

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