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This is a thoughtful new review of the “interactive explanation” milieu: https://distill.pub/2020/communicating-with-interactive-articles/. I’m a friend of the format—I’ve written articles like this myself—but I worry it’s trapped in a limited framing, selling short the potential of computational representations.
Here's my crux: The Cartesian plane was not invented to disseminate mathematics, or to make math more engaging. It was invented to help *do math*.
The same point can be made about John Snow’s cholera map, Feynman QED diagrams, and our other most powerful representations.
The same point can be made about John Snow’s cholera map, Feynman QED diagrams, and our other most powerful representations.
If you create an interactive representation which amplifies original research, then you can often *also* use it for dissemination, journalism, etc. But if your design goal is “communicating to others,” it’s very unlikely that the representation will amplify original research.
This is what we see in practice, with almost all these articles: representations designed to introduce an audience to an idea, and no more. Many other “explorable” authors have confided uncertainty to me about the impact of this work. With love: I suspect they’re right to worry.
A more aspirational goal is to help decision-makers make complex decisions by “shipping the model”. This aims closer to the mark. But it’s usually lip service: pieces like The Atlas of Redistricting ( https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/redistricting-maps/) are more for idle play than serious analysis.
Even Jupyter-based “executable books” erect huge barriers between embedded figures and ongoing use. Try extracting a model from an article-notebook to use in “real” work. It’s rarely easy, and I think that illustrates the medium’s priorities.
In summary, there’s a reason these articles usually feel like one-offs, and that the field doesn’t seem to be accreting: the representations are rarely deep enough to stand on their own and build upon each other. They’re too often for showing, not for thinking. Bret put it well:
(This topic really deserve a full essay—there are many other important problems and opportunities in this space—but my queue is full enough that tweets are all I can afford for now…)
