A look back on 2018 and the Idyll project
It’s been a busy but exciting year. I got to attend the notorious CHI conference in Montreal, and the UIST conference in Berlin. There was a workshop on machine learning at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative in San Francisco, one on linked open data at the New Museum in New York, and a week spent in Beirut working with Data4Change. Oh — also the elections with CNN.
Amidst all that we managed to make some progress on Idyll. As classes are wrapping up in Seattle, I wanted to take the opportunity to collect some of that progress and share it here.
Idyll helped people learn…
In April I published an interactive explanation of the kernel density estimation function. Using Idyll, it took just a few days to put this together, and despite the short development time it seems to really resonate with people who are trying to learn about the topic.
I came across your KDE interactive page this morning and I had to let you know how useful, impressive, and just plain cool it is! I was Googling to learn more about KDE and your website was perfect for quickly teaching me the basics in a way that was easy to understand. Excellent work and thank you!
Out of all my Idyll posts, this one’s prompted the most Twitter messages and emails, and is now featured highly in Google search results for kernel density estimation. It’s inspiring to know that something I wrote with Idyll seems to be reaching the right audience and having a genuine impact on people’s learning.
Fred Hohman and I submitted an interactive article on dimensionality reduction to the Workshop on Visualization for AI Explainability at the IEEE VIS conference. I met Fred last summer when we were both at JPL, and this was a great excuse to continue collaborating.
The article was accepted to the program, and Fred presented it in Berlin. This marks the first acceptance of an Idyll document at an academic venue! We were recognized with an honorable mention for best paper in the workshop.
I worked with Alex Kale, a Ph.D. student in the University of Washington Information School, to produce How To: Tune a Guitar. The article walks readers through the techniques and theory of tuning a guitar using interactive visualizations. The piece was a hit on social media, Hacker News, and was covered by GIGAZINE, a Japanese news website, along with several other design blogs.
Idyll helped people create…
There is a growing excitement around explorable explanations and interactive articles that can help communicate complex topics to a broad, engaged audience. Over the year we’ve seen a steady increase in the number of visitors to our examples and documentation pages, and in the number of downloads of Idyll itself.
This year the Explorable Explanations community hosted their first explorables jam, organized by Nicky Case and Chris Walker. Two Idyll articles were submitted to the jam.
Beat Basics, by Megan Vo, is an explorable explanation that tackles the topic of alternative rhythms in music. The article uses an interactive visual adapted from John Varney’s rhythm wheel to teach readers about 3/4 and 6/8 time. Megan is an undergraduate computer science student at the University of Washington who has also helped work on Idyll.
The Eye, by Ala’, Andrew, Jason, Peter, and Tanya [Ed. note: they didn’t leave any more detailed contact info], uses Idyll to parameterize manually created interactive diagrams to aid readers in understanding how different parts of the human eye contribute to our eyesight.
In addition to the dimensionality reduction article, Fred used Idyll to publish two other posts, each of which explained a particular algorithm using interactive graphics. He wrote about the math behind shuffling decks of cards, and, with Caleb Robinson, covered the pancake problem. The Math of Card Shuffling was featured on the front page of Hacker News.
The Parametric Press is an interactive digital magazine that the Idyll organization is producing with support from O’Reilly Media. The focus is on making important scientific and technical concepts accessible to a wide audience. I’m very excited to see where this project will go, and hope that it will help connect writers with the powerful storytelling capabilities of the web.
If you are interested in participating, the Call for Proposals is now open, with up to $1,000 awarded for accepted entries. We are also interested in talking to anyone who would like to support the project through design, programming, or editing work in service of the stories.
Idyll became more user friendly…
With support from Albert Wenger’s Eutopia Foundation we hired Andrew Osheroff to help improve our core tools. Andrew is one of the original creators of the great Binder tool, and helped us overhaul the idyll command. His work has made it easier to create new posts (with a new idyll create command) and release version updates.
Andrew also built idyll.pub, a free hosting service built for Idyll articles. Anyone can run the command idyll publish and get a publicly available link to their work. The service gives you a unique and stable URL that can be updated as edits are made.
In addition to community members who have been helping track and fix issues on GitHub, several undergraduate students at the University of Washington have made substantial contributions to Idyll over the past year:
- Alan Tan has been working to improve Idyll’s authoring tools, laying the groundwork for an improved debugging process, and has made improvements to the component library.
- Manesh Jhawar has been working on Idyll’s compiler and runtime, and has improved the overall stability and interoperability of these low-level tools.
- Megan Vo has worked to improve and expand our library of examples and is helping design future writing tools built on Idyll.
- Pavan Kumar helped build plugins based on a new compiler and runtime plugin system.
Christian Frisson, a researcher at the University of Calgary, has also contributed to the plugin ecosystem, and has provided great feedback as he’s been using Idyll in some of his work.
Wrapping Up…
We’ve got some exciting things planned for 2019, including the first issue of the Parametric Press, and more. I’m looking forward to a holiday break and sharing more progress soon.
I want to give a special thanks to my advisor Jeffrey Heer for providing invaluable guidance and clarity of thought, to Andrew Sass, Sara Stalla, and Fred Hohman for their work helping build the Parametric Press, and to all of our supporters. If you like what we are doing, please consider donating to our nonprofit collective.
