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When I was a Ph.D. student I was surprised that in academia (my field was: quantum information theory) the majority of researchers put zero effort, and thought,
by stared 7y ago
When I was a Ph.D. student I was surprised that in academia (my field was: quantum information theory) the majority of researchers put zero effort, and thought, in presenting data in a clean and clear way. (As a reaction I devoted a section in my thesis to say what is data vis.)
One my day "but it is for other specialists". Nope, it is not the problem. Of course, every data vis should be tailored for a specific audience. But there is typically zero though put their either. See section 3.1.2 from https://arxiv.org/abs/1412.6796 https://arxiv.org/abs/1412.6796.
From a more recent one ("Simple diagrams of convoluted neural networks", https://medium.com/inbrowserai/simple-diagrams-of-convoluted-neural-networks-39c097d2925b https://medium.com/inbrowserai/simple-diagrams-of-convoluted...):
"[In academic] research, visualization is a mere afterthought (with a few notable exceptions, including the Distill journal, https://distill.pub/ https://distill.pub/).
One may argue that developing new algorithms and tuning hyperparameters are Real Science/Engineering™, while the visual presentation is the domain of art and has no value. I couldn’t disagree more!
Sure, for computers running a program it does not matter if your code is without indentations and has obscurely named variables. But for people — it does. Academic papers are not a means of discovery — they are a means of communication."
- amitport 7y agoIn my experience, it's just about cost-effectiveness. Proper visualization is hard, researchers have a lot of ground to cover and theory and proper experiments are just more important (not only for journal reviewers). Sure, if have a big research group with man hours to spare someone should focus on that, but it's rare to have that capacity.
- stared 7y agoSure, creating a really good custom data visualization takes time and effort. Using default color themes in a non-ugly library - only minimal care.
- jacobolus 7y agoFriendly note: That arXiv paper would benefit from better color choices in its diagrams. HSL/HSV models should generally be avoided in all contexts. Beyond that, the paper colors reference links #0000ff (neon green). This makes them illegible and unpleasantly distracting. Try a darker (and less intense) color to improve legibility. The bright red links are also a bit distracting, but that’s more a matter of personal preference. There are some good resources in https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse512/19sp/ https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse512/19sp/ which I just ran across recently. e.g. http://www.personal.psu.edu/cab38/ColorSch/ASApaper.html http://www.personal.psu.edu/cab38/ColorSch/ASApaper.html