The HCI academic community does a great job of presenting paper summaries in accessible 5-minute YouTube clips. Gives you the gist of the argument + a friendly face to humanise the research.
Eg. One on absurd outcomes of algorithmic systems:
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Imagine if every academic paper came with a widely accessible video synopsis
Researchers who need to dig into the details would still fund all those $$$ JSTOR subscriptions for access to full papers. The rest of us might get to finally learn what's happening in research labs...
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Like a short intro to someone's thesis? That would make masters/Phd research so much more accessible.
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Definitely valuable for long thesis papers that frankly no one but paid advisors fully read
But even shorter 5-10 page papers with lots of academic jargon are reaching a teeny tiny audience. A few minutes of summarising the main point in plain English would go a very long way.
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Even more broadly β I think short recordings (audio or audio + video) are vastly underused as a way to quickly lead someone through something (code, document, presentation, paper) to catch them up. So much richer than writing down a summary.
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Part of it is probably tooling β screen recording used to be mostly clunky (OBS is nice but not for everyone) and not have sharing integrated ("OK so what do I do with this 150 meg file now π€").
Imagine if you had smth. like Loom integrated w/ e.g. Slack/Discord
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That would be nice.
Re:papers, asking for money for publications of public funded research is a crime.
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Yes! Been thinking about this a lot lately - was wondering if I should do something like this for my own publications & even provide additional context & connections - it is so frustrating to have work stuck behind a paywall & difficult for people to find and engage with!
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