Conversation

Matthew Conlen
@mathisonian
This is an insightful thread from
@andy_matuschak
critiquing our recent post "Communicating with Interactive Articles" on
@distillpub
. I've followed Andy for a while and respect his work, so I feel its worth responding and pointing out that we (mostly) don't disagree!
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Andy Matuschak
@andy_matuschak
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This is a thoughtful new review of the “interactive explanation” milieu: distill.pub/2020/communica. 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.
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Matthew Conlen
@mathisonian
First where we see things differently: I absolutely don't believe that by publishing this we're selling short the potential of computational media/representations. We don't claim to cover every possible use, rather cover a specific case ("communication”) in depth.
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Matthew Conlen
@mathisonian
I also don't think its fair to dismiss as "one-off." True its difficult for research to build in interdisciplinary spaces, but such a review can't exist without the work it pulls from & (hopefully) helps the process of accretion, making references accessible across domains
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Matthew Conlen
@mathisonian
That said, I fully agree with Andy that there is more that can be done with computational media & representations beyond communication, and eagerly anticipate more research and writing on this. I just don't think that its one or the other, there's room for both.
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Matthew Conlen
@mathisonian
The potential of new "tools for thought" is huge, and I would love to see this get written, especially by a true practitioner of the domain. I know I'm not alone here,
@andy_matuschak
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Andy Matuschak
@andy_matuschak
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(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…)
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Andy Matuschak
@andy_matuschak
Yeah, sounds like we broadly agree. I should clarify: I’m not concerned with whether *this piece* is selling the medium short or is/isn’t accretive. It’s just what nudged me to write. My concerns are rather with the framing usually used (implicitly/explicitly) by the cited works.
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