Beyond an Audience of One

Showcasing student work to the world.

Photo by Matt Botsford on Unsplash.

Ever since first becoming a professor, I have been obsessed with finding ways where student work in my classes can become something more than just a dry and academic exercise. After all, most assignments and projects are primarily designed for an audience of one person: the instructor (or grader). It has long seemed to me that all that time, creativity, and effort could be better invested into things that could be shared with the world.

I’ve experimented with a bunch of different formats for this — many which I have borrowed from others — including public project presentations, poster displays, and project submissions to academic conferences and journals. I am particularly pleased with the annotated visual analytics bibliography that my students have been contributing to over the years, where all students read their own designated research paper and summarize it each week (more on this another time). However, few of these efforts have become truly impactful.

In Spring 2019, when I was teaching my graduate visual analytics class, I was reading about the new Multiple Views research blog on Medium. There was also a new trend — started by Casey Fiesler, I believe — where the CHI and CSCW conferences were soliciting blog versions of all accepted papers. Inspired by these, it struck me that I could ask my students to do this — write popular science versions of research papers — but for other people’s work. Having to explain someone else’s research in terms that would be understandable to a general audience not only requires understanding the material deeply, but also trains important skills in how to describe technical content to non-technical managers, stakeholders, and laypersons.

Unfortunately, March 2019 was too late for me to make this change in my ongoing visual analytics course (students don’t tend to appreciate haphazardly changing grading requirements on them). Instead, I bided my time until the fall semester.

The Course

During Fall 2019, I taught INST 760, a graduate data visualization course. In total, I had 23 students enrolled in the course. One of their assignments, worth a full 10% of their final grade, was to write a popular science blog post on a visualization research paper. I provided a curated list of 23 research papers and asked the students to sign up for one paper each. The deadline was rolling throughout the semester (which was probably a mistake since I ended up getting most of the submissions at the end).

I created a simple bare-bones publication on Medium to hold the blog posts in one place: VisUMD. This had the benefit in that it gave me editor privileges to read student submissions and make minor copyedits as well as formatting changes. More significant changes I asked students to address themselves. I only published posts when they had attained an appropriate level of quality.

The Results

At the time of writing, twenty of my students have had their blog posts published on VisUMD (with only a few still languishing in the revision process). The VisUMD publication also contains project reports, so to make the research posts more accessible, I tweeted them all in one big thread:

It has been exciting to see the visualization community’s warm welcome of my students’ writings. While some researchers are great at describing their work in a popular format (examples below), much of this research was previously only available in academic papers. For this reason, it feels like my students have actually been able to contribute meaningfully to the visualization research area, something which is often hard to do in a mere course.

This has been a very successful experiment, and I fully intend to continue it in future years. If more of my colleagues take up this idea, we should be able to make quick work of describing visualization and HCI for all!

In the rest of this post follows the text of my assignment. Feel free to use it as desired in your own courses! Note that I have borrowed freely from the CSCW 2018 Medium guidelines as well as the guidelines for the Multiple Views blog.

Assignment: Popular Blog Post

In this assignment you will be writing a blog post summarizing an important paper in the visualization field. The blog post should be around 600–800 words in length. You will be signing up for a research paper to present during class. In other words, you cannot choose which paper to summarize yourself, but you will need to choose from a few available ones. Your blog article will be posted on the VisUMD publication on Medium.

Procedure

1. Create a free Medium account (if you don’t have one).
2. Write your story on Medium.
3. Email me with your account name on Medium so I can add you as a writer.
4. Add your story to the VisUMD publication.
5. Wait for my feedback.
6. Revise the story as needed.

When I am happy with your article, it will be posted to the VisUMD blog for the world to see! I will also tweet individual posts for more exposure.

Grading

I will be grading the blog posts on the following basis:

• Ability to convey complex scientific information in a simple and straightforward manner;
• Appropriate length (between 600 and 800 words);
• The effective use of one or two images to illustrate the work; and
• Effective and high-quality language.

Format and Content

Here are some general guidelines for how to write these blog articles:

• Length: The sweet spot is approximately 800 words (approximately 4 minutes to read), but slightly longer or shorter is acceptable.
• Content: Remember to write for a popular audience. This means writing for impact, giving lots of examples, eliminating jargon, acronyms, and technical terms, and skipping methodology and literature surveys.
• Comprehension: Read the paper you are summarizing at least twice to make sure you understand everything.
• Pitch, Twist, and Hook: Come up with a clear, conscious, and compelling approach to telling your story. Writers often talk about “the hook”; the special part of the story that pulls your reader into reading the rest of the article by virtue of being unexpected, unique, or mind-boggling.
• Title: Come up with a short, simple, and catchy title. Don’t endeavor for the typical long, clumsy, and academic titles you find in scientific papers.
• Summary: Include a short summary paragraph of the gist of the article; ideally one or two sentences that summarize the takeaways.
• Inverted pyramid: Journalists tend to write stories using the so-called Inverted Pyramid format, where the facts are given in decreasing order of importance (i.e. with the most important things first).
• Sentences: Write short, strong, and easy-to-read sentences, ideally with an active voice (i.e., sentences have the form “subject + verb + object”). Grammarly will help flag unwieldy and academic writing.
• Voice: On that note, avoid passive voice if at all possible. It’s even more important here than for a scientific article!
• Parentheses: Parentheses tend to break the flow in running prose. While this is fine in a scientific article, try to avoid using them in a popular article. One or two sets are generally fine, but too many and the narrative becomes hard to read.
• Images: Include at least one image. Be sure to write a descriptive caption (including punctuation); often, you should write multiple sentences to describe the image. There is no premium on text in captions! Also, don’t bother numbering images, but embed where you discuss them.
• References: You don’t need references in the blog post. Keep them in the linked paper and don’t add it to your post. If you need to motivate something, do it in words yourself and don’t rely on the literature. In the worst case, you can provide URLs, but don’t link to academic paper PDFs.
• Paper information: Be sure to include the full citation at the end of the paper. If the paper includes a video or other supplementary material, include it as well! Videos are particularly good to embed.
• Spelling and grammar: It matters! Check carefully and, ideally, have someone else read your post to find issues you missed yourself.

Using Images and Media

Feel free to use any images and media you find in your blog post. If you are writing about work that is not yours, consider reaching out to the authors. Almost any researcher is going to welcome the external exposure your blog post will bring. In fact, most people will be flattered that you are writing about them! Sometimes they may even have additional material that you could not find on a public resource.

If you need basic stock photography to illustrate a point, or to just add something visual to your otherwise boring blog post, take a look at Unsplash or Pexels. All of the photographs there are high quality and free for use (even in commercial settings). Just be careful that stock photos have a certain “feel”, and using too many of them may give your post a generic appearance.

Examples

Here is a collection of examples to use as a reference.

Research papers:

• Why Data Sharing & Privacy Controversies Aren’t Killing Social Media Platforms — by Casey Fiesler
• Ecosystem or Echo-System? Exploring Content Sharing Across Alternative Media Domains —by Kate Starbird
• Explaining the Gap: Visualizing One’s Predictions Improves Recall and Comprehension of Data — by Yea-Sul Kim and Jessica Hullman
• Hack.edu: Examining How College Hackathons Are Perceived By Student Attendees and Non-Attendees — by Philip Guo
• Visualizing Deep Learning Models at Facebook — by Minsuk Kahng and Polo Chau

Summarizing an area or a topic (several papers):

• Sonification: The Power, The Problem — by Robert Kosara
• Blur and Uncertainty — by Robert Kosara
• Understanding Pie Charts — by Robert Kosara

Overview of new technology or API:

• Vistrates: A versatile tool for data analytics — by Karthik Badam
• Introducing Vega-Lite — by Kanit “Ham” Wongsuphasawat, Dominik Moritz, and Jeffrey Heer

Travel or event reports:

• Seven Visualization Talks That Terrified Me At CHI —by Michael Correll
• SIGCSE 2019 Travel Report — by Amy J. Ko

Vision and future directions:

• Next Steps for Data Visualization Research — by UW IDL team

Group blogs:

• ACM CSCW — the CSCW Medium publication
• ACM CHI — the CHI Medium publication
• HCI & Design at UW — UW DUB’s Medium publication
• Sparks of Innovation — the UMD HCIL Medium publication
• Multiple Views: Visualization Research Explained — a Medium publication on visualization research

Further Reading

• Why (and how) academics should blog their papers — by Casey Fiesler
• How to write a blogpost from your journal article

Acknowledgments

The above draws on similar guideline documents written by other people (see Further Reading). In particular, I have borrowed ideas from the CSCW 2018 Medium guidelines as well as the guidelines for the Multiple Views blog.