What makes a great infographic? Edward Tufte, in his book Beautiful Evidence (2006), proposes the six basic principles of “analytical design” (he means infographics). Are these the principles that everyone should follow when designing information graphics?
Well, Tufte’s own principles do …
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Pedro Domingos likes big ideas. He sets out to describe to us how computers can write their own programs. For example, there is the well-established case of handwriting recognition. This is a form of machine learning in which the computer is …
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Perhaps it is the innocence of Jimmy Whale, Wikipedia’s founder, or perhaps it is an innocence shared by all the Wikipedia editors. Either way, Wikipedia is surrounded by a sweet optimism that is at odds with the reality of the actual …
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TrendMD is (as its website states) “a content recommendation engine for scholarly publishers, which powers personalized recommendations for thousands of sites”. An interesting blog post by Matt Cockerill of TrendMD (published February 2016) claims “TrendMD’s collaborative filtering engine improves clickthrough rates 272% …
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According to publishers’ own figures (reported in The Guardian in February 2016), there was a decline in ebook sales in 2015 compared to the preceding year. Although this decline was small compared to the previous year (a drop of only …
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The Journal Impact Factor has been discussed, and criticized, for years. A recent Scholarly Kitchen article looks at another proposal for improving the impact factor (Optical Illusions, 21 July 2016). This is by no means the first suggested improvement …
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It is a sign of the maturity of open access that good, reliable figures are available. The latest stats from OASPA, the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Assocation, reveal that there were 160,995 open-access articles published in 2015. What do they mean …
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Any author will ask questions such as the ones above, and academic authors are no exception. In one sense, we have better answers than were possible just 20 years ago. Although thousands of copies of print books are sold per year, …
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Do you understand this graphic? It is an example of a sparkline, by Edward Tufte. Tufte was, if not the originator of sparklines, one of its earliest advocates. He wrote about them in his book Beautiful Evidence (2006); he defines sparklines as …
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Just as you think that Open Access has come of age: discussions have all been concluded, funding and administrative bodies such as the EU (in Europe) and HEFCE and RCUK (in the UK) have mandated it, you attend an event like …
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