The deadlines for the workshop proposal approaches, should we coordinate somewhere else? who wants to help?

An alternative name I thought about is "Computing Systems Collective" 😄

Thanks for writing this.

I think of myself as an "off-brand gentleman researcher" [A] who has also tried building products and businesses in the past. So I may not have anything in common with "real" researchers. On the other hand, "it doesn't feel like research" is a problem I wrestle with everyday.

The way I think about it lately is, we're all (researchers, artists, founders) people surrounded by an environment of great beauty. But the beauty is kinda stark. Not that different from the environment we evolved for, achingly beautiful landscapes indifferent to our survival. Our advantage today: survival is seldom at issue. Our disadvantage: there's also a lot less reason to band together, first by survival becoming a given over the last 10,000 years, and then by the great expansion of the state space of beautiful things we could go look at. Computers have given us new ways to find and appreciate beauty that we didn't have before. The key bottleneck now seems to be to get some number of people to care about the beauty we're looking at. It seems more meaningful somehow if we share beauty and appreciation deeply with others.

Art, research and business seem like heuristics to improve the odds that others will engage with what we're engaging with:

• Art: it's beautiful and it's right here! Just try experiencing it!
• Research: it'll be useful to you, and give you (researcher) more tools to go exploring yourself.
• Business: it'll be useful to you, and you (investor, employee, conference attendee where I'm on the panel) should care about it because I've got a lot of money / am going to have a lot of money, and maybe you can get a lot too. (Yes, sounds crass. But am I being overly uncharitable? Is there more reason here that I am forgetting?)

Anyways, I'm not sure what I'm saying. I guess I'm wondering if "research" is a well-posed category beyond a trade network for getting funded and earning a living. The boundaries between the above heuristics seem porous, and I think there may be space to discover new heuristics.

Thanks for a thought-provoking post!

[A] Some recent "papers" I've written: 1 2 3 4

The boundaries between the above heuristics seem porous, and I think there may be space to discover new heuristics

Absolutely. I share your ambivalence the labels on some of the work I do. Is it research? Art? Inquiry? etc.

To me there is something rewarding about doing stuff that is "novel" in some way, whether that is published at a conference/journal or just a blog post. Realistically most of the work is not like that. But it is something I'm interested in and would like to do more of in the future.

PANE does something kind of similar to what you’re showing here, with nested boxes, but is more compact.

In general, I’d recommend working towards compactness. Number: value: "2" has few advantages over 2 .

Here’s how PANE would show a data structure roughly similar to what you’re showing here. Which do you prefer?

neat, I should add indexes as well. How do you decide at which point to lay-out a list horizontally?

wrt the numbers: For my thing I do have a view which shows the numbers plain, but the view from the screenshot is intended to print the structure as raw as possible. It's an early buggy testing system where I'd wanna catch stuff like extraneous properties being added

I explored structured outlines some time ago

just in case, that gloodata is not the current one

akovantsev.github.io/corpus/spy

paste e.g. vega.github.io/schema/vega-lite/v4.json there and play with click/cmd+click/alt+click on []{}""

(EDN looks prettier though)

pro tip: then, save page as a single interactive file

people.csail.mit.edu/ebakke/research/reportlayout_infovis2013.pdf and whatever Dataset does

Thanks for the further examples!

Mariano Guerra more UI inspo, nice!

@Misha A interesting I noticed for myself that I prefer information to mostly on grow vertically but seeing your spy, I'm wondering whether opinions differ more on that than I thought.

Tom Lieber I remember seeing this paper a while ago but it left my memory, thanks for bringing it back. It's kind of sad (but reflective of the state of programming), that even the authors only describe it as database UI when I don't know why we'd want to look at nested data anywhere in any other way.

For Dataset I think I did not find what was meant

@Gregor it depends on what are you looking at and what are you looking for. Some things are best to be looked at top-down, for others side-by-side does the job. That's why in this spy it is on-demand, as well as collapsed or not.

Also it is info-per-space management: top-down-only and sideways-only are 1D, both-on-demand - 2D, add folding and it is 2.5D

just in case:

click on []{}()" - cycles between collapsed, vertical, horizontal views

cmd+click - clicks on all siblings simultaneously

alt+click - clicks on all similar xpaths, eg value under same key in a list of maps.

this way you dont have to click on every collection item to lay it out to your liking