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Taking Abstracts Seriously
What it would mean to take abstracts seriously -- what is the Distill version of an abstract?
If Distill really succeeds and there are lots of papers, most readers will only read a small number. In this context, it is very valuable to give people a 1-2 min way to engage with the paper.
Interesting to think how this fits in with the existing views of an article. Currently there exist the headline + image on the landing page, which leads to the long-form article. An abstract feels like it would be in between these views—though that's not necessarily how it should be navigated.
I could see them as full page views containing a custom mashup of a traditional abstract, most insightful figure/interaction and big picture/insight. They would need to be authored separately.
Contrast or compare this with strong hero elements which @shancarter says start to feel more like an independent entity already:
The more the hero or title page is interesting content and self contained, the more it because [becomes?] a full-fledged atomic unit of the web
Would an abstract serve a different purpose? Maybe more to depict the insight of the article, whereas a hero element might be more concerned with introducing the topic or problem the article studies?
It's interesting to think about the emotional experience a reader has. SIGGRAPH abstracts sometimes make an impact that you remember years later. The pix2pix demo had the same flavour: https://affinelayer.com/pixsrv/ A good traditional abstract conveys the core point of the paper. Perhaps a good Distill abstract conveys in a more vivid, embodied (?) form the core point of the paper.
It's interesting to think about what would make the pix2pix demo better, if it were considered as a Distill abstract. I think it'd (a) more vividly convey the many tasks (e.g., map-to-photo, night-to-day etc) pix2pix can do; and (b) it might well be shorter.
Interesting framings!
I agree with Ludwig that if it appears inline it should be meant to be read, not implied to be skipped. In that way it's more of an introduction or "lede". Maybe that's what we mean about taking it seriously.
It feels weird that it has two roles: meant to be used independent of the paper to summarize or when browsing, but then also attached the front of the article as the first thing you should read. It's hard to do both well at the same time.
I really like Michaels idealized vision of the abstract. However, I really want to avoid any devices that encourage throat clearing.
On Mar 21, 2017, at 11:42 AM, Michael Nielsen [email protected] wrote:
It's interesting to think about the emotional experience a reader has. SIGGRAPH abstracts sometimes make an impact that you remember years later. The pix2pix demo had the same flavour: https://affinelayer.com/pixsrv/ A good traditional abstract conveys the core point of the paper. Perhaps a good Distill abstract conveys in a more vivid, embodied (?) form the core point of the paper.
It's interesting to think about what would make the pix2pix demo better, if it were considered as a Distill abstract. I think it'd (a) more vividly convey the many tasks (e.g., map-to-photo, night-to-day etc) pix2pix can do; and (b) it might well be shorter.
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BTW, Nature has the abstract serve the double purpose of being the first paragraph of their letters. It's an interesting form. Here's a pretty interesting example, in machine learning: http://www.davidqiu.com:8888/research/nature14236.pdf