Comment by torme | Hacker News Reader

Comment by torme | Hacker News Reader

Neat? Yes.

Usable? No.

I'm not sure if theres some piece of information thats trying to be portrayed here (other than quantity of dissertations per major) but as a browser, it's pretty useless. It employs mystery meat nav heavily, mostly because you have to hover over a dissertation to view any info about it. Imagine finding a paper you liked, and then going back 15 minutes later to try and find it.

If there is some data thats trying to be shown its not clear to me what it is. Some of the inner circles are in columns which seem to indicate correlation, but I cant figure out if thats accurate or not. For instance, if I click on philosphy, I see a dot in the direction of Food Research, and when I hover over that dot I see a thesis about "Practical reasoning and the varieties of agency".

What is trying to be portrayed here?

"What is trying to be portrayed here?"

How dissertations in an area overlap with other areas.

Calling it "Stanford Phd dissertation browser" sets up the wrong expectations, but it's an interesting infographic.

Yep, this is a really bad way to present the information. Having a collapsible columnar list for each department would be orders of magnitude more useful. Plus it would be in HTML, and you could use ctrl/cmd+f to search for dissertations by keyword.

Perfect example of bad data viz.

Yes and no. I found quite useful and visual the way to show the relationship between topics. For example, you can see the close relationship between biology and psychology. I'm not sure a large table could the job.

I see almost no correlation between bio and psych. In fact, I only see 2 articles that link those 2 topics at all.

Usable? Absolutely.

It's automatically clustering topics radially based on proximity to each other and to other disciplines.

Click on CS. Then click on CS again (now in the center). CS + Music is out by the Music field. CS + EE is all in a column pointed to the EE field.

It's a tool for discovery.

If its a tool for discovery than I still say its not usable.

If I went looking for list of articles, linking CS + Music, this doesn't help me. I'd want to click CS, click music, and then receive a list of articles matching that correlation. Instead I have to hover over each dot, and scrub through years to even see titles for things. Sure, I get the "excitement" of not knowing what I'm looking for, but that is not a usable tool for discovering articles.

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