Josh Pollock's personal website.
We often think of external representations as separate islands. We have charts over here, diagrams over there, maps over there, and so on. I don’t really view it that way. I enjoy finding bridges between these different islands. In fact I think there is tons of exciting work to be done by looking for these bridges, and I wish that the visualization research community would invest more in studying…
i’m nearing the end of my phd. was i happy doing it? for large parts of it, the answer has been no. some of that has just been old patterns that have pushed me towards doing work that superficially feels nice, but is really avoiding my emotions and leads to stress, anxiety, frustration. but other parts of that have been trying to change my work process to be someone i’m not. i need to be more…
The usefulness of pie charts continues to be a very contentious issue in VIS, because of the long shadow of Cleveland and McGill’s experiments that led to VIS’s modern theory of “effectiveness.” I’m not really here to criticize that study, because I think it’s actually pretty good. I do think the theory is far from complete. It’s been 40 years. We can do a lot better. Anyways, pie charts and bar…
aliveness is live coding in strudel with lu aliveness is dancing with someone and aliveness is watching someone sing rent and aliveness is peter spiderman and aliveness is the source running through us and aliveness is something bigger. born from the collective and aliveness is harmony and aliveness is play and aliveness is a crooked mirror and aliveness is from the source and returning to it and…
I get asked a lot in the lab to help people out with API and language design. I wish I had resources I could point people at to learn better, but I don’t. As with most (all?) skills, I know that it should be some combination of deliberate practice and developing awareness. I’m slowly building up design heuristics/how to attune to features of a domain including orthogonality and consistency. But I…
Formalism and Awareness Skill building helps us focus our awareness. Formalism is an incredible scalpel for sharpening thought. It forces us to be really precise about what we mean. There is nothing more formal than a (classical) computer program. It is even more formal than mathematics. Formalisms often force us to erase syntactic differences between concepts to uncover more parallels. A sequence…
This post is from November 26, 2021. I have lightly edited it and published it now, because the ideas are still on my mind. I played jazz trumpet from elementary school through mid-way through college. I was no Joe Hellerstein, but I did have some amazing opportunities to learn from and play with a lot of amazing musicians. This experience has profoundly influenced the way I approach grad school.…
(updated 2024-12-21) HCI Is the Bottleneck in a World with Strong AI As model capabilities advance, we are rapidly gaining the ability to generate images, videos, and audio from simple text prompts that are indistinguishable from human-generated content. Yet, even if we discount existing flaws with models, there’s still a huge gap between model capabilities and systems that are effective in…
Hide it in a box. Tape it shut. All the duct tape in the world will do. Don’t feel. Feeling is an avalanche. Too much. Best not to feel. When I’m in my little house not feeling, the feeling is a bright burning light outside. Too bright for me. I stay inside. All good.
Purpose: This is a pep talk document. If you’re ever on the fence about writing a post. Return to this place. The only way to fail is not to finish writing it It’s literally impossible to fail because it’s too low quality, too hard to read, wrong software, planned wrong, confusing, etc Have you seen the Internet? It’s basically inconceivable that you will write something below average Hence, I…