Explorable Explanations
March 10, 2011
Ten Brighter Ideas?
Holy shit. How have I never seen this? It’s blowing my brain. In many ways, this website represents much of my vision for LogicHub. He even says:
As you explore this document, imagine a world where we expect every claim to be accompanied by an explorable analysis, and every statistic to be linked to a primary source. Imagine collecting data and designing analyses in a collaborative wiki-like manner.
Published on March 29, 2010, this was the first explorable explanation. As I currently go through his work in order of creation, I am recognizing a pattern: first he creates something he’s passionate about, then he generalizes it via an essay. He did this with the BART widget and Magic Ink, and here with Ten Brighter Ideas and Explorable Explanations. It makes me wonder if I should be working on more concrete problems that I’m passionate about first and then try and abstract from there into a tool afterwards.
In fact, I would argue that Ten Brighter Ideas is so much better than most explorable explanations that I feel like the idea isn’t done justice.
Debate
Multiple authors could model the same situation, and readers could compare. If you look at the groups for and against the above proposition, you’ll see they’re basically just hurling around unsourced soundbites, leaving readers little to go on besides emotional appeal. What if both sides were expected to offer reactive documents, and the reader could critically explore their predicted scenarios?
Wow, this is quite similar to my LogicHub idea.
Inform
This tools like a really neat tool to build interactive fiction: http://inform7.com