Some meta thoughts, since I’ve thought a lot about what made the best-textbooks thread work:
I think the inclusion criteria for the best textbook thread were really important. Having a relatively objective inclusion criteria made people more comfortable posting, and made using it as a trusted source a good bit better.
I think having the top-level post update with new additions was really valuable, and caused the post to be a good long-term reference. A github repo might work, but I expect the trivial inconvenience of clicking through the link to make it a lot less useful (you want people to come back to the place where they can submit new visualizations if you want the thing to keep getting new submissions).
Limiting it to one submission per comment was really useful because it allowed for fine-grained upvoting and downvoting of various suggestions, and made navigating the thread a lot easier. I would also recommend doing that.
The inclusion criteria were easy to set for textbooks; textbooks are over a hundred years old as a format, and there are always multiple options for any not-brand-new subject. By contrast most of the really impressive visualizations of huge datasets are younger than 10 years, and it is mostly a question of is there a visualization or not, rather than being able to select among several. That being said, I did consider whether to strive for an authoritative source, but I reason I can do the legwork up front to separate out hobbyist efforts. However, if everyone is more likely to use the list if it only contains authoritative sources (or endorsed by authoritative sources), then I would reconsider and set that as a criteria.
I agree with this directly, particularly the trivial inconvenience point. But I am comfortable doing the legwork on both for now, and we can see which proves the more popular/useful.
This is an excellent point; I will modify the post to include it.
I agree with this directly, particularly the trivial inconvenience point. But I am comfortable doing the legwork on both for now, and we can see which proves the more popular/useful.
Some meta thoughts, since I’ve thought a lot about what made the best-textbooks thread work:
I think the inclusion criteria for the best textbook thread were really important. Having a relatively objective inclusion criteria made people more comfortable posting, and made using it as a trusted source a good bit better.
I think having the top-level post update with new additions was really valuable, and caused the post to be a good long-term reference. A github repo might work, but I expect the trivial inconvenience of clicking through the link to make it a lot less useful (you want people to come back to the place where they can submit new visualizations if you want the thing to keep getting new submissions).
Limiting it to one submission per comment was really useful because it allowed for fine-grained upvoting and downvoting of various suggestions, and made navigating the thread a lot easier. I would also recommend doing that.
I agree with these, for the most part.
The inclusion criteria were easy to set for textbooks; textbooks are over a hundred years old as a format, and there are always multiple options for any not-brand-new subject. By contrast most of the really impressive visualizations of huge datasets are younger than 10 years, and it is mostly a question of is there a visualization or not, rather than being able to select among several. That being said, I did consider whether to strive for an authoritative source, but I reason I can do the legwork up front to separate out hobbyist efforts. However, if everyone is more likely to use the list if it only contains authoritative sources (or endorsed by authoritative sources), then I would reconsider and set that as a criteria.
I agree with this directly, particularly the trivial inconvenience point. But I am comfortable doing the legwork on both for now, and we can see which proves the more popular/useful.
This is an excellent point; I will modify the post to include it.
Nice, thank you for that! :)