The Scientist is a Storyteller

I always stress the fact that presenting scientific data or describing a scientific achievement needs a good story. The scientist should be also a storyteller that captures the audience attention, that stimulate curiosity and that evoke mental images.

I have just found a short article by Roald Hoffmann (chemist, Nobel laureate and engaging writer) that says the same things, but in a much better way.

The report review agony

At last i have finished the report "From Tradition to Insight Support - What we can ask to our Chemistry Visualization tools". I'm quite happy of the result. But before this you should pass through the "review agony": the more you read it, the more errors you find. This, plus no one that help and sympathize with you.
Anyway, here are some sparse ideas i want to share with you about the "review agony":

• Colleagues are always busy and do not find time to help you reading and correcting your paper. I do not speak about reviewing the content of the paper. This is asking too much. It is simply asking to read and correct the language.
• Correcting and revising a paper works better on paper with a red pen. On video is not the same. Why?
• It is vital to have a deadline. Everytime you re-read the paper you find things to change or polish. So it is important to force yourself to stop.
• A tool like latex2rtf is really useful. Word is really helpful for spotting errors. Well, you have to take cum grano salis its suggestions.
• When you find a reference, you should enter it immediately in a Bibtex database. Otherwise entering it during the paper writing is a mess.
• Latex is really not so bad. If you do not do anything too complex it is really simple to use.
• Remove the "Latex look" from documents produced using Latex. You now, this peculiar font and spacing. that make them immediately recognizable. Well, I added a simple \usepackage{txfonts} and \usepackage{parskip} and everything looks more interesting (try it).
• Same source, different result on Linux and Windows. Bleah!

Visualization Tools and Games

To create more effective visualization tools, we can look to the area of video games. Here the immersion, called "playability", is of supreme importance. The gamers do not want to be distracted by peripheral interaction issues; they want to reach the game goal. They want "fluid interaction" with the tool.

This is exactly the same goal pursued by a researcher looking to an unknown structure. Think about options selection: currently the user should find a menu, find the right menu and push the right option. Instead something similar to a 3D menu widget or semi-transparent display positioned near the attention point distracts a lot less.

I collected some papers and someday I plan to explore the issue (if I can find someone that could work with me)

But...

• There are constrains from the operating systems producers that are not interested to change the status quo
• There is an uniformity issue: Exit is always under the File menu etc.
• If you want the certification sign (Win logo for example) you should follow the interface guidelines of the platform. Maya for example has circular popup menus but no Win Logo.

On the other side:

• If you use only one application you do not need uniformity.

Summarizing: it seems the eternal fight between standarization and innovation. But if you want to explore new territories, you need to do something different and look at the results.

From Tradition to Insight Support

I have just finished writing this report that carries as subtitle: What we can ask to our Chemistry Visualization tools

If Monday, during the CSCS's User Day, it will collects nice comments from our users, it will be somehow published for comment here. For now here is the abstract:

“There has always been a strong relationship between chemists’ understanding of chemical phenomena and the associated external representations.

It is thus common wisdom that visualization tools should play a prominent role in the chemistry discovery cycle, and they do indeed.

But looking at them with a non-chemist eye, reveal that they implement some interesting visualization ideas, but fall short on the perceptual support side and, more important, on the human-computer interaction (HCI) principle implementation.

In this work we substantiate those findings with a tool survey and an inventory of chemistry representation methods. We hope those two results would be the basis for engaging a discussion with the chemist research community to clarify, understand and define the characteristics that an effective chemistry visualization tool should have”.

Starting

I'm always experimenting with new technologies...

So here is a Blog about Chemistry Visualization. It wants to be as a starting effort to communicate and collaborate about topics of interest of the Chemistry community about visualization tools and methods.

First of all the plan is to publish and share what I'm doing here at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) with my chemistry users: tools, research, tips, etc. etc.

Beside this, this blog it's an experiment in community building. Will it have success? Time will tell.