Updates to Thought Cloud
Making Thought Cloud more cloud-like
Recently I came across the digital garden and learning in public ethos around internet blogging. The central idea is that personal blogs need not be so magazine-like, where a reverse chronological feed displays finalized and static essays. The idea is to continually edit and curate past work as your thinking changes, and to present the work in a less linear way. The foci of interactivity and replacing date-ordered lists are particularly compelling to me, so I’m partially moving Thought Cloud to my personal website where I have much more control over the format and visuals than on Substack. I plan to still post short introductions on Substack to send notifications/emails but then link to my website.
Learning in public is not so different from the push toward open science. Preprints and open review formats, for example, both expose a previously hidden part of the scientific process to the public. But far before the preprint stage, I have partial results that I ultimately decide not to pursue, things I try that do not work, or small insights that are not really interesting enough for a paper but nonetheless shape the way I’m thinking about a topic. Writing these things down in public forces me to be slightly more rigorous than I otherwise would have and creates a better record than a personal journal in case I, or someone else, wants to return to a particular idea. I’ve done some of this but plan to lean more heavily in this direction on Thought Cloud.
This framing is a bit different than a more traditional scientific blog that aims primarily to explain established concepts to a wider audience. Exposition is also great, and I do that here too, but I think the more research-oriented things have been more personally useful. I plan to continue doing both but categorize each post along a dimension of less to more technical.
The move to my website will also fold a number of interactive animations directly into Thought Cloud. Previously, these visualizations were separate from the blog but served a similar purpose, which is to explore technical concepts and make them more accessible, for me and for others. I will also be able to include interactive elements inline in text posts, which will substantially improve both types of content.
To make Thought Cloud more cloud-like and less list-like, the new index page embeds each individual artifact (an essay, an interactive visual, etc.) on a two-dimensional map of concepts. Rather than scrolling a reverse-chronological list, the map organically clusters artifacts based on their topical similarity. The result is an actual cloud of my public thinking, living up to the name Thought Cloud.