Meet @InfoVis_Ebooks, Your Source for Random InfoVis Paper Snippets by Robert Kosara.
From the post:
InfoVis Ebooks takes a random piece of text from a random paper in its repository and tweets it. It has read all of last year’s InfoVis papers, and is now getting started with the VAST proceedings. After that, it will start reading infovis papers published in last year’s EuroVis and CHI conferences, and then work its way back to previous years.
Each tweet contains a reference to the paper the snippet is from. For InfoVis, VAST, and CHI, these are DOIs rather than links. Links get long and distracting, whereas DOIs are much easier to tune out in a tweet. If you want to see the paper, google the DOI string (keep the “doi:” part). You can also take everything but the “doi:” and append it to http://dx.doi.org/ to be redirected to the paper page. For other sources, I will probably have to use links.
As the name suggests, InfoVis Ebooks is about infovis papers. If you want to do the same for SciVis, HCI, or anything else, the code is available on github.
When I first saw this, I thought it would be a source of spam.
But it lingered on a browser tab for a day or so and when I looked back at it, I started to get interested.
Not that this would help a machine but for human readers, seeing the right snippet at the right time, could lead to a good (or bad) idea.
Can’t tell which one in advance but seems like it would be worth the risk.
Perhaps we can’t guarantee serendipity but we can create conditions where it is more likely to happen.
Yes?
PS: If you start one of these feeds, let me know so I can point to it.