Explorable Explanations

エクスプローラブル・エクスプラネーション / 2011– / Technique / Reading on the Web

The name Bret Victor gave, in a March 2011 essay of the same title, to writing that embeds a running model inside the prose. Numbers in the body text carry a dotted underline and can be dragged, and pulling one rewrites the rest of the sentence and the figure beside it at the same time. He described the result as a written argument whose assertions are backed by explorable computational models.

Numbers inside the running text sit on a dotted underline and turn blue when touched / Dragging one of those numbers rewrites the following sentence and the neighboring figure at once / Figures are not quarantined in a separate sandbox but sit continuous with the paragraphs around them / Untouched, the piece still reads, because the default values already make the figures meaningful

Explorable Explanations — Vi Hart／Nicky Case《Parable of the Polygons》2014年 — Wikimedia Commons / CC0 — Vi Hart／Nicky Case《Parable of the Polygons》2014年 — Wikimedia Commons / CC0 ／ Nicky Case《To Build a Better Ballot》2016年 — Wikimedia Commons / CC0 ／ Piotr Migdał《Virtual Lab by Quantum Flytrap》2024年 — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0

Explorable Explanations — Nicky Case《To Build a Better Ballot》2016年 — Wikimedia Commons / CC0 — Vi Hart／Nicky Case《Parable of the Polygons》2014年 — Wikimedia Commons / CC0 ／ Nicky Case《To Build a Better Ballot》2016年 — Wikimedia Commons / CC0 ／ Piotr Migdał《Virtual Lab by Quantum Flytrap》2024年 — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0

Dictionary entry

Best used for: Publishing an explanation built on a model, where readers should be able to change the assumptions themselves · Teaching material that has to show not just the conclusion but the conditions under which it flips
Type: Set the prose like ordinary reading matter; mark only the live numbers, with an underline and a color, and never with a different typeface.
Composition: Hold the text to a single column of roughly 600px and place each figure beside or directly after the paragraph it belongs to, close enough that the handle and its effect share one field of view.
Material: Limit the interaction to grabbing and dragging, with no input fields and no submit buttons, and always ship default values that already say something.
Caution: If the content only shows up once the reader touches something, everyone who does not touch it gets a blank article.
Further study: Bret Victorの2011年の記事本体と、そこで公開されたTangleの実装 / reactive document、explorable example、contextual informationという3つの型の違い / 同じ主張を静止した図と可変の図で書き分け、どこで理解が分かれるか試す

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