Scientific Communication As Sequential Art
This page presents a scientific paper that has been redesigned as a sequence of illustrations with captions. This comic-like format, with tightly-coupled pictures and prose, allows the author to depict and describe simultaneously — show and tell. It is based on Watts and Strogatz's seminal Nature paper on network theory, shown to the right. This paper was chosen because it's accessible to a broad audience, and it's very well-written — already near the limit of clarity for just prose. Try actually reading this design instead of skimming it (it's quicker than it looks!) and consider how the illustrations make abstract descriptions more concrete, and help you maintain the "picture in your head". Further discussion follows. Networks of coupled dynamical systems have been used to model biological oscillators, Josephson junction arrays, excitable media, neural networks, spatial games, genetic control networks and many other self-organizing systems. Ordinarily, the connection topology is assu