Károly Zsolnai-Fehér explores how to make Two Minute Papers work for both newcomers and regular viewers. He proposes adding a glossary to video descriptions or overlaying definitions for technical terms, and asks the audience which approach works better.
Dear fellow scholars, this is Two Minute Papers with this is not an episode about a paper, but it's about the series itself. There are some minor changes coming and I'm trying my very best to make it as enjoyable as possible to you, so I would really like to hear your opinion on an issue. Many of our episodes are on new topics where I'm trying my best to cover the basics so that the scope of a new research work can be understood clearly. However, as we are continuing our journey deeper into the depths of state of the art research, it inevitably happens that we have to build on already existing knowledge from earlier episodes. The big question is how we should handle such cases. For instance, in the case of a neural network paper, the solution we went for so far was having a quick recap for what a neural network is. We can either have this recap in every episode about for instance, neural networks, fluid simulations, or photorealistic rendering and be insidiously annoying to our seasoned fellow scholars who know it all, or we don't talk about the preliminaries to cater to the more seasoned fellow scholars out there at the expense of new people who are locked out of the conversation as they may be watching their very first episode of Two Minute Papers. So the goal is clear, I'd like the episodes to be as easily understandable as possible, but while keeping the narrative intact so that every term I use is explained in the episode first, I was thinking about handing out a so called dictionary in the video description box where all of these terms would be explained briefly. At first this sounded like a good idea, but most people new to the series would likely not know about it and for them the fact that these episodes are not self contained anymore would perhaps be confusing or even worse, repulsive. The the next idea was that perhaps instead of re explaining these terms over and over again, we could add an overlay text in the video for them. The more seasoned fellow scholars won't be held up because they know what a Lagrangian fluid simulation is, but someone new to the series could also catch up easily just by reading a line of text that pops up. I think this one would be a formidable solution. I would love to know your opinion on these possible solutions. I personally think that the overlay text is the best, but who knows, maybe a better idea gets raised. Please make sure to let me know below in the comment section whether you have started watching two Minute Papers recently or maybe you are a seasoned fellow scholar and how you feel about the issue. Have you ever encountered terms that you didn't understand? Or was it the opposite? Am I beating a dead horse with re explaining all this simple stuff? I'd like to make these episodes the best I possibly can so that the seasoned fellow scholars and people new to the show alike can marvel at the wonders of research. All feedback is welcome, and please make sure to leave a comment so I can better understand how you feel about this issue and what would make you happier. Thanks for watching and for your generous support and I'll see you next time.
