Attention is All They Need: Exploring the Media Archaeology of the Computer Vision Research Paper

TL;DR

This paper investigates how the visual elements of computer vision research papers have evolved over the past decade, highlighting the influence of the deep learning era on research communication and dissemination.

Contribution

It offers a media archaeology analysis of research paper elements, emphasizing their role in the research attention economy and proposing considerations for future research publishing practices.

Findings

Changes in figures and tables reflect shifts in research emphasis.

Visual elements serve as tools for advertising and measuring contributions.

The study highlights the sociotechnical implications of research paper design.

Abstract

Research papers, in addition to textual documents, are a designed interface through which researchers communicate. Recently, rapid growth has transformed that interface in many fields of computing. In this work, we examine the effects of this growth from a media archaeology perspective, through the changes to figures and tables in research papers. Specifically, we study these changes in computer vision over the past decade, as the deep learning revolution has driven unprecedented growth in the discipline. We ground our investigation through interviews with veteran researchers spanning computer vision, graphics, and visualization. Our analysis focuses on the research attention economy: how research paper elements contribute towards advertising, measuring, and disseminating an increasingly commodified "contribution." Through this work, we seek to motivate future discussion surrounding the design of both the research paper itself as well as the larger sociotechnical research publishing system, including tools for finding, reading, and writing research papers.