Side by side

One frustration when reading academic papers and alike is the difficulty of assessing figures and tables at the same time as reading their description in the paper. The worst manifestation of this is journals that send papers for review with the tables and figures right at the end of the document! But even reading published work often involves flipping back and forth. The best thing about Twitter is finding out about new stuff. A post about parallaxr crossed my time line. Intrigued about what a parallax scroll document was, I took a look. It occurred to me it was possibly an interesting way to view figures and text simultaneously while still moving through a document or paper.

On left is covid 19 cases in Glasgow since August. The trend shows a relatively rapid rise until a recent decline. Now as you scroll down the picture will change

and now we can see the trend for Edinburgh. Both graphs are cases by specimen date so the last couple of days' data are incomplete. Link to the data source, and to the R code. The parallaxr R package is simple to use and I guess you could extend the idea to specifically focus on academic papers .