Attention is All They Need: Exploring the Media Archaeology of the Computer Vision Research Paper
This work addresses the problem of how research communication is commodified in computer vision, offering an incremental analysis to motivate discussions on improving research publishing systems.
The paper examined how the rapid growth in computer vision research, driven by deep learning, has transformed the design and elements of research papers, such as figures and tables, to advertise and measure contributions in an attention economy.
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.