Jasmine Otto
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jatazak.bsky.social
Jasmine Otto
@jatazak.bsky.social
Visualization researcher in SF Bay, building intelligent interfaces for critical technical practitioners. On the job market.
PhD Computational Media, UC Santa Cruz. https://jazztap.github.io/
Pinned
Welcome y'all. I'm Jasmine Otto, a visualization researcher who makes bespoke intelligent interfaces for creative collaborations. I'm interested in rituals of simulation, modelling, and decision-making in complex sociotechnical organizations.
Reposted by Jasmine Otto
⏰ tomorrow, Nov 18, 5pm Berlin/4pm London
“Data Vis for Cancer Patient Education“ - a #DataVis #BioVis talk

Link & Abstract: alt-text and also:
biovis.net/2025/meetup/ (right under picture)
November 18, 2025 at 9:53 AM
@ebertini.bsky.social's highlights from VIS this year include our paper on visualization literacy, which is deceptively hard to define.
filwd.substack.com/p/presentati...
Give it a look for practitioner reflections regarding measurement, reading skills, critical thinking.
hal.science/hal-05245265...
Presentation/Paper Highlights from IEEE VIS 2025
Presentations of papers that caught my eye last week in Vienna
filwd.substack.com
November 15, 2025 at 7:33 PM
Reposted by Jasmine Otto
I'll present our work on Embedding Atlas (apple.github.io/embedding-at...) in the @ieeevis.bsky.social session "VIS Short Papers: Explorations in Abstract and Physical Spaces" in Room 1.14 after lunch.
Embedding Atlas
Interactive visualizations for large-scale embeddings. Effortlessly explore, filter, and search through rich metadata.
apple.github.io
November 5, 2025 at 10:49 AM
Reposted by Jasmine Otto
Sam Shields @smshieldsy.bsky.social presents Playtrace Arc Search, which essentially acts as a 'heatmap' of playtraces for designers to use for posthoc analysis. Very neat stuff!
November 10, 2025 at 4:39 PM
Reposted by Jasmine Otto
My rebuke. 286 words, probably including the title, idk.
A (very) brief defence of dialogue choices
In games, the player needs to have something to do.
medium.com
November 10, 2025 at 4:48 PM
Reposted by Jasmine Otto
I don’t know why people complain about writing research grants. It’s basically looking at your history and realizing that all the pieces represent excellent decisions and figuring out how they point in a specific and promising direction

which is definitely not a form of soul destroying self-harm
November 11, 2025 at 6:23 PM
Reposted by Jasmine Otto
Wrote a short piece arguing that higher ed must help steer AI. TLDR: If we outsource this to tech, we outsource our whole business. But rejectionism is basically stalling. If we want to survive, schools themselves must proactively shape AI for education & research. [1/6, unpaywalled at 5/6] +
Opinion | AI Is the Future. Higher Ed Should Shape It.
If we want to stay at the forefront of knowledge production, we must fit technology to our needs.
www.chronicle.com
November 4, 2025 at 7:55 PM
Reposted by Jasmine Otto
My #IEEEVIS 2025 paper explorer is live! 🎉
👉 johnguerra.co/viz/ieeevis2... 👈

An interactive #dataviz to explore 300+ papers by similarity. Perfect for:
✨ Discovering papers related to your interests
✨ Planning which sessions to attend
✨ Creating your own paper list (new!)

Pls help me distribute it
November 2, 2025 at 1:28 PM
Caroline Humphrey's "A Nomadic Diagram", in Working With Diagrams (2022)
> Waddington (1940:11) thought of ‘landscape’ as a metaphor, a new virtual domain for envisioning “the whole complex system of actions and interactions which constitute [cellular] differentiation."
www.jstor.org/stable/27113...
October 28, 2025 at 10:02 PM
Reposted by Jasmine Otto
If you want cons to be smaller, cheaper, more accessible, and less corporate- consider checking out @roguelike.club this weekend, maybe even buying a ticket! Even if proc gen isn’t your fav, I think it can be inspiring to see this type of event in action, and we can only keep doing it with support ❤️
October 24, 2025 at 8:13 PM
Reposted by Jasmine Otto
Hey SF folks! I‘ll have a reading (more of a free association of esolang thoughts) Friday Night at Gray Area grayarea.org/event/book-l...
Book Launch & Signing — Daniel Temkin: Forty-Four Esolangs
Gray Area celebrates Artist and Author Daniel Temkin and his new monograph, "Forty-Four Esolangs."
grayarea.org
October 20, 2025 at 3:37 AM
Looking forward to seeing folks tomorrow!
bsky.app/profile/jata...
October 24, 2025 at 4:29 PM
Being in a crowd and playing drums: 10/10, would drum again. Props to the cowbell players, guy with a whistle, and dancing unicorns.
October 21, 2025 at 8:18 PM
Reposted by Jasmine Otto
I'm shorthanding greatly, but trust erodes in those circumstances. It's you not trusting the people next to you at work. It's not trusting your students when they turn in papers. It's not good. AI has to go.
October 21, 2025 at 11:51 AM
Reposted by Jasmine Otto
I’ve been linking this paper to anyone who will listen for years now, I think it’s easily the single most valuable reading for game devs making social experiences:

lostgarden.com/2017/01/27/g...
Game design patterns for building friendships
In November of 2016, a small group of veteran game designers got together in a remote portion of Texas for a think tank called Project Horseshoe. Our workgroup dug deep into how design can help bui…
lostgarden.com
October 20, 2025 at 5:12 PM
Reposted by Jasmine Otto
I found this a really illuminating thread on what demonstrations do and why they matter.
In social movement studies, we talk about how marches and protests expand the threshold of acceptable risk so that people take more and bigger social risks IN PUBLIC, EN MASSE. This is extremely important for the bourgeois white folks holding signs and building social rapport.
Not a shitpost: #NoKings is feel-good performative activism for comfortable mostly upper and upper middle class white folks and that’s good, actually. Millions of people in the streets protesting a fascist regime is good. It is good for the normie baseline to be massive displays of public dissent.
October 19, 2025 at 2:59 AM
Reposted by Jasmine Otto
Do you want a bit more sketchiness in your #datavis?

Here's my @observablehq.com Plot plugin that turns an Plot specification into a sketchy version with minimal extra work:

observablehq.com/@jwolondon/m...

Builds on the work of Gordon Tu and rough.js
October 19, 2025 at 5:11 PM
Reposted by Jasmine Otto
In simulation game design it is important for one area of the simulation to be inexplicably overgranular (because it was a pet interest of one of the designers) and thus become a key part of the system's signature expressivity
October 17, 2025 at 7:20 PM
Reposted by Jasmine Otto
Language-Based Dependency-Tracking for Explorables, presented at LIVE 2025. Joint work with Joe Bond, Cristina David, @mcnuttandrew.bsky.social and Alfonso Piscitelli. www.youtube.com/watch?v=gds8...
LIVE 2025 - Language-Based Dependency-Tracking for Explorables
YouTube video by The LIVE Workshop
www.youtube.com
October 10, 2025 at 12:16 AM
Reposted by Jasmine Otto
I've called the process of designing a system from an inspiration set "story interpolation" (middling term, admittedly). I love to use this slide from a talk Tarn gave at Northwestern's Progression Mechanics to illustrate the concept
October 12, 2025 at 1:09 AM
Reposted by Jasmine Otto
I'm at #uist2025 presenting our new work with @jonathoda.bsky.social!

𝗗𝗲𝗻𝗶𝗰𝗲𝗸 is a computational substrate for end-user programming that makes it easy to implement programming experiences like programming by demonstration, collaborative editing and more!

tomasp.net/academic/pap...
September 30, 2025 at 6:13 AM
Bay Area UX/PL folks - I'm organizing a get-together the morning of Sat, Oct 25th. Come chat about the joy and despair of making software tools for humans!
partiful.com/e/Fs3AD41RUM...
RSVP to Feeling of Computing // Downtown SF | Partiful
Get coffee, chat convivial tools, and hang out with folks in human-centered computing. This month, special guest Ivan Reese is joining us! (Location is outdoors, near transit and multiple coffee shop...
partiful.com
October 10, 2025 at 6:36 PM
Reposted by Jasmine Otto
Check out a summary and backstory to a new special issue on Theory Visualization in Social Sciences. #sociology

thesilverlining3.substack.com/p/theory-vis...
Theory Visualization in the Social Sciences
Check out our special issue on the topic!
thesilverlining3.substack.com
September 22, 2025 at 9:49 PM
Reposted by Jasmine Otto
if you're interesting in gaining a better intuition for how llms behave at inference time, you should try logitloom🌱, the open-source tool i made for exploring token trajectory trees (aka looming) on base and instruct models! more info in thread

🌱 vgel.me/logitloom
💻 github.com/vgel/logitloom
October 8, 2025 at 1:37 AM
Reposted by Jasmine Otto
I did some final testing at the REFRESH festival (refresh.zhdk.ch/refresh-6/ex...) this weekend. Of course I found a new bug IMMEDIATELY... get the BUG FREE* version soon!

*maybe
October 6, 2025 at 10:16 AM