Introduction to Constellate

What Is Constellate?

Wonderful sites like The Pudding and Distill showcase the power of long-form interactive content. Unfortunately, hand-coding these sites using pure Javascript requires enormous time investment, even for skilled web developers. Distill estimated in 2018 that mentoring researchers through the creation process for one of their articles took 20-80 hours.¹

The goal of Constellate is to get 90% of the way to a bespoke piece like one from Distill or The Pudding without requiring a line of HTML, CSS, or JS. Constellate uses Jupyter notebooks, an already ubiquitous format for interactive content that can leverage the mature Python data visualization ecosystem. Constellate will take a notebook and, well, constellate it:

• Document structure is inferred by the heading levels, generating an interactive table of contents.
• All Markdown cells are turned into HTML, with plugins supporting crucial features like $\LaTeX$ and footnotes.²
• On the right side of any page, several kinds of content are automatically rendered and included:
  • Code that generates text output is shown along with the output it generated.
  • $\LaTeX$ is rendered and shown as an image: this lets you display a long series of equations without breaking the flow of the document.
  • Static matplotlib/seaborn plots are rendered and shown along with the code that created them.
  • Plotly figures are rendered in the browser in all their interactive glory, just as they show up in the notebook.
  • Figures from the Holoviz ecosystem (bokeh, panel, holoviz) are also rendered as interactive webapps. They interface with a Python server, so it's possible to use interactive visualizations that depend on specific files or use Python's ecosystem of machine learning tools without any effort translating those to Javascript. What appears in your notebook is what appears in the webapp.
  • More functionality coming soon!

Constellate produces constellations, which can easily deployed to a URL and accessed by anyone.