We spent a year writing this review of low-dim embeddings and arguing about things like epistemic roles and best practices :-) 20+ authors are all participants of the Dagstuhl seminar we held last year: www.dagstuhl.de/24122. Led by @alexandr.bsky.social and Cyril de Bodt. arxiv.org/abs/2508.15929

one of the more fun topics stemmed from a discussion with @hippopedoid.bsky.social over what the oldest 2D PCA visualization we could find was. After some scouring, we settled on a 1960 paper from researchers at the Université de Montréal about turtle carapaces, which we recreated.

Last year I met a bunch of great researchers who work with high-dimensional data at a Dagstuhl seminar. This week we put out a preprint about the history and philosophy of low-dimensional embedding methods, their applications, their challenges, and their possible future arxiv.org/abs/2508.15929