  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.
