VISUAL STUDIES OF SCIENCE

Bill Rankin, with Mario Biagioli and Jimena Canales, Spring 2005.

 

I. THEORIES OF THE VISUAL

Phenomenology, Structuralism, and Post-Structuralism

Arnheim, Rudolf. Visual Thinking. 1969.

Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. 1972.

——— Image, Music, Text. 1977.

——— Camera Lucida. 1981.

Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. 1986.

——— Cinema 2: The Time-Image. 1989.

Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic. 1973.

——— Discipline and Punish. 1977.

Gombrich, Ernst. Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation. 1960.

Goodman, Nelson. Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols. 1968.

Jay, Martin. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. 1993.

Levin, David Michael, ed. Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision. 1993.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “The Primacy of Perception.” in The Primacy of Perception. 1964.

Rajchman, John, “Foucault’s Art of Seeing.” in Philosophical Events: Essays of the 80’s. 1991.

Silverman, Kaja. The Threshold of the Visible World. 1996. (last section)

 

Visual Epistemology

Alpers, Svetlana. The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century. 1983.

——— “The Studio, the Laboratory, and the Vexations of Art.” in Picturing Science, Producing Art. 1998.

Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. 1990.

——— Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture. 1999.

Damisch, Hubert. The Origin of Perspective. 1987.

Daston, Lorraine and Peter Galison. “The Image of Objectivity.” in Representations 40 (1992).

Elkins, James. The Poetics of Perspective. 1994.

Galison, Peter. “Judgement Against Objectivity.” in Picturing Science, Producing Art. 1998.

Panofsky, Erwin. Perspective as “Symbolic Form.” 1927.

Pomian, Krzysztof. “Vision and Cognition.” in Picturing Science, Producing Art. 1998.

Smith, Pamela. The Body of the Artisan. 2004.

Stafford, Barbara. Artful Science: Enlightenment, Entertainment, and the Eclipse of Visual Education. 1994.

 

 

II. HISTORY/THEORY OF MEDIA AND MEDIATION

“Media Theory” and its Discontents

Adorno, Theodor. The Culture Industry. 1991. [c.1938].

Attali, Jacques. Noise: The Political Economy of Music. 1977.

Benjamin, Walter. “The Task of the Translator.” in Illuminations. [1923].

——— “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” in Illuminations. [1936].

Corbin, Alain. The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination. 1986.

——— Time, Desire, and Horror: Toward a History of the Senses. 1995.

——— Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the Nineteenth-Century French Countryside. 1999.

Ellul, Jacques. The Technological Society. 1964.

Flusser, Vilém. Towards a Philosophy of Photography. 1983.

* Fox Talbot, William Henry. The Pencil of Nature. 1844.

Frosh, Paul. The Image Factory: Consumer Culture, Photography and the Visual Content Industry. 2003.

Fyfe, Gordon. “Art and its Objects: William Ivins and the Reproduction of Art.” in Picturing Power. 1988.

Gitelman, Lisa. Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era. 1999.

Ivins, William. Prints and Visual Communication. 1969.

Kittler, Friedrich. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. 1997.

McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy. 1962.

——— Understanding Media. 1964.

Oetterman, Stephan. The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium. 1997. [1980].

Ong, Walter. “Ramist Method and the Commerical Mind” in Studies in the Renaissance 8 (1961).

Schwartz, Vanessa. Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris. 1998

Sterne, Jonathan. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. 2003.

 

Printing and “Print Culture”

Bloch, R. Howard and Carla Hesse, eds., Future Libraries (Representations 42; Spring 1993).

Eisenstein, Elizabeth. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. 1979.

Johns, Adrian. The Nature of the Book. 1998.

——— “Science and the Book in Modern Cultural Historiography.” SHPS 29 (1998).

Kusukawa, Sachiko. “Illustrating Nature.” in Books and the Sciences in History. 2000.

McKitterick, Rosamond. “Books and Sciences Before Print.” in Books and the Sciences in History. 2000.

Secord, James. Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of “Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation.” 2000.

Shapin, Steven. “Pump and Circumstance: Robert Boyle’s Literary Technology” in Social Studies of Science 14 (1984).

Yeo, Richard. “Encyclopedic Knowledge.” in Books and the Sciences in History. 2000.

 

Museums and Archives

Bann, Stephen. “‘Views of the Past’: Reflections on the Treatment of Historical Objects and Museums of History (1750-1850).” in Picturing Power. 1988.

Biagioli, Mario. “Confabulating Jurassic Science.” in Technoscientific Imaginaries. 1995.

Bourdieu, Pierre and Hans Haacke. Free Exchange. 1995.

Haraway, Donna. “Teddy-Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908-1936.” in Primate Visions. 1989.

Lenoir, Timothy. “The Naturalized History Museum.” in The Disunity of Science. 1996.

Mitchell, Timothy. “Orientalism and the Exhibitionary Order.” in Colonialism and Culture. 1992.

Pomian, Krzysztof. Collectors and Curiosities. 1990.

Sekula, Allan. “The Body and the Archive.” in October 39, 1986, 3-64.

* Sheldon, William. Atlas of Men: A Guide for Somatotyping the Adult Male at All Ages. 1954.

Starn, Randolph. “A Historian’s Brief Guide to New Museum Studies.” in AHR 110 (2005).

 

 

III. INSCRIPTION AND REPRESENTATION IN SCIENCE STUDIES

Aman, Klaus and Karen Knorr-Cetina. “The Fixation of (Visual) Evidence.” in Representation in Scientific Practice. 1990.

Giere, Ronald. “Visual Models and Scientific Judgment.” in Science without Laws. 1999.

Haraway, Donna. “The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies.” in Differences 1 (1989).

Latour, Bruno. Laboratory Life. 1979.

——— Science in Action. 1987.

——— “Drawing Things Together.” in Representation in Scientific Practice. 1990.

Law, John and John Whittaker. “On the Art of Representing.” in Picturing Power. 1988.

Lenoir, Timothy. “Inscription Practices and Materialities of Communication.” in Inscribing Science. 1998.

Lynch, Michael and John Law. “Picture, Texts, and Objects [bird guides].” in The Science Studies Reader. 1988.

Lynch, Michael. “The Production of Scientific Images.” in Communication and Cognition 31 (1998).

——— “Discipline and the Material Form of Images.” in Social Studies of Science 15 (1985).

——— “Science in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Biology and Philosophy 6 (1991).

——— “Representation is Overrated.” in Configurations 2 (1994).

Pang, Alex Soojung-Kim. “Visual representation and post-constructivist history of science.” HSPS 28 (1997).

Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg. “Experimental Systems, Graphematic Spaces.” in Inscribing Science. 1998.

 

 

IV. SCIENTIFIC IMAGE-MAKING

Visual Demonstration and Non-Verbal “Vocabulary”

Hankins, Thomas and Robert Silverman, “The Magic Lantern and the Art of Scientific Demonstration.” in Instruments and the Imagination. 1995.

Ferguson, Eugene. “The Mind’s Eye: Nonverbal Thought in Technology.” in Science 4306 (1977).

Rudwick, Martin. “The Emergence of a Visual Language for Geological Science 1760-1840.” in History of Science 14 (1976).

Kaiser, David. “Stick-Figure Realism: Convention, Reification, and the Persistence of Feynman Diagrams, 1948-1964.” in Representations 70 (2000).

Klein, Ursula. Experiments, Models, Paper Tools: Cultures of Organic Chemistry in the Nineteenth Century. 2003.

Mitman, Gregg. “Cinematic Nature, Hollywood Technology, Popular Culture and the American Museum of Natural History.” Isis 84 (1993).

——— Reel Nature: America’s Romance with Wildlife on Film. 1999.

Rotman, Brian. “Thinking Dia-Grams.” in The Science Studies Reader. 1995.

Secord, Anne. “Botany on a Plate: Pleasure and the Power of Pictures in Promoting Early Nineteenth-Century Scientific Knowledge.” in Isis 93 (2002).

Tucker, Jennifer. “Photography as Witness, Detective, and Impostor: Visual Representation in Victorian Science.” in Victorian Science in Context. 1997.

 

Graphs and Thematic Maps

Bruno, Giuliana. Atlas of Emotion. 2002. (chapter 7, on emotional maps)

Funkhouser, H. Gray. “Historical Development of the Graphical Representation of Statistical Data.” in Osiris 3 (1937).

Hankins, Thomas. “Blood, Dirt, and Nomograms: A Particular History of Graphs.” in Isis 90 (1999).

* Marey, E. J. La méthode graphique dans les sciences expérimentales. 1878.

Monmonier, Mark. Air Apparent: How Meteorologists Learned to Map, Predict, and Dramatize Weather. 1999.

Robinson, Arthur. Early Thematic Mapping in the History of Cartography. 1982.

Tilling, Laura. “Early Experimental Graphs.” in British Journal for the History of Science 8 (1975).

Tufte, Edward. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. 1983.

——— Envisioning Information. 1990.

——— Visual Explanations. 1997.

 

Auto-Inscription: Helmholtz and Marey, Physiology and Physics

Brain, Robert. “Standards and Semiotics.” in Inscribing Science. 1998.

Brain, Robert and M. Norton Wise. “Muscles and Engines: Indicator Diagrams and Helmholtz’s Graphical Methods.” in The Science Studies Reader. 1994.

Braun, Marta. Picturing Time: The Work of Etienne-Jules Marey. 1992.

Chadarevian, Soraya de. “Graphical Method and Discipline: Self-Recording Instruments in Nineteenth-Century Physiology.” in SHPS 24 (1993).

Douard, John W. “E.-J. Marey’s Visual Rhetoric and the Graphic Decomposition of the Body.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science. 1995.

Holmes, Frederic L., and Kathryn M. Olesko. “The Images of Precision: Helmholtz and the Graphical Method in Physiology.” in The Values of Precision. 1995.

Lenoir, Timothy. “Helmholtz and the Materialities of Communication.” in Osiris 9 (1994).

——— “The Politics of Vision: Optics, Painting, and Ideology in Germany, 1845-1895.” in Instituting Science. 1997.

* Marey, E. J. La machine animale, locomotion terrestre et aérienne. 1873.

* Muybridge, Eadweard. Descriptive Zoopraxography. 1893.

Rabinbach, Anson. “Time and Motion: Etienne-Jules Marey and the Mechanics of the Body.” in The Human Motor. 1990.

Snyder, Joel. “Visualization and Visibility.” in Picturing Science, Producing Art. 1998.

 

Microscopy and Telescopy as Extensions of the Senses

Canales, Jimena. “Photogenic Venus: The ‘Cinematographic Turn’ and its Alternatives in Nineteenth-Century France.” in Isis 93 (2002).

Dennis, Michael. “Graphic Understanding: Instruments and Interpretation in Robert Hooke’s Micrographia.” in Science in Context 3 (1989).

* Frankel, Felice. Envisioning Science: The Design and Craft of the Science Image. 2002.

Freedberg, David. “The Case of the Urban Bee.” in Picturing Science, Producing Art. 1998.

Holmberg, Gustav “Mechanizing the Astronomer’s Vision: On the Role of Photography in Swedish Astronomy, c. 1880-1914.” in Annals of Science 53 (1996).

Rasmussen, Nicolas. Picture Control: The Electron Microscope and the Transformation of Biology. 1997.

Schaffer, Simon. “On Astronomical Drawing.” in Picturing Science, Producing Art. 1998.

——— “Astronomers Mark Time: Discipline and the Personal Equation.” in Science in Context 2 (1988).