Periodic Reporting for period 2 - SPECIMEN (Depicting Species: The Role of the Image in Modern Biology 1750-1950)
Período documentado: 2021-08-01 hasta 2022-07-31
In studying the diversity of nature, biologists have employed a remarkable range of scientific images. The use of these visual representations in science and to communicate science has a long tradition. The project SPECIMEN is the first study to investigate the transformation of pictorial scientific practices in zoological systematics and how it redefined the boundary between expert and lay audiences from a long durée perspective (1750-1950). The project explores the ways scientists, popularizers, and other actors involved in the dissemination of scientific knowledge used and redefined visual languages to address different audiences, including their fellow biologists.
The use of images for sharing results, ideas, theories, experiences, and movements of thought is not restricted to scientists. Basically, everyone with access to social media, the internet, and traditional analog publication formats consumes, creates, and distributes images. Nevertheless, images are, as we know, complicated vehicles. As much as they enable shortcuts across social, cultural, and geographical communication boundaries, they also impede such communication. We do not always understand what we see based on an image alone, because we are not familiar with specific connotations and the contexts images refer to visually; at the same time we cannot be sure that the images we share are not being misinterpreted and misused by others.
Focusing on the example of scientific images produced for classifying animals, this project explores how images change their meanings as they travel across different audiences. In my research, I follow specific image-pathways, considering how these images were used and reused in relation to two interrelated objectives. In the framework of Objective 1, I explore the ways academically trained biologists used visual representations in their particular research programs, with the aim of investigating how changes in visual conventions and modes of zoological illustrations were tied to changes in scientific approaches to systematics. Objective 2 explores these scientific images’ distribution and dissemination across expert and lay audiences. How have norms for using these images changed across audiences? How have changing contexts for the dissemination and reproduction of scientific images changed their meanings and readings?
The use of images for sharing results, ideas, theories, experiences, and movements of thought is not restricted to scientists. Basically, everyone with access to social media, the internet, and traditional analog publication formats consumes, creates, and distributes images. Nevertheless, images are, as we know, complicated vehicles. As much as they enable shortcuts across social, cultural, and geographical communication boundaries, they also impede such communication. We do not always understand what we see based on an image alone, because we are not familiar with specific connotations and the contexts images refer to visually; at the same time we cannot be sure that the images we share are not being misinterpreted and misused by others.
Focusing on the example of scientific images produced for classifying animals, this project explores how images change their meanings as they travel across different audiences. In my research, I follow specific image-pathways, considering how these images were used and reused in relation to two interrelated objectives. In the framework of Objective 1, I explore the ways academically trained biologists used visual representations in their particular research programs, with the aim of investigating how changes in visual conventions and modes of zoological illustrations were tied to changes in scientific approaches to systematics. Objective 2 explores these scientific images’ distribution and dissemination across expert and lay audiences. How have norms for using these images changed across audiences? How have changing contexts for the dissemination and reproduction of scientific images changed their meanings and readings?
In the framework of the above-stated objectives, I developed three case studies, each of which addressed the role of scientific images and visualization practices for knowledge-production and knowledge-dissemination.
In the paper “Changing Audiences, Changing Meanings: Haeckel’s Copepods and Biology’s Popular Culture,” I explore the ways German zoologist Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) used the scientific illustrations he presented in the Art Forms of Nature to tear down lay-expert boundaries (fig. 1). This case study serves as a paradigm within the project’s research plan. I have used questions, topics, and themes raised by Case Study 1 to develop two different cases in the framework of the project’s overall objectives.
The peculiarities of marine invertebrates (with respect to habitat, anatomy, and physiology), in some cases also referred to as “insects of the ocean,” is one reoccurring theme that I follow in my second case study. The starting point for Case Study 2 is the observation that in the nineteenth century’s second half, marine biologists expressed something like envy of ornithologists for possessing more refined norms in classifying species. For example, the problem of describing a bird’s colour accurately was solved by establishing a standardized nomenclature of colours that systematically named and numbered thousands of colour-shades (fig. 2). My paper discussing “The Rosy View of Ornithological Classification from Marine Biology in the late 19th century” investigates why and how nineteenth century marine biologists used ornithology in arguing for norm-standardization in their sub-discipline.
The luminescent of marine species, a reoccurring theme raised in these two cases, provides the starting point for the last case exploring the production and dissemination of scientific knowledge through visualization practices across different audiences and among various actors. In the late nineteenth century, marine bioluminescence occupied a niche dynamically intersecting with many disciplines and subdisciplines in the physical and the life sciences on the one hand, while constituting a field of popular perception and public reception on the other hand. Case Study 3 “Luminous Marine Animals and an Enlightened Public: How Bioluminescence Popularized Marine Biology” investigates this niche through the lens of visual culture (fig.3).
The research for these cases is based on primary and secondary sources and involved iconographic and comparative analysis. Examining monographs, journal and newspaper articles, illustrated magazines, encyclopedia, and objects, I traced the transformation of images and iconographies across material entities and time and space. I presented this research at various venues, including the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Johns Hopkins University, History of Science Switzerland, International Congress of History of Science and Technology, and the CHSTM-working group Ocean Sciences, Technology, and Medicine. Since January 2021, I am the creator and co-organizer of the CHSTM-working group Visual Cultures in Natural History, the Life Science, and Medicine. Further, in October 2021, I organized the international workshop “The Circulation of Images in the Life Sciences” in collaboration with the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine.
In the paper “Changing Audiences, Changing Meanings: Haeckel’s Copepods and Biology’s Popular Culture,” I explore the ways German zoologist Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) used the scientific illustrations he presented in the Art Forms of Nature to tear down lay-expert boundaries (fig. 1). This case study serves as a paradigm within the project’s research plan. I have used questions, topics, and themes raised by Case Study 1 to develop two different cases in the framework of the project’s overall objectives.
The peculiarities of marine invertebrates (with respect to habitat, anatomy, and physiology), in some cases also referred to as “insects of the ocean,” is one reoccurring theme that I follow in my second case study. The starting point for Case Study 2 is the observation that in the nineteenth century’s second half, marine biologists expressed something like envy of ornithologists for possessing more refined norms in classifying species. For example, the problem of describing a bird’s colour accurately was solved by establishing a standardized nomenclature of colours that systematically named and numbered thousands of colour-shades (fig. 2). My paper discussing “The Rosy View of Ornithological Classification from Marine Biology in the late 19th century” investigates why and how nineteenth century marine biologists used ornithology in arguing for norm-standardization in their sub-discipline.
The luminescent of marine species, a reoccurring theme raised in these two cases, provides the starting point for the last case exploring the production and dissemination of scientific knowledge through visualization practices across different audiences and among various actors. In the late nineteenth century, marine bioluminescence occupied a niche dynamically intersecting with many disciplines and subdisciplines in the physical and the life sciences on the one hand, while constituting a field of popular perception and public reception on the other hand. Case Study 3 “Luminous Marine Animals and an Enlightened Public: How Bioluminescence Popularized Marine Biology” investigates this niche through the lens of visual culture (fig.3).
The research for these cases is based on primary and secondary sources and involved iconographic and comparative analysis. Examining monographs, journal and newspaper articles, illustrated magazines, encyclopedia, and objects, I traced the transformation of images and iconographies across material entities and time and space. I presented this research at various venues, including the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Johns Hopkins University, History of Science Switzerland, International Congress of History of Science and Technology, and the CHSTM-working group Ocean Sciences, Technology, and Medicine. Since January 2021, I am the creator and co-organizer of the CHSTM-working group Visual Cultures in Natural History, the Life Science, and Medicine. Further, in October 2021, I organized the international workshop “The Circulation of Images in the Life Sciences” in collaboration with the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine.
The relationship between science and society has been the object of longstanding debates in the history of science. Over the past forty years the application of “popularization of science” and “popular science” have reflected a search for useful concepts and approaches that avoid a now discarded demarcation between scientific knowledge production and consumption and between science and non-science. Within these debates, images have played an important role. The project SPECIMEN furthers these debates by focusing on the structures that shape the continuum between science and society and on the movement of things circulating within it. With my cases, I in particular show how (1) the economy of mass publication and broad circulation and (2) norms and regulations (or their absence) constrains and shapes the movement and adaption of images. While SPECIMEN refers to an internal debate, visual literacy is a general issue with wider social, political, and cultural implications for consuming and producing media and participating in society and science. My work can help improve visual literary through characterizing how norms for producing and consuming came to be what they are.