Scientific representations like maps, brain scans, and botanical drawings are crucial to the practice of science and its dissemination, but we know little about the ways that visualizations are circulated within, understood by, and convince nonscientists. New kinds of imagery further complicate the picture: today, widely accessible technologies can create photorealistic algorithmically generated images. These new kinds of images have introduced distinctive challenges to our ability to trust the things we can see with our own eyes. How do scientists use new kinds of imagery to show that they know the things that they know? How do they use images to convince diverse others to accept the evidence they offer?
This project is a multisited ethnographic study of the study of new 3D and 4D digital methods as they move between academic, practitioner, and public contexts, with a special emphasis on movements between science and the law. Show & Tell uses this unique object of study to answer three interconnected research questions, each offering both empirical and theoretical leverage on issues of scientific representation and scientific communication:
How do scientific visualizations produce agreement across diverse epistemic cultures – what makes it possible for images to be understood by and convince scientists from multiple disciplines as well as prosecutors and judges?
How do old ways of seeing interact with new technologies when scientists use new kinds of imagery as evidence?
How do specific formal and material qualities influence the credibility of new kinds of images as they move between science and the law?
This project offers unique purchase on both basic- science theoretical issues and contemporary social problems. It uses a multisited ethnographic research design to allow for an inquiry into scientific representation as it is developed for, and moves across, distinct communities. Show & Tell’s emphasis on algorithmically generated images will offer important insights into the ways that we might continue to use visual evidence and enhance its power in an era of deceptive image technologies. With the opportunity to witness the birth of new forms of scientific visualization and their movement between restricted scientific fields and varied practitioner and public contexts, this project will provide insight both on basic theoretical questions – how we use new kinds of visualizations to know what we know, and how we use images to prove it to others – as well as critical and timely questions on the relationships between scientific communication and public understanding.
