Project description
Drawing on the rules for naming animals
From 1758 when Carl Linnaeus standardised the consistent binomial nomenclature for animals to the ‘Modern Synthesis’ concept developed by evolutionary biologists from 1930s onwards, the visual cultures of zoological systematics has evolved tremendously. The EU-funded SPECIMEN project will explore zoological systematics through the rich pictorial legacy that were used to produce and inform species concepts. The project will examine the material using scientific and artistic practices. It will be the first study of the transformation of pictorial scientific practices in systematics between 1750 and 1950 and how they redefined the boundary between expert and lay audiences. The findings will be published in a book that will present a panorama of scientific knowledge.
Objective
This project investigates the visual cultures of zoological systematics informed by practices, techniques, genres, ideas, materiality, norms, producers, and audiences. Approaching systematics through its rich pictorial legacy, I explore how thinking through images in using them as research tools produces distinct species concepts and how images used as training or teaching devices informed species concepts. The timeframe of this investigation spans three centuries and explores two hundred years of biological research between Linnaeus’ first attempt to standardize zoological nomenclature in 1758 and the “Modern Synthesis” of evolution and heredity in the 1930s and 1940s. On the basis of the empirical examination of archival collections and printed materials, I examine the functions, production, and usage of zoological illustrations within biological research (objective 1) and follow their circulation among lay audiences (objective 2). I will approach the material from an interdisciplinary perspective. This involves first an iconographic method as a foundation for a comparative evaluation. I draw here on both scientific and artistic practices. Second, I embed the production of zoological illustrations within the framework of cooperative knowledge production between different groups of actors stemming from different intellectual, educational, social, and national backgrounds. This will be the first study of the transformation of pictorial scientific practices in systematics between 1750 and 1950 and how they redefined the boundary between expert and lay audiences. The book resulting from this research will draw a vivid panorama of scientific knowledge production carried out by zoologist, artists, technicians, and amateur scientist.
Fields of science
Keywords
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
MSCA-IF - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF)Coordinator
1211 Geneve
Switzerland