Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte最新文献

As soon as the SARS-Cov2 disease was recognized by experts to potentially cause a serious pandemic, a three dimensional diagrammatic image of the virus, colored in strong red, conquered public media globally.

This study confronts this iconic virus image with a historic image analysis of 33,000 biomedical articles on coronaviruses published between 1968–2020 and interviews with some of their authors.

Only a small fraction of scientific virus publications entail images of the complete virus. Red as an alarm color is not used at all by scientists who don't aim for a non-scientific public.

Circulation in this case concerns the movement of iconic images from a scientific context into a general public. On the basis of hps-studies on scientific diagrams and especially on color use in scientific diagrams to convey specific messages in public, the paper discusses the role of the claim of public corona-virus diagram as “scientific.”

It points at relevant differences between most frequent scientific corona-virus images and the diagrammatic image used in public. Both author- and readerships (in science and public) follow contrasting aims and values. Thus, the images meet non-expert readers for whom the images entail very different – and potentially unintended – meanings then to virus experts.

This special issue looks at some of the ways that images are adopted, co-opted, and adapted in the life sciences and beyond. It brings together papers that investigate the role of visualization in scientific knowledge-production with contributions that focus on the distribution and dissemination of knowledge to a broader audience. A commentary provides a critical perspective. In this editorial we introduce circulation as a practice to better understand scientific images. Along two themes, we highlight connections across the papers. First, the social life of scientific representation follows the contexts, settings, and spaces through which images circulate. Second, authorship, expertise, and trust inform the capacity and the failure of images to circulate. Altogether, this volume raises a set of new questions about circulation as practice in the historiography of images in the life sciences.

This paper comments on five articles in the special issue “Circulating Images in the Life Sciences.” It sees the papers as unified by two themes. The first is their attention to the processes of legitimation. The second is the embedding of the images in textual cultures, which changed over time from the mid-nineteenth century to the very recent past, most notably with the recent advent of digital culture.

Eighteenth century river hydraulics used both theory and measurement to address problems of flood safety, navigation and defense related to the rivers. In the late eighteenth century the Dutch overseer of the rivers, Christiaan Brunings, integrated hydraulic theory and meteorological practices, which enabled him to design a unique instrument for measuring river flow. The question is whether the unprecedented detail of measurements fits the putative empirical stance in the eighteenth century. The interactions between theory, instrument, measurement, and other knowledge practices are here assessed using experiences in similar measurement practices. I argue that Brunings had theoretical and embodied understanding of hydrodynamics, as he knew how to design an instrument for flow measurement of sufficient accuracy for his purpose in the sociopolitical context of river management.

For the last ten years, within molecular life sciences, the reproducibility crisis discourse has been embodied as a crisis of trust in scientific images. Beyond the contentious perception of “questionable research practices” associated with a digital turn in the production of images, this paper highlights the transformations of gel electrophoresis as a family of experimental techniques. Our aim is to analyze the evolving epistemic status of generated images and its connection with a crisis of trust in images within that field.

From the 1980s to the 2000s, we identify two key innovations (precast gels and gel docs) leading to a “two-tiered” gel electrophoresis with different standardization procedures, different epistemic statuses of the produced images and different ways of generating (dis)trust in images. The first tier, exemplified by differential gel electrophoresis (DIGE), is characterized by specialized devices processing images as quantitative data. The second tier, exemplified by polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (PAGE), is described as a routine technique making use of image as qualitative “virtual witnessing.” The difference between these two tiers is particularly apparent in the ways images are processed, even though both tiers involve image digitization. Our account thus highlights different views on reproducibility within the two tiers. Comparability of images is insisted upon in the first tier while traceability is expected in the second tier. It is striking that these differences occur not only within the same scientific field, but even within the same family of experimental techniques. In the second tier, digitization entails distrust, whereas it implies a collective sentiment of trust in the first tier.

In 1961, Lee Chin Eng jumpstarted the reef hobby, a hobby dedicated to the modeling of coral reefs in captivity, with an article in Tropical Fish Hobbyist. He illustrated the article with eight photographs; these images were meaningful to the hobbyists viewing them and they conveyed both information about the tank system and also claims about Lee's expertise. This paper examines three genres of photographs—landscapes, active, and passive portraiture—that appeared in Lee's article and how and why they have proliferated in the reef hobbyist community over the last sixty years. By tracing the history of these genres, we can better understand natural knowledge producers rely on photographs to exchange knowledge and cement community identity.

This article will investigate the ways in which Polish illustrated press contributed to communicating and reporting the work of Polish émigré naturalists working in Latin America to the Polish general public living in the Prussian, Russian and Austrian partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth 1844–1885. It examines the ways in which illustrations were used to shape the public's opinion about the significance of these migrants’ scientific achievements. The Polish illustrated press, its authors and editors were instrumental in shaping the public's perceptions of the reach of Polish scientists, and exploring their impact on broader scientific debates, thereby situating Polish people and their work in a global context. The didactic and opinion-making role of the illustrated press was highly influential among Polish audiences during this period, at a time when the survival of Polish identity, culture, language, and education was uncertain. Illustrated weeklies were one of the vectors through which high science was made accessible to the Polish public. A study of pictures in Polish illustrated press will help to explain how they contributed towards shaping the images in the public eye of naturalists’ scientific work, and discourses about science and its actors more broadly.

After the United States Congress passed the Water Pollution Control Act of 1948, biologists played an increasingly significant role in scientific studies of water pollution. Biologists interacted with other experts, notably engineers, who managed the public agencies devoted to water pollution control. Although biologists were at first marginalized within these agencies, the situation began to change by the early 1960s. Biological data became an integral part of water pollution control. While changing societal values, stimulated by an emerging ecological awareness, may explain broader shifts in expert opinion during the 1960s, this article explores how graphs changed experts’ perceptions of water pollution. Experts communicated with each other via reports, journal articles, and conference speeches. Those sources reveal that biologists began experimenting with new graphical methods to simplify the complex ecological data they collected from the field. Biologists, I argue, followed the engineers’ lead by developing graphical methods that were concise and quantitative. Their need to collaborate with engineers forced them to communicate, negotiate, and overcome conflicts and misunderstandings. By meeting engineers’ expectations and promoting the value of their data through images as much as words, biologists asserted their authority within water pollution control by the early 1960s.