Arguing against Graphic Ambivalence: What Earth Modeling Reveals about Visualization in Scientific Computing

ABSTRACT:Computation in the sciences does not sufficiently account for aesthetics, which prevents information from being corroborated. This argument is made through a comparison between virtual earth modeling communities and epistemic culture and an elaboration on modeling methods as exemplary of the negotiations between scholarly knowledge, aesthetics, and computer resources necessary for visualization. The salience of these negotiations to institutionalized epistemic practice is reinforced through three histories of visualization in the sciences: computation in ecology, empirical modeling and physically based rendering, and visualization in scientific computing. The article flags the significance of this argument for its role in shaping public policy.