Past and Present of Scientific Imagery
TSST Seminar with Attila Bátorfy
Meeting ID: 892 3091 4483
Passcode: 808443
We rarely recognize that many of the images we see in our everyday life, and also many iconic images communicate knowledge which are based of systematic scientific research. One branch of these epistemic images is exploratory, which give us heuristic findings, understanding, insights, highlights, patterns or outliers. The other branch is explanatory: images for enlightenment, argumentation, explanation, moralization, conviction, propaganda and manipulation.
The statistical/mathematical tradition (Funkhouser 1937, Friendly 2006,) and the art historian tradition (Crary 1992, Elkins 2001, Bender and Marrinan 2010, Lima 2011, 2014, 2017, Bredekamp et. al. 2015, Kemp 2016), of studying information graphics in a historical perspective largely focus on the visual and technical inventions of scientific imagery. On this historical timeline we can see telescopes and microscopes, planets and bacteria, anatomical drawings, fleas and mineral structures, broken bones and lungs, situation plans, disease maps, statistical graphs, x-rayed bodies, networks, 3D models of atomic particles and animated data visualizations of the spread of a pandemic.
In my presentation I show a series of the most important inventions of scientific imagery broken down to different topics like logic, time, space, body, diseases and I highlight some new ‘iconic’ visualizations published the last decade.
Attila Bátorfy master teacher of journalism, media studies and information graphics at the Media Department of Eötvös Loránd Science University and founder of the first Hungarian visual journalism project Átló. His Phd-thesis is about the early history of information graphics in Hungary.
Organisator Robert Braun, Techno-Science and Societal Transformation
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