viz.

Image Credit: Cassini's Carte de la Luna (Map of the Moon), 1679

Via Harry Ransom Center

Last Friday, I visited Other Worlds: Rare Astronomical Works, showing through January 3 at UT’s Harry Ransom Center. Although overshadowed, as it were, by the HRC’s Edgar Allan Poe exhibit From Out that Shadow, Other Worlds is a worthwhile destination in its own right. However, the creative energy invested in these often visually stunning artifacts from centuries past left me with questions about the current (non-)status of astronomy in the public imagination.

But first: let me explain why an Immensely Pleasurable half-hour can be had by stopping into this exhibit.

Anticipating 2009 as the Year of Darwin,* Olivia Judson offered this suggestion last year: let’s get rid of Darwinism. She criticizes the Darwin-centric focus of both specialist and popular discourse as “grossly misleading. It suggests that Darwin was the beginning and the end, the alpha and omega, of evolutionary biology.” Judson’s complaint, of course, is nothing new: as a peeved St. John Mivart notes in Man and Apes (1873), “Again, the doctrine of evolution as applied to organic life…is widely spoken of by the term ‘Darwinism.’ Yet this doctrine is far older than Mr. Darwin…”

Image Credit: Cartooning Darwin

H/T: Seed Daily Zeitgeist

While preparing to teach this week, I came across a couple of intriguing resources that help to explain how the figure of Charles Darwin entered circulation as a scientific celebrity, an icon of sorts, beginning in the late 19th century. They suggest the active role of popular visual culture in the intertwining of Darwin with evolution, even as the meanings of that term remained multiple, fragmentary, diffuse.

Image Credit: Ernst Haeckel

H/T: Slate

In the viz. archive, Dale quotes a 1979 interview with German filmmaker Werner Herzog, in which he insists that "if we do not find adequate images and an adequate language for our civilization with which to express them, we will die out like the dinosaurs." Re-watching Herzog’s 2007 documentary Encounters at the End of the World, which offers a strangely beautiful vision of Antarctica, I was reminded of the late-19th-century scientific drawings by German zoologist Ernst Haeckel. Both give us “new images” of the natural world through a complex mode of artistic, mystical, and scientific vision, generating what I’ll call a visual biology of the strange.

Image credit: The IFF by Alyssa Gorelick. H/T to io9

Noel’s last post, in which she calls for “incisive, creative visualizations of ecological crisis," got me thinking about two recent, ongoing art projects that engage with the challenge of visualizing Eco-Perils: namely, the loss of biodiversity and the dying coral reefs. Ultimately, they suggest that our failure of vision, our inability to see ecological danger, is intimately linked with a failure of scientific understanding.

Image credit: Ben Fry

This month, Ben Fry at Seed launched a project called The Preservation of Favoured Traces, a visualization tool that allows us to witness how Origin of Species evolved across six revisions during Darwin’s lifetime. The results are intriguing not only for those of us who teach rhetoric of science (and who secretly harbor a crush on Charles Darwin, especially during his mutton-chop phase), but for scholars interested in how textual history might be visualized.