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.

The New York Times has posted an interview with Dartmouth’s Hany Farid, the creator of “digital forensics.” Here’s how Dr. Farid describes the field:

It’s a new field. It didn’t exist five years ago. We look at digital media—images, audio and video—and we try to ascertain whether or not they’ve been manipulated. We use mathematical and computational techniques to detect alterations in them.

In society today, we’re now seeing doctored images regularly. If tabloids can’t obtain a photo of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie walking together on a beach, they’ll make up a composite from two pictures. Star actually did that. And it’s happening in the courts, politics and scientific journals, too. As a result, we now live in an age when the once-held belief that photographs were the definitive record of events is gone.

Actually, photographic forgeries aren’t new. People have doctored images since the beginning of photography. But the techniques needed to do that during the Civil War, when Mathew Brady made composites, were extremely difficult and time consuming. In today’s world, anyone with a digital camera, a PC, Photoshop and an hour’s worth of time can make fairly compelling digital forgeries.

Dr. Farid makes some other interesting claims as well. Since 1990, the percentage of fraud cases involving photos has risen from 3 percent to 44.1 percent. While the majority of the interview focuses on digital manipulation in scientific research, clearly photographic forgery is becoming a significant problem in all areas of society.

Over the summer I was unfortunate enough to require a reconstruction of my Anterior Cruciate Ligament (ACL). As I was wheeled out of the clinic in an anaesthetic haze, my doctor handed me a series of photos not unlike the ones below.

GLOBAL WARMING!

On the heels of yesterday’s post about the art (and absolute fidelity to reality) of scientific photographs, this story from The Guardian describes how scientists from the National Observatory of Athens are investigating sunset paintings “to work out the amount of natural pollution spewed into the skies by [volcanic] eruptions such as Mount Krakatoa in 1883.” Apparently the method has some validity:

They used a computer to work out the relative amounts of red and green in each picture, along the horizon. Sunlight scattered by airborne particles appears more red than green, so the reddest sunsets indicate the dirtiest skies. The researchers found most pictures with the highest red/green ratios were painted in the three years following a documented eruption.

via Boing Boing

Those of you interested in the rhetoric of science should enjoy The Micropolitan Museum of Microscopic Art Forms, which is supported by the fantastically-named Institute for the Promotion of the Less than One Millimeter. The site boasts some beautiful imagery which, along with the accompanying text, should be able to spark some fantastic discussions about the relationship of visuals and scientific knowledge.