Scientific illustrations – call for participants and papers

The Centre de Recherches Texte/Image/Langage at the University of Burgundy (Language and Communication) is planning a three-to-four-year programme of seminars on illustrations in science. The programme, scheduled from 2012 to 2015, will focus on exploring as exhaustively as possible the relations between scientific texts and their illustrations. Our aim is to reflect on the theories underlying these relations, in order to clearly define both the criteria of scientific illustrations and the part played by illustrations in scientific progress. By its very nature, the subject inevitably presupposes a post-fifteenth century Western bias, but the programme is not exclusive and is open to alternative approaches.

The programme involves the study of scientific development, alongside the development of illustrative techniques. Studies focusing on specific disciplines (illustrations in medicine, physics, biology, etc) are as welcome as those with a chronological approach (illustrations during the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, etc), often involving the crossing of boundaries into other genres of images.

The seminars will be organised in group sessions devoted to the following themes (the list is provisional and may be extended):

* the objectives of scientific illustrations. To what extent does the illustration’s educational function in the dissemination and popularisation of science conflict with, or alternatively, complement, its epistemic role and its value in furthering scientific knowledge?

* scientists, illustrators, and scientist-illustrators. Some scientists illustrate their work themselves; others use professional illustrators with no scientific training. Is the distinction significant? Papers focusing on the latest developments in the techniques of scientific illustration will be particularly welcome, as will contributions from illustrators themselves.

* evaluating scientific illustration. Do some sciences defy illustration? How do you illustrate an experiment? What does the reader of a scientific text expect from the illustrations? Can the illustration be more informative than the text it illustrates?

Among the many questions raised by this subject, some jump to mind with a particular immediacy: what happens when the microscope and telescope replace the naked eye? How have anatomical plates and terrestrial cartography evolved as science has advanced? To what extent do so-called “scientifically objective” images reflect the ideology, prejudices and cultural fixations of a particular age?

The exchanges between historians of science and specialists of the image on all these topics should, we hope, be productive and profitable. Most of the seminars will take place on the University Campus in Dijon, France (exceptionally special locations may be involved). A publication incorporating the contributions is planned. The first seminar is scheduled provisionally for the end of 2011 or the beginning of 2012. The working languages will be English and French.

UNIVERSITY OF BURGUNDY- Centre INTERLANGUEs texte/IMAGE/langage

Scientific Illustration – seminars 2011-2012

Seminars will take place on Fridays – precise location and time to be confirmed

NOVEMBER 25^th  2011 : conférence introductive

Valérie Chansigaud  “Cinq siècles d'illustrations naturalistes, entre tradition et évolution”

Après avoir étudié durant son doctorat en sciences de l'environnement la place des invertébrés dans les représentations culturelles et la construction des savoirs, elle explore aujourd'hui l'histoire de la découverte de la biodiversité et l'origine de sa protection. Par ailleurs, elle s'intéresse à la façon dont les connaissances naturalistes sont transmises, par exemple à l'aide des nouvelles technologies participatives.
* Publications : "Histoire de l'ornithologie" (2007), "Histoire de l'illustration naturaliste" (2009). En préparation : "Des Hommes et des Oiseaux" (2012), "Atlas historique de la destruction de la biodiversité" (2012) ; codirection de la collection "Poche Nature" sur les illustrateurs et photographes naturalistes (fin 2011).

January 27^th 2012 : illlustrating evolution

Richard Somerset (Nancy 2) “Telling the story of evolution in images: the popularising work of Arabella Buckley”

Richard Somerset teaches at the University of Nancy 2, and specializes in the relations between science and literature, and more generally the history of ideas in the 19th century.

Marie-Odile Bernez (Dijon) “Richard Bradley and some pre-evolutionist illustrations”

Her studies focus on eighteenth-century Britain and the history of ideas, in link with sciences, and also political events. She has translated the works on the French Revolution by Mary Wollstonecraft and published articles on eighteenth-century aspects of the development of modernity.

March 9^th 2012 : Time and knowledge

Stephen Boyd Davis (Middlesex University) “The Eye of History: pioneering depictions of historical time”
 
Stephen Boyd Davis is a designer by background. He is head of the Lansdown Centre for Electronic Arts and of the Art and Design Research Institute at Middlesex University, UK. Fascinated by the visualisation of historical time, he has in recent years been studying early chronographics with reference particularly to the research of Twyman, Grafton, and Rosenberg. Recent papers for the conferences "Electronic Visualisation and the Arts" and "Computers and the History of Art" have explored aspects of this research, including the potential for using digital technology to achieve some of the unresolved ambitions of the C18th pioneers in this field.

Eric Kindel (Reading) “Recording knowledge: Christiaan Huygens and the invention of stencil duplicating”

Eric Kindel is a designer, writer and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication, University of Reading. His research and publishing on episodes in the history of stenciling, including recent work on Christiaan Huygens, has been underway since 1999. Work has especially focused on recovering knowledge of stenciling practices for producing words and texts. He also served (2007-11) as Principal Investigator for the research project “Isotype revisited” (www.isotyperevisited.org). Research in this area has encompassed campaigns of public information created by the Isotype Institute in 1950s British colonial West Africa, and also involved the staging of the exhibition “Isotype: international picture language” at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London (2010-11).

May 11^th 2012 : pictures in physics and psychology

Maria Rentetzi (Athens) “Visualizing Postwar High Energy Physics: A Gendered Task”

Maria Rentetzi is assistant professor at the National Technical University of Athens in Greece where she  teaches sociology of science. She has been trained as an STS scholar at Virginia Tech in the US and worked as a visiting fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. She was awarded  the Gutenberg e-prize in 2004 by the American Historical Association.  Her book Trafficking Materials and Gendered Experimental Practices: Radium Research in Early Twentieth Century Vienna was published in 2008 by Columbia University Press.

Sigrid Leyssen (Basel) “Perceiving Pictures and Picturing Perception”

Sigrid Leyssen studied philosophy and film studies in Leuven, Belgium and Cambridge, UK. She is part of the Graduate School Image and Time, at the interdisciplinary research institute eikones – NCCR Iconic Criticism, The power and meaning of images, Basel University and is affiliated with the Institute of Philosophy, Leuven University. Her dissertation project carries the working title ‘Images and Image perception in Albert Michotte’s Experimental phenomenology of perception’. Areas of interest are history and philosophy of psychology, scientific images, theories of (image) perception, psychological instruments, and early cinema studies.

June 15^th 2012 : THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF scientific illustration

Alix Cooper (Stony Brook) “Picturing Nature: Gender and the Politics of Description in Eighteenth-Century Natural History”

Alix Cooper is Associate Professor of History at the State University of New York at Stony Brook in the United States, where she teaches European history, the history of science and medicine, women's and gender history, and environmental history. Her book Inventing the Indigenous: Local Knowledge and Natural History in Early Modern Europe was published in 2007 by Cambridge University Press.

Valérie Morrisson (Dijon) “Photographic portraits in anthropological and ethnological British journals 1860-1900”

Valérie Morisson, Maître de Conférences en anglais à l’Université de Bourgogne, Dijon, est l’auteure d’une thèse portant sur l’art irlandais contemporain et ses rapports à l’identité nationale. Elle a publié plusieurs articles relatifs à l’histoire culturelle irlandaise explorant, dans une perspective ethnosymboliste, les liens unissant l’art au champ du politique et l’évolution du nationalisme culturel en Irlande au cours des XXe et XXIe siècles. Elle s’intéresse également aux représentations visuelles des irlandais par les Anglais aux XIXe et XXe siècles. 

The programme of seminars is to be continued over the next few years. Please address queries and proposals to Marie-Odile Bernez, Este endereço de e-mail está protegido de spam bots, pelo que necessita do Javascript activado para o visualizar .