Visualisation and Cognition: Drawing Things Together

Changes in communication technologies have over and over again in the course of history resulted in changes in the nature of scientific thought. In particular, the printing press, in the specific European context, played a central role in giving rise to the development of modern science. Printed scientific texts, to a greater or lesser degree, have been regularly accompanied by diagrams and pictures; however, some spectacular exceptions notwithstanding, the text dominated the image. And while the logic of the linear text was conducive to strict reasoning, it also fostered excessive specialization and compartmentalization within science. The philosopher and sociologist Otto Neurath, a leading member of the Vienna Circle, was among the first to suggest that, with the help of a pictorial language, a new unity within science could be achieved. (Published in Kristóf Nyíri, ed., Mobile Learning: Essays on Philosophy, Psychology and Education, Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 2003, pp. 45–67.)

2017

Dialogue, 1999

Historical Studies in the physical and biological …, 1997

Technology and Culture, 1998

Since the 1980s, interdisciplinary research crossing literature and the sciences has gone through substantial development through the stimulating input of both historians of the sciences and literary scholars. Research, which generally positions itself at the level of discourse, attaches priority to two paths, either by focussing on the use that literary texts make of scientific discourse, or by examining " literary technologies " employed by sciences as supports of " poetics " or a " rhetoric " of sciences. My perspective here will be somewhat different, to the extent that the aim is not to identify borrowings or influences between these two fields but instead to distinguish a common field, the shared use of intellectual resources that bring visual imagination into play. The hypothesis that will guide me is that mathematics and literature share an iconic character which is crucial for their specific semiotic regime and that can be attributed to the implication of diagrammatic properties both in natural and formal language (Batt, 2007).

Social Science Computer Review, 1995

Technology and Culture, 1998