Science from Sight to Insight ─ How Scientists Illustrate Meaning

John Dalton’s molecular structures. Scatter plots and geometric diagrams. Watson and Crick’s double helix. The way in which scientists understand the world—and the key concepts that explain it—is undeniably bound up in not only words, but images. Moreover, from PowerPoint presentations to articles in academic journals, scientific communication routinely relies on the relationship between words and pictures. In Science from Sight to Insight, Alan G. Gross and Joseph E. Harmon present a short history of the scientific visual, and then formulate a theory about the interaction between the visual and textual. With great insight and admirable rigor, the authors argue that scientific meaning itself comes from the complex interplay between the verbal and the visual in the form of graphs, diagrams, maps, drawings, and photographs. The authors use a variety of tools to probe the nature of scientific images, from Heidegger’s philosophy of science to Peirce’s semiotics of visual communication. Their synthesis of these elements offers readers an examination of scientific visuals at a much deeper and more meaningful level than ever before.

Alan G. Gross is professor of communication studies at the University of Minnesota—Twin Cities. He is the author or coauthor of several books, including The Rhetoric of Science and Starring the Text: The Place of Rhetoric in Science Studies. Joseph E. Harmon works as a science writer and editor at Argonne National Laboratory. He is the coauthor with Alan Gross of several books, including Communicating Science, The Scientific Literature: A Guided Tour and The Craft of Scientific Communication.