SPECIMEN · Depicting Species: The Role of the Image in Modern Biology 1750-1950

Depicting Species: The Role of the Image in Modern Biology 1750-1950

In studying the diversity of nature, biologists have employed a remarkable range of scientific images. The use of these visual representations in science and to communicate science has a long tradition. The project SPECIMEN is the first study to investigate the transformation of pictorial scientific practices in zoological systematics and how it redefined the boundary between expert and lay audiences from a long durée perspective (1750-1950). The project explores the ways scientists, popularizers, and other actors involved in the dissemination of scientific knowledge used and redefined visual languages to address different audiences, including their fellow biologists. The use of images for sharing results, ideas, theories, experiences, and movements of thought is not restricted to scientists. Basically, everyone with access to social media, the internet, and traditional analog publication formats consumes, creates, and distributes images. Nevertheless, images are, as we know, complicated vehicles. As much as they enable shortcuts across social, cultural, and geographical communication boundaries, they also impede such communication. We do not always understand what we see based on an image alone, because we are not familiar with specific connotations and the contexts images refer to visually; at the same time we cannot be sure that the images we share are not being misinterpreted and misused by others. Focusing on the example of scientific images produced for classifying animals, this project explores how images change their meanings as they travel across different audiences. In my research, I follow specific image-pathways, considering how these images were used and reused in relation to two interrelated objectives. In the framework of Objective 1, I explore the ways academically trained biologists used visual representations in their particular research programs, with the aim of investigating how changes in visual conventions and modes of zoological illustrations were tied to changes in scientific approaches to systematics. Objective 2 explores these scientific images’ distribution and dissemination across expert and lay audiences. How have norms for using these images changed across audiences? How have changing contexts for the dissemination and reproduction of scientific images changed their meanings and readings?

Data: CORDIS, © European Union