Why do scientific images change over time?
Scientists make and use images (2D visual representations like diagrams, graphs, maps, photographs) to record and communicate data, negotiate concepts, and produce knowledge; images are an integral part of the process and progress of science. Just like scientific knowledge changes over time, so do the features and content of scientific images.
Historians and philosophers studying science used to think that scientific images were evolving to represent physical reality more truthfully. For example, one could interpret scientific images representing the human brain over many centuries as evolving to become more true as scientific knowledge about the brain changed. But are images of the brain becoming more true to reality?
During the mid-20th century, some historians and philosophers studying the evolution of scientific knowledge came to appreciate the primacy of its social and cultural origins. Rather than being understood as shaped by “reality,” scientific knowledge was thought to be shaped by the cultures in which it was produced and by the problems it was designed to address. Historians, philosophers, and sociologists of science wondered: if scientific images were not changing to represent a “truer” view of the world, then what do scientific images represent, and why do they change?
In the 1980s, these scholars began to document how images were direct products of material and social experimental practices. By this interpretation, no one scientific image of the brain represents reality more truthfully than another; rather, the content and features of scientific images of the brain are different, and these differences render specific images better or worse at addressing specific problems in specific contexts.
How should we analyze scientific images?
Learning about material, social, and experimental practices is central to analyzing scientific images. However, this is not a complete account of how scientific images are shaped and change over time.
Historians, philosophers, meta-scientists, and scientists themselves rarely have access to the direct material and social experimental practices by which scientific images are designed, such that images must have representational abilities beyond the contexts of their production.
Among scientific publications and on longer time scales, scientists appear to design images that more often share visual features with images they have seen previously. The features and content of scientific images, then, are not only shaped by material and experimental practices, but also by design constraints set by other images.
Back to the brain example: scientific illustrations of the brain are certainly changing in response to material and social experimental contexts, but the features and content of new images of the brain were likely constrained by the features and content of prior images to which anatomists, physicians, and medical illustrators had access.
Currently, I am creating quantitative methods and tools for comparing scientific images to complement traditional historical and philosophical narratives. Methods include using bibliometric analysis to identify groups of images that correspond to the development of scientific concepts. I am also developing a tool that builds networks of images to reveal patterns in image syntax and semantics. Learn more about motivations for this work here: