The Educated Eye: Visual Culture and Pedagogy in the Life Sciences

edited by Nancy Anderson and Michael R. Dietrich

Dartmouth College Press, 2012
Paper: 978-1-61168-044-7 | Cloth: 978-1-61168-043-0 | eISBN: 978-1-61168-212-0
Library of Congress Classification QH315.E326 2012
Dewey Decimal Classification 570.76

ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC

ABOUT THIS BOOK

The creation and processing of visual representations in the life sciences is a critical but often overlooked aspect of scientific pedagogy. The Educated Eye follows the nineteenth-century embrace of the visible in new spectatoria, or demonstration halls, through the twentieth-century cinematic explorations of microscopic realms and simulations of surgery in virtual reality. With essays on Doc Edgerton’s stroboscopic techniques that froze time and Eames’s visualization of scale in Powers of Ten, among others, contributors ask how we are taught to see the unseen.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

NANCY ANDERSON is an assistant professor of visual studies at the State University of New York, Buffalo. MICHAEL R. DIETRICH is a professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Dartmouth College.

REVIEWS

“The individual essays are scholarly, insightful and well written.”—The British Journal for the History of Science

“The detailed case studies offer insights into a wide range of practices of visualization in the life sciences. Crucially, the essays highlight that scientific seeing cannot be considered in isolation from the use of other senses, in particular tactile engagement with objects under scrutiny. The contributors show that image making is an act of labor and that the “educated eye” requires a skillful hand. The collection thus provides a diverse set of case studies and valuableinterdisciplinary takes on recent and contemporary visualization that may appeal to historians of modern medicine and science who are interested in the role of images, in pedagogy, in the formation of professional identities, and in the relationship between science and the public.”—Isis

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface • Introduction: Visual Lessons and the Life Sciences – Nancy Anderson and Michael R. Dietrich • Trained Judgment, Intervention, and the Biological Gaze: How Charles Sedgwick Minot Saw Senescence – Mara Mills • Facing Animals in the Laboratory: Lessons of Nineteenth-Century Medical School Microscopy Manuals – Nancy Anderson • Photography and Medical Observation – Scott Curtis • Cinematography without Film: Architectures and Technologies of Visual Instruction in Biology around 1900 – Henning Schmidgen • Cinema as Universal Language of Health Education: Translating Science in Unhooking the Hookworm (1920) – Kirsten Ostherr • Screening Science: Pedagogy and Practice in William Dieterle’s Film Biographies of Scientists – T. Hugh Crawford • Optical Constancy, Discontinuity, and Nondiscontinuity in the Eameses’ Rough Sketch – Michael J. Golec • Educating the High-Speed Eye: Harold E. Edgerton’s Early Visual Conventions – Richard L. Kremer • On Fate and Specification: Images and Models of Developmental Biology – Sabine Brauckmann • Form and Function: A Semiotic Analysis of Figures in Biology Textbooks – Laura Perini • Neuroimages, Pedagogy, and Society – Adina L. Roskies • The Anatomy of a Surgical Simulation: The Mutual Articulation of Bodies in and through the Machine – Rachel Prentice • Contributors • Index

See other books on: Pedagogy | Study & Teaching | Technique | Visual communication | Visual Culture
See other titles from Dartmouth College Press

Nearby on shelf for Biology (General):