Picturing the Book of Nature

Picturing the Book of Nature PDF Author: Sachiko Kusukawa
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226465292
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
Because of their spectacular, naturalistic pictures of plants and the human body, Leonhart Fuchs’s De historia stirpium and Andreas Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica are landmark publications in the history of the printed book. But as Picturing the Book of Nature makes clear, they do more than bear witness to the development of book publishing during the Renaissance and to the prominence attained by the fields of medical botany and anatomy in European medicine. Sachiko Kusukawa examines these texts, as well as Conrad Gessner’s unpublished Historia plantarum, and demonstrates how their illustrations were integral to the emergence of a new type of argument during this period—a visual argument for the scientific study of nature. To set the stage, Kusukawa begins with a survey of the technical, financial, artistic, and political conditions that governed the production of printed books during the Renaissance. It was during the first half of the sixteenth century that learned authors began using images in their research and writing, but because the technology was so new, there was a great deal of variety of thought—and often disagreement—about exactly what images could do: how they should be used, what degree of authority should be attributed to them, which graphic elements were bearers of that authority, and what sorts of truths images could and did encode. Kusukawa investigates the works of Fuchs, Gessner, and Vesalius in light of these debates, scrutinizing the scientists’ treatment of illustrations and tracing their motivation for including them in their works. What results is a fascinating and original study of the visual dimension of scientific knowledge in the sixteenth century.

Picturing the Book of Nature

Picturing the Book of Nature PDF Author: Sachiko Kusukawa
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226465292
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
Because of their spectacular, naturalistic pictures of plants and the human body, Leonhart Fuchs’s De historia stirpium and Andreas Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica are landmark publications in the history of the printed book. But as Picturing the Book of Nature makes clear, they do more than bear witness to the development of book publishing during the Renaissance and to the prominence attained by the fields of medical botany and anatomy in European medicine. Sachiko Kusukawa examines these texts, as well as Conrad Gessner’s unpublished Historia plantarum, and demonstrates how their illustrations were integral to the emergence of a new type of argument during this period—a visual argument for the scientific study of nature. To set the stage, Kusukawa begins with a survey of the technical, financial, artistic, and political conditions that governed the production of printed books during the Renaissance. It was during the first half of the sixteenth century that learned authors began using images in their research and writing, but because the technology was so new, there was a great deal of variety of thought—and often disagreement—about exactly what images could do: how they should be used, what degree of authority should be attributed to them, which graphic elements were bearers of that authority, and what sorts of truths images could and did encode. Kusukawa investigates the works of Fuchs, Gessner, and Vesalius in light of these debates, scrutinizing the scientists’ treatment of illustrations and tracing their motivation for including them in their works. What results is a fascinating and original study of the visual dimension of scientific knowledge in the sixteenth century.

Picturing Tropical Nature

Picturing Tropical Nature PDF Author: Nancy Stepan
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801438813
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
"Picturing Tropical Nature reflects on the work of several nineteenth- and twentieth-century scientists and artists, including Alexander von Humboldt, Alfred Russel Wallace, Louis Agassiz, Sir Patrick Manson, and Margaret Mee. Their careers illuminate several aspects of tropicalization: science and art in the making of tropical pictures; the commercial and cultural boom in things tropical in the modern period; photographic attempts to represent tropical hybrid races; antitropicalism and its role in an emerging environmentalist sensibility; and visual depictions of disease in the new tropical medicine."--Jacket.

Picturing Personhood

Picturing Personhood PDF Author: Joseph Dumit
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691236623
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
By showing us the human brain at work, PET (positron emission tomography) scans are subtly--and sometimes not so subtly--transforming how we think about our minds. Picturing Personhood follows this remarkable and expensive technology from the laboratory into the world and back. It examines how PET scans are created and how they are being called on to answer myriad questions with far-reaching implications: Is depression an observable brain disease? Are criminals insane? Do men and women think differently? Is rationality a function of the brain? Based on interviews, media analysis, and participant observation at research labs and conferences, Joseph Dumit analyzes how assumptions designed into and read out of the experimental process reinforce specific notions about human nature. Such assumptions can enter the process at any turn, from selecting subjects and mathematical models to deciding which images to publish and how to color them. Once they leave the laboratory, PET scans shape social debates, influence courtroom outcomes, and have positive and negative consequences for people suffering mental illness. Dumit follows this complex story, demonstrating how brain scans, as scientific objects, contribute to our increasing social dependence on scientific authority. The first book to examine the cultural ramifications of brain-imaging technology, Picturing Personhood is an unprecedented study that will influence both cultural studies and the growing field of science and technology studies.

Picturing Science, Producing Art

Picturing Science, Producing Art PDF Author: Peter Galison
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113520750X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 529

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Book Description
First Published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Picturing Research

Picturing Research PDF Author: Linda Theron
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9460915965
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
Picturing research: drawing as visual methodology offers a timely analysis of the use of drawings in qualitative research. Drawing can be a method in itself, as in the research area of Visual Studies, and also one that complements the use of photography, video, and other visual methodologies. This edited volume is divided into two sections. The first section provides critical commentary on the use of drawings in social science research, addressing such issues of methodology as the politics of working with children and drawing, ethical issues in working with both adults and children, and some of the interpretive considerations. The second section, in its presentation of nine research-based case-studies, illustrates the richness of drawings. Each case study explores participatory research involving drawings that encourages social change, or illustrates participant resilience. These case studies also highlight the various genres of drawings including cartoons and storyboarding. The book draws on community-based research from a wide variety of contexts, most in South Africa, although it also includes work from Rwanda and Lesotho. Given the high rates of HIV&AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa, it should not be surprising that many of the chapters take up concerns such as the preparation of teachers and community health workers in the age of AIDS, and the experiences of orphans and vulnerable children. Moving further afield, this book also includes work done with immigrant populations in Canada, and with tribunals in Somalia and Australia. Picturing research is an important resource for novice and experienced researchers interested in employing qualitative methodology that encourages rich (yet low-tech) visible data and that offers a participatory, enabling experience for participants and their communities.

Manufacturing National Park Nature

Manufacturing National Park Nature PDF Author: J. Keri Cronin
Publisher: UBC Press
ISBN: 077481909X
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
National parks occupy a prominent place in the Canadian imagination, yet we are only beginning to understand how their visual representation has shaped and continues to inform our perceptions of ecological issues and the natural world. J. Keri Cronin draws on historical and modern postcards, advertisements, and other images of Jasper National Park to trace how various groups and the tourism industry have used photography to divorce the park from real environmental threats and instead package it as a series of breathtaking vistas and adorable-looking animals. Manufacturing National Park Nature demonstrates that popular forms of picturing nature can have ecological implications that extend far beyond the frame of the image.

Picturing

Picturing PDF Author: Rachael Ziady DeLue
Publisher: Terra Foundation for the Arts
ISBN: 9780932171573
Category : ART
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Diligent and profound thinking about the nature and capacity of images and image-making in the form of art-critical writing, poetry, literature, theatre, and philosophical or scientific treatises, among other things, existed alongside and became complexly entangled with artistic practice in the American context. The essays in Picturing consider the questions about the very nature of representation--What is an image? Why make an image? What do images do?--that artists and others brought to bear on the making, viewing, and analysis of art and visual culture in the United States. In so doing, it highlights the centrality and significance of the problematic of picturing within the domain of American visual practice. Essays in this volume present a range of subjects from the early modern period through the end of the twentieth century. Some focus on texts, others on images or other visual artifacts, with the understanding that works of art themselves actively theorize their own nature and limits. They posit the idea of picturing broadly, hoping to demonstrate how deliberation about pictures and picture-making in the American context included but also extended beyond academy-based or art-critical writing, manifesting in expressions as diverse as natural history illustration, popular fiction, and illustrated travel narratives. It is usually assumed that thinking about pictures in the United States hewed closely to the precepts of European art treatises, the derivativeness of art theory in America thus not warranting close or sustained analysis. Picturing explores the circulation of ideas across the Atlantic while aiming to reveal the richness, range, complexity, and even the strangeness of the theorization of the visual in the American context. About the Terra Foundation for American Art Research Series The series explores themes of critical importance to the history of American art through a series of innovative essays exposing historical material to different conceptual concerns. Each volume offers original research that attends to specific objects as well as to historically significant and presiding conceptual and theoretical concerns. Structured around ideas that have been important to artistic developments within the United States, the series invites readers to look and think critically about art objects as they have been made, collected and talked about in their times.

Picturing the Prairie

Picturing the Prairie PDF Author: Philip Juras
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780578864587
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 108

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Book Description
The fifty-four paintings in this volume celebrate the natural beauty of the rare tallgrass prairie environments of Illinois and the remarkable legacy of conservation that sustains them. Artist and author Philip Juras's evocative canvases are based on extensive research, travel, and time in the field with prairie conservation experts. As a result, his luminous paintings, and his descriptions of them, are rich in ecological and historical detail. An accompanying essay by acclaimed conservationist Stephen Packard tells the story of how the tallgrass prairie ecosystem was, and is, being saved from extinction in Illinois by a series of remarkable individuals and initiatives-efforts that have inspired conservation practices well beyond the state's borders.Picturing the Prairie invites us to get to know these restored landscapes, both within these pages and in the corresponding 2021 exhibition at the Chicago Botanic Garden. In them we can experience the magnificence of this archetypal American grassland, both in its present nature, and as it was in the past.

Picturing Culture

Picturing Culture PDF Author: Jay Ruby
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226730998
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
Here, Jay Ruby—a founder of visual anthropology—distills his thirty-year exploration of the relationship of film and anthropology. Spurred by a conviction that the ideal of an anthropological cinema has not even remotely begun to be realized, Ruby argues that ethnographic filmmakers should generate a set of critical standards analogous to those for written ethnographies. Cinematic artistry and the desire to entertain, he argues, can eclipse the original intention, which is to provide an anthropological representation of the subjects. The book begins with analyses of key filmmakers (Robert Flaherty, Robert Garner, and Tim Asch) who have striven to generate profound statements about human behavior on film. Ruby then discusses the idea of research film, Eric Michaels and indigenous media, the ethics of representation, the nature of ethnography, anthropological knowledge, and film and lays the groundwork for a critical approach to the field that borrows selectively from film, communication, media, and cultural studies. Witty and original, yet intensely theoretical, this collection is a major contribution to the field of visual anthropology.

Picturing the Beast

Picturing the Beast PDF Author: Steve Baker
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252070303
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
Explores how human beings use animals and images of animals to define themselves--and how those depictions interfere with our abilities to understand the true nature of animals.