The Story
The Culture of Diagram is about visual thinking. Exploring a terrain where words meet pictures and formulas meet figures, the book foregrounds diagrams as tools for blurring those boundaries to focus on the production of knowledge as process. It outlines a history of convergence among diverse streams of data in realtime: from eighteenthcentury print media and the diagrammatic procedures in the pages of Diderots Encyclopedia to the paintings of JacquesLouis David and mathematical devices that reveal the unseen worlds of quantum physics. Central to the story is the process of correlation, which invites observers to participate by eliciting leaps of imagination to fill gaps in data, equations, or sensations. This book traces practices that ran against the grain of both Lockes clear and distinct ideas and Newtons causalitypractices greatly expanded by the calculus, probabilities, and protocols of data sampling.Todays digital technologies are rooted in the ability of highspeed computers to correct errors when returning binary data to the human sensorium. Hightech diagrams echo the visual structures of the Encyclopedia, arraying packets of dissimilar data across digital spaces instead of white paper. The culture of diagram broke with the certainties of eighteenthcentury science to expand the range of human experience. Speaking across disciplines and discourses, Bender and Marrinan situate our modernity in a new and revealing light.
Description
The Culture of Diagram is about visual thinking. Exploring a terrain where words meet pictures and formulas meet figures, the book foregrounds diagrams as tools for blurring those boundaries to focus on the production of knowledge as process. It outlines a history of convergence among diverse streams of data in realtime: from eighteenthcentury print media and the diagrammatic procedures in the pages of Diderots Encyclopedia to the paintings of JacquesLouis David and mathematical devices that reveal the unseen worlds of quantum physics. Central to the story is the process of correlation, which invites observers to participate by eliciting leaps of imagination to fill gaps in data, equations, or sensations. This book traces practices that ran against the grain of both Lockes clear and distinct ideas and Newtons causalitypractices greatly expanded by the calculus, probabilities, and protocols of data sampling.Todays digital technologies are rooted in the ability of highspeed computers to correct errors when returning binary data to the human sensorium. Hightech diagrams echo the visual structures of the Encyclopedia, arraying packets of dissimilar data across digital spaces instead of white paper. The culture of diagram broke with the certainties of eighteenthcentury science to expand the range of human experience. Speaking across disciplines and discourses, Bender and Marrinan situate our modernity in a new and revealing light.
