Thread by @sfiscience

🧵 "Images as Social Agents and Historical Ledgers in Knowledge Systems"

Today's SFI Seminar by @JSMF Fellow @onuhgrrarrow (@ASU) on how the co-evolution of images and concepts has shaped human knowledge about biological entities like cells & biofilms 🦠

"Scientific images are inseparable from the complex knowledge systems in which they emerge...images are intermediaries between researchers and their concepts."
- @onuhgrrarrow (@ASU), streaming now:

"In the late 19th Century, the first biology textbooks were getting published. In them, all the images of cells were of *specific* cells. A little later the pictures are of slightly diagrammatic cells. Finally, fully diagrammatic."

- @onuhgrrarrow (@ASU):

"We're used to thinking of microbes as parts of groups; the state of our knowledge system influences how we interpret historical images."

- @onuhgrrarrow (@ASU) on a persistent error in the interpretation of 17th Century science illustration:

#Leeuwenhoek

"I have become increasingly convinced that tracing the evolution of scientific concepts requires complex systems methods. I need tools that don't exist yet..."

- @onuhgrrarrow (@ASU), streaming now:


#biofilms #historyofscience #sciencehistory

@onuhgrrarrow @ASU "Letting images lead" in the study of the historical interactions between image+ concept, @onuhgrrarrow (@ASU) lays out the plan for using #deeplearning to trace the evolution of ideas:

"Images act as condensed versions of the state of knowledge systems."