Nanoscience, images and technologies of visualisation: A space odyssey
January 22, 2015
This blog post is a story about an intellectual and collaborative adventure that should be all too familiar to academics. However, opportunities for such adventures may sadly be disappearing in an era of impact driven research. It is a story of how enthusiasm, curiosity, serendipity and collaboration can lead to unexpected and joyous outcomes. At …
Making science picturesque
October 24, 2014
I was idly browsing io9 the other day and read a fascinating article on comets in the history of art. This would be a nice topic for another blog post… but that’s not what this post is about. When looking at these delightful pictures, my eyes fell on “an engraving from Le Magasin Pittoresque, a …
Images and visualisations: Technology, Truth and Trust
October 6, 2012
This is a GUEST blog by Andrew Balmer (University of Manchester): I recently co-chaired (with Brigitte Nerlich and Annamaria Carusi) an ESF conference on visualisation, hosted by the University of Linköping but actually held in Norrköping, Sweden. It went swimmingly, with a variety of interesting and instructive presentations and posters, from philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, nanoscientists, …
Seeing like the Mars Curiosity Rover
August 8, 2012
In my last blog I talked about metaphor as ‘the mind’s eyes’, as metaphors make us see something as something else, which enables us to think about something in novel ways, extend our knowledge and in the process shape both science and society. In this sense metaphor can be said to be a mental technology …