The Culture of Diagram by Michael Marrinan, Hardcover, 9780804745048 | Buy online at The Nile
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The Culture of Diagram

Author: Michael Marrinan and John Bender  

Hardcover

This book defines diagrams as tools manipulated by users to produce new kinds of understanding and demonstrates that a modern diagrammatic knowledge emerged in eighteenth-century visual culture to become the foundation of later nineteenth-century science.

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Summary

This book defines diagrams as tools manipulated by users to produce new kinds of understanding and demonstrates that a modern diagrammatic knowledge emerged in eighteenth-century visual culture to become the foundation of later nineteenth-century science.

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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 real-time: from eighteenth-century print media and the diagrammatic procedures in the pages of Diderot's Encyclopedia to the paintings of Jacques-Louis 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 Locke's clear and distinct ideas and Newton's causality-practices greatly expanded by the calculus, probabilities, and protocols of data sampling.

Today's digital technologies are rooted in the ability of high-speed computers to correct errors when returning binary data to the human sensorium. High-tech 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 eighteenth-century 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.

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Critic Reviews

“"This wide-ranging study boldly connects elements of visualization, fine art and literary analysis, science history, and virtual reality . . . An ambitious work that will likely fascinate faculty and students in various disciplines."”

"This is a genealogy, not a history, of visual correlation as a form of knowledge. As such, the book becomes a powerful instance of the diagrammatic practice it describes. Like David's Oath of the Horatii, it is structured as a multiple-part space, with tightly argued sections separated by ample "whiteness" to enable manifold correlations to be made by the user. The authors admirably follow Diderot's practice in trusting the synthetic faculties of their audience, ensuring rich rewards for readers who take up their invitation." - Robert M. Brain, ISIS: History of Science & Its Cultural Influences "This wide-ranging study boldly connects elements of visualization, fine art and literary analysis, science history, and virtual reality ... An ambitious work that will likely fascinate faculty and students in various disciplines." - David R. Conn, Library Journal "Displaying extraordinary erudition in many different fields, the authors performatively duplicate the method of rapports (correlations) across disciplines that they see as the special genius of diagrams themselves ... The Culture of Diagram is a wonderfully stimulating, provocative, original achievement, lavishly illustrated with many examples that reinforce its argument." - Martin Jay, Nineteenth-Century French Studies "Ranging from the 19th century to the present, Bender and Marrinan's topics go beyond, and often integrate, the sciences and the arts, as the authors read diagrammatic knowledge into prints and oil paintings and thread statistics and probability theory through the social sciences, human vision theory, and into modern physics ... Recommended." - D. Topper, CHOICE "The Culture of Diagram is a well-crafted book. Its originality resides in the authors' capacity to recognize a running theme from the eighteenth century to the present in the history of representation in different domains such as painting, illustration, literature, aesthetics, theater and science, and in establishing key connections between ideas ... this book creates a renewed ground for reflection." - Norberto Serpente, British Journal of the History of Science

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About the Author

John Bender is Jean G. and Morris M. Doyle Professor in Interdisciplinary Studies at Stanford University and a former Director of the Stanford Humanities Center (2001-2008). He is the author of Spenser and Literary Pictorialism and the prizewinning Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-Century England.
Michael Marrinan is Professor of Art History in the Department of Art & Art History at Stanford University. His writings include Romantic Paris: Histories of a Cultural Landscape 1800–1850 (Stanford 2009) and Painting Politics for Louis-Philippe: Art and Ideology in Orléanist France, 1830–1848.

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More on this Book

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 real-time: from eighteenth-century print media and the diagrammatic procedures in the pages of Diderot's Encyclopedia to the paintings of Jacques-Louis 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 Locke's clear and distinct ideas and Newton's causality--practices greatly expanded by the calculus, probabilities, and protocols of data sampling. Today's digital technologies are rooted in the ability of high-speed computers to correct errors when returning binary data to the human sensorium. High-tech 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 eighteenth-century 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.

Read more

Product Details

Publisher
Stanford University Press
Published
20th January 2010
Pages
296
ISBN
9780804745048

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