Abstract
ABSTRACTThis paper explores students and researchers drawings of white blood cell recruitment. The data combines interviews with exhibit of review-type academic images and analyses of student model-drawings. The analysis focuses on the material aspects of bio-scientific data-making and we use the literature of concrete bioscience modelling to differentiate the qualities of students model-making choices: novelty versus reproduction; completeness versus simplicity; and the achievement of similarity towards selected model targets. We show that while drawing on already published images, some third-year undergraduates are able to curate novel, and yet plausible causal channels in their graphic representations, implicating new phenomenal potentials as lead researchers do in their review-type academic publications. Our work links the virtues of drawing to learn to the disclosure of potential epistemic things, involving close attention to the contours of non-linguistic stuff and corresponding sensory perception of substance; space; time; shape and size; position; and force. The paper documents the authority and power students may achieve through making knowledge rather than repeating it. We show the ways in which drawing on the images elicited by others helps to develop physical, sensory, and sometimes affective relations towards the real and concrete world of scientific practice.
Highlights
In science the settlement of facts and models are inseparably intertwined with the historical development of visual culture and technology (Daston & Galison, 2007; Rheinberger, 1988, 2010) and scientific knowledge is intrinsically bound up with graphic representation (Coopmans, Vertesi, Lynch, & Woolgar, 2014; Latour, 2006; Lynch, 1988, 2006; Pauwels, 2006)
We show that while drawing on already published images, some third-year undergraduates are able to curate novel, and yet plausible causal channels in their graphic representations, implicating new phenomenal potentials as lead researchers do in their review-type academic publications
It is relevant to state that while our work demonstrates the ways in which student drawing sometimes brought about new disclosure of phenomenal potentials, some of the most successful drawing-work was explained in the context of laboratory experience or the witness of ‘things’ produced and visualised in experimental settings
Summary
In science the settlement of facts and models are inseparably intertwined with the historical development of visual culture and technology (Daston & Galison, 2007; Rheinberger, 1988, 2010) and scientific knowledge is intrinsically bound up with graphic representation (Coopmans, Vertesi, Lynch, & Woolgar, 2014; Latour, 2006; Lynch, 1988, 2006; Pauwels, 2006). Biology makes most frequent and most varied use of images (Elkins, 2007), and while the technologies of bioscience image-making have changed dramatically since the enlightenment, drawing has never been entirely replaced as a relevant research tool (Hoffmann & Whittmann, 2013; Whittmann, 2013). Most bioscience lectures and textbooks rely on images as pedagogical devices (Perini, 2012a), and drawings of ‘things’ like cells and their functions are concrete models of their material targets (Weisberg, 2012). In a botany text the schematized cell will contain chloroplasts and an outer cell wall, whilst in a zoology text it will not include these items. The model is not a nerve cell, nor is it a muscle cell, nor a pancreatic cell, it stands for all of these. (p. 145 [emphasis added]: quoted in Weisberg, 2012, p. 18)
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