Haptic Visions

Valerie Hanson

Description

Haptic Visions is about reading messages conveyed about the nanoscale and image use generally, with a particular focus on the rhetorical interactions among images, ourselves, and the material world. More specifically, this book explores how visualizations like Eigler and Schweizer’s form persuasive elements in arguments about manipulation and interaction at the atomic scale. Haptic Visions also analyzes how arguments about atomic interaction expressed in images of the nanoscale affect our understanding of nanotechnology, as well as what visualizations like the “IBM” images imply about how digital images and scientific visualization technologies such as the one Eigler and Schweizer used (the scanning tunneling microscope or STM), help constitute arguments.

Informations

• Publié par: Parlor Press, LLC
• Date de parution: 01 mai 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781602355538
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Visual Rhetoric
Series Editor: Marguerite Helmers
The Visual Rhetoric series publishes work by scholars in a wide variety of disciplines, including art theory, anthropology, rhetoric, cultural studies, psychology, and media studies.
Other Books in the Series
Locating Visual-Material Rhetorics: The Map, the Mill, and the GPS by Amy D. Propen (2012)
Visual Rhetoric and the Eloquence of Design , ed. by Leslie Atzmon (2011)
Writing the Visual: A Practical Guide for Teachers of Composition and Communication , ed. by Carol David and Anne R. Richards (2008)
Ways of Seeing, Ways of Speaking: The Integration of Rhetoric and Vision in Constructing the Real , ed. by Kristie S. Fleckenstein, Sue Hum, and Linda T. Calendrillo (2007)
Haptic Visions

Rhetorics of the Digital Image,
Information, and Nanotechnology
Valerie L. Hanson
Parlor Press
Anderson, South Carolina
www.parlorpress.com
Parlor Press LLC, Anderson, South Carolina, USA
© 2015 by Parlor Press
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America
S A N: 2 5 4 - 8 8 7 9
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hanson, Valerie L., 1969-
Haptic visions : rhetorics of the digital image, information, and nanotechnology / Valerie L. Hanson.
pages cm. -- (Visual rhetoric)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-60235-550-7 (pbk. : acid-free paper) -- ISBN 978-1-60235-551-4 (hardcover : acid-free paper)
1. Technical literature--Philosophy. 2. Visual communication. 3. English language--Rhetoric. 4. Nanotechnolgy. 5. Nanoart. 6. Haptic devices. 7. Scanning tunneling microscopy. I. Title.
T11.H275 2015
601’.4--dc23
2015006894
2 3 4 5
Visual Rhetoric Series
Editor: Marguerite Helmers
Cover design by Danielle Shuff.
Cover image: “Swirl” by Vladimir Kramer. From Unsplash. Used by permission.
Printed on acid-free paper.
Parlor Press, LLC is an independent publisher of scholarly and trade titles in print and multimedia formats. This book is available in paper, cloth and eBook formats from Parlor Press on the World Wide Web at http://www.parlorpress.com or through online and brick-and-mortar bookstores. For submission information or to find out about Parlor Press publications, write to Parlor Press, 3015 Brackenberry Drive, Anderson, South Carolina, 29621, or email [e-mail].


Contents
Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Imaging and Imagining Science in the Information Age
1 Imaging Atoms, Imagining Information: Rhetorical Dynamics of the Scanning Tunneling Microscope
2 Camera Haptica: Blindness, Histories, and Productions of Haptic Vision
3 Haptical Consistency: Emerging Conventions of the STM Image-Interface
4 Visual Intelligence: Reading the Rhetorical Work of STM Images in Tropes
5 Conclusion Haptic Visions of Science and Rhetoric: Interaction and Its Implications
Notes
Works Cited
Index For Print Edition
About the Author


Illustrations
Figure 1. Six images showing the assembly of the letters I B and M.
Figure 2. Color image of Eigler and Schweizer’s arrangement of xenon atoms into the letters I, B, and M.
Figure 3. “How an STM Works.”
Figure 4. “Quantum Corral” image.
Figure 5. Journal cover depicting carbon nanotube gate wires.
Figure 6. “Molecular Switches.”


To all my family


Acknowledgments
This book has been a project long in the making. The ideas for this book originally started in my PhD dissertation work at the Pennsylvania State University; I am grateful to my friends, my teachers, and my dissertation committee—Richard Doyle, Stuart Selber, Susan Squier, and Robert Yarber—for their inspiring and enlightening conversations, provocations, insights, and advice. I am also grateful for graduate fellowships from Penn State and from a National Science Foundation grant (Science, Medicine, and Technology in Culture; Pennsylvania State University, 2002–2003; principal investigators: Londa Schiebinger, Robert Proctor, Richard Doyle, and Susan Squier) that gave me time to pursue these ideas.
The collegial and intellectual support I have received at Philadelphia University helped me continue this project. In particular, I want to thank Marion Roydhouse, Katharine Jones, John Eliason, and Julie Kimmel for their encouragement and conversation. A Philadelphia University Research and Design grant helped expand my research through funding interviews conducted with scientists using the scanning tunneling microscope (STM) during 2005 and 2006. I am deeply grateful for the generosity, time, and good will of those scientists who agreed to be interviewed for this project. Thanks also go to the members of the Philadelphia-area nano-studies reading group for their intellectual support, insights, and discussions of things nano and beyond, including a few of this book’s topics in earlier stages.
A slightly modified form of parts of Chapter 4 and the conclusion originally appeared in Science Communication (“Amidst Nanotechnology’s Molecular Landscapes: The Changing Trope of Subvisible Worlds,” Science Communication , 34.1 (2012): 57–83. Pre-published May 19, 2011 (DOI: 10.1177/1075547011401630)). I am grateful to the editor, Susanna Hornig Priest, and the anonymous reviewers for their guidance. An earlier version of the argument in Chapter 3 appeared in a different form in Augenblick (“Nature as Database? Microscope Images’ Impact on Visual Cultures of the Natural World,” Augenblick , 45 (2009): 9–25). I thank the guest editor, Angela Krewani, for inviting me to be part of that production. This book’s development also benefited from a fellowship as part of the ZiF Research Group, “Science in the Context of Application: Methodological Change, Conceptual Transformation, Cultural Reorientation,” at Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Forschung (Center for Interdisciplinary Research), and I thank the other fellows and organizers of that fellowship. A few ideas developed in Chapter 3 appear in a different, earlier form in in my contribution to Science Transformed? Debating Claims of an Epochal Break, edited by Alfred Nordmann, Hans Radder and Gregor Schiemann (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011). Parts of this book’s arguments were also presented at conferences and other presentations, including those at the ZiF, the Annual Meetings of the Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S), the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST) Conferences, Conferences on College Composition and Communication (CCCCs), and Imaging and Imagining NanoScience and Engineering: An International and Interdisciplinary Conference. I thank audience members for their feedback and responses. I also am deeply grateful to David Blakesley and Marguerite Helmers at Parlor Press for their feedback and support, and to the anonymous reviewer whose comments and suggestions markedly improved this book.
Other support, material and emotional, was provided by so many to whom I am so grateful: A tremendous thank you to all my family and friends for conversation, patience, love, understanding, and enthusiasm as this project developed.


I ntroduction: Imaging and Imagining Science in the Information Age
The Information Age incarnates itself in the eye.
—Ivan Illich
I n Greg Bear’s 1985 and 1988 science fiction novels, Eon and Eternity, humans from the distant future communicate through a mix of speaking, gesturing, and “picting,” where the communicator projects stylized images above her or his shoulder from a torque-shaped machine worn around the neck. In Bear’s narrative, this multi-modal communication surprises humans from the near future as they encounter their distant descendants; the use of “picting” while speaking likely seemed far-fetched to Bear’s readers in the 1980s. However, as I write this book in the early twenty-first century, with my camera phone in my pocket and my laptop with its graphic user interface on my desk, the use of images to communicate has become ubiquitous. In fact, Bear’s envisioned form of communication seems not only plausible today, but also imminent—just a small step from texting with emoji or using Snapchat.
A few years after the publication of Bear’s science fiction novels, two scientists, D. M. Eigler and E. K. Schweizer, published a series of six images (see Figure 1) in an article in the April 5, 1990 issue of Nature . Like Bear’s form of communication, Eigler and Schweizer’s images intermingle text, picture, and (atomic) bodily movement to communicate; in the case of Eigler and Schweizer’s images, the purpose is to demonstrate the scientist’s ability to manipulate thirty-five individual xenon atoms and arrange the atoms to form the letters “IBM” on a nickel surface. At the time, Eigler and Schweizer’s images created a stir among scientists and others; the images also spurred interest in an emerging field of science and technology: nanotechnology. 1 The fact that Eigler and Schweizer communicate what we can see and do with atoms in images forms part of a larger message about the important role of visualizations in shaping and communicating scientific knowledge. While the “IBM” images were published a few decades ago, the message that nanoscale images such as Eigler and Schweizer’s sends is still relevant today to both scientific an