Final Forum on Visualizing Knowledge
The final Visualizing Knowledge seminar takes place on Tuesday, June 5, 2007 at the Stanford Humanities Center from 4:00-6:00 pm. This final roundtable convenes a panel of 14 scholars working throughout the schools of Stanford to discuss the primary themes that the Sawyer-Mellon Visualizing Knowledge Seminar has raised over the course of the year.
These themes include:
Themes
1) What is the significance, importance, and effect of translating non-visual forms of knowledge into visual representations? How does meaning change in the translation process? What is gained? What is lost?
2) What is the direct and immediate epistemological value of the visual? What kinds of knowledge are conveyed by or produced in the visual register? What is unique to visual forms of knowledge? What kind of authority does the visual hold?
3) Technologies and instruments of visualization augment visual senses in numerous ways, making the invisible available to the senses. In what ways do instruments limit or change knowledge that is made visible? What is the relationship of instruments to the human senses? How do instruments change our purchase on the natural world? Does a mimetic or schematic representation have more value when visualizing knowledge?
4) How does the increased reliance on visual forms of knowledge change inquiry? What skills must develop or changes with the rise of visual forms? Does this lead to more interdisciplinary work? Does it create new types of divisions? What protocols of research does the reliance on visual forms encourage or require?
5) Does visualizing knowledge encourage social interactions or build community? Would a correlation between socializing and visual representations explain some aspects of gaming, online communities, cinema, TV, theatre?
6) The seminar was presented as considering how knowledge is made visual from Alberti’s window to digital arrays. While we considered Japanese visual culture, it was largely against a Western framework. Has the seminar operated within a Western optical hegemony? Is there another approach that would have allowed us to avoid this comparative method?
7) To what extent is the computer screen a window to the world? What is our relationship to the screen? What world is referenced when visual knowledge is presented on a screen?
8) What’s the emerging importance of the body in a new visual culture? In the past, the eye was considered a portal to the body. Do new forms of visualizing knowledge require us to participate in a different and more corporeal manner? (Wii, computer mouse) Is the experience different by gender?