practices, thus indicating, one way in which visualization technologies form points of intersection for the “mechanical techniques, instrumental requirements, and socioeconomic forces” that Crary mentions (8). Therefore, the practices of mediating between data and image also form a site for analyzing the rhetorical work of instruments.
Along with extensive mediation practices, inscriptions tend to require extensive interpretive practices to understand what is being shown; although, visual inscriptions may present phenomena in ways that look simple or apparent. Amann and Knorr Cetina’s study underscores the complexity of the processes of visualization and interpretation in making scientific knowledge. The apparent simplicity of the image as a form for presenting data sometimes leads to confusion about how to read visual inscriptions made by instruments, even by experts.20 For example, in the early days of the STM, researchers occasionally misinterpreted what the images showed (Mody, Instrumental 12–13; Woodruff 75). In a study of PET scans, Joseph Dumit explains that some of the difficulties researchers have in interpreting scans involve not only habits of seeing, but also theoretical questions of interpretation (68–69).21 Thus, practices of mediation and interpretation of the productions of instruments form two aspects of the complexity of digital visualization technologies used to create inscriptions; interpretive practices, like mediation practices, suggest possible directions for analyzing rhetorical functions.
Images of Data
Galison’s account of the merging of two traditions of presenting evidence in microphysics in the early 1970s points to an origin for the development of recent scientific and medical visualization technologies that present large amounts of data in image form, such as the STM, MRI, and PET scans, for example (Image and Logic 570). Galison argues that the development and use of electronic images in physics for the first time allowed researchers from these two traditions to combine methods and see images as evidence. Because large amounts of data could compose images, researchers who had focused on images like photographs for evidence could use the same methods—images—as those researchers who relied on statistical data for evidence. The use of images to present evidence authoritatively within the field was so important, Galison argues, that “the controllable image” has become the main form that data has taken in the sciences (Image and Logic 810).22 Indeed, many scientific and medical visualization technologies that rely on data in image form were developed and used in the 1970s.23 The STM, too, was developed within the trend of using data to compose images: The inventors of the STM first filed for patents in 1978 in Switzerland, and then in 1980 in the US (Granek and Hon 102).24
The expression of data in image form, common to visualization technologies such as the STM and the MRI, raises questions about how the use of data-images, or informational images, affects the ways in which images function in discourse and in reading practices or assumptions about what the images convey. Amann and Knorr Cetina’s observation that the significance of data must be discovered highlights the importance of exploring how the presentation of data in electronic and image form affects the practices scientists use to discover or interpret the data. The fact that concerns about communication with informational images is common to a group of digital visualization technologies such as PET, MRI, STM, and ultrasound suggests that while the details of the context of practice for each visualization technology offer unique insights, a study charting the rhetorical effects of one visualization technology (like the STM) can be relevant to the study of the others. Further, few studies exist on the rhetorics of the creation of data images by these technologies, or on the rhetorics of digital images such as those the STM, MRI, and related technologies produce.25
The complex mediation and interpretation practices needed to express data in images also affect users in ways that suggest directions for further study of the rhetorics of instruments. Scholars in art history, science studies, and media studies recognize the importance of investigating the effects of an instrument on the experimenters or users of the instruments; the insights of these scholars provide a basis for extending analysis to rhetorical aspects. For example, Crary argues that optical instruments reconfigured the position of the nineteenth century observer, creating a change in visual practices (see 8-9 for a brief summary of his main argument as it relates to instruments). Galison and Daston examine the identity of the scientist in Objectivity, recounting how the scientific self has been shaped by historically specific scientific practices that are associated with the main “epistemic virtue” of the time, such as objectivity (191-251) or, more recently, trained judgment (357-61). Curtis explores the ways in which photography trains medical observers. While Crary, Daston and Galison, and Curtis do not focus on rhetoric, their detailed analyses of instruments in practice present historical and social models of how instruments may affect users, perhaps informing rhetorical analyses of how users are influenced by using instruments.
A Method for Analyzing Material, Embodied Interactions
This chapter performs a close reading of the operations and productions of the STM as it demonstrates how the specific rhetorical influences of a technology affect its productions (such as STM images). I focus on the rhetorics of the STM as part of the complex, material, and embodied practices of scientific knowledge-making and communication. Attention to the production processes of technologies is likely to become more and more important for analyzing the productions of those technologies, whether those productions take the form of images, databases, or other digital objects; how we make arguments with visualization technologies can be informed by the productive capacities and effects of those visualization technologies. In performing a close reading of the operation of an instrument, and considering the ways in which the STM is imbricated within social and material practices as an inscription device, this chapter highlights the material and embodied rhetorics at play in the formation of scientific knowledge, adding a rhetorical dimension to science studies of embodiment, and a science studies dimension to rhetorical studies of embodiment.26
My close reading of the STM through the dynamics of its operation also necessitates analysis of interaction; interaction is crucial to the operation of the STM. As the summary of the STM’s operations above suggests, creating images of the nanoscale involves interactions between electrons, material apparatuses (including scanning and computer components), human actions, computer software, and cultural practices—practices of seeing and organizing as well as coordinating information and things. STM operation relies on interactions among the constitutive elements of the instrument, interactions that exist not only between user and sample, as in most microscopical work (Keller, “The Biological Gaze” 112), but also at other levels, such as the interaction between the sample and the STM. Therefore, closely reading the interactions that compose STM dynamics reveals rhetorical dimensions of scientific practices of making knowledge.27
What interaction means, however, also becomes a question: In casual use, “interaction” is often over-generally applied to anything involving a computer, and the term’s definition is disputed among scholars studying digital media and technology.28 Janet Murray clarifies that what is often meant by interactivity in computers is that “they create an environment that is both procedural and participatory” (74). Rhetoricians analyzing the context of writing in new media or digital media environments focus on the participatory aspect of interactivity, without paying much attention to the participatory aspect that Murray identifies, using the term to indicate the ability of the user/reader to communicate with the user/writer. A few rhetoricians, such as Teena A. M. Carnegie, James Porter, and Ian Bogost, however, examine procedural as well as participatory aspects of interaction.
Porter, Carnegie, and Bogost suggest that the value of interaction lies in shaping audience response as a structural element, as opposed to only content—that form and content are both components of the rhetorics of interaction. Carnegie argues that the computer interface functions as a Ciceronian exordium, a rhetorical opening strategy that aims to engage the audience so that the audience is receptive to hearing the argument (165). Carnegie claims that three modes of interactivity, drawn from new media and human-computer interaction (HCI) research, multi-directionality, manipulability, and presence, are also the rhetorical modes of the interface (166). Carnegie links these three modes to higher levels of audience engagement, drawing from Sheizaf Rafaeli and Fay
