Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book is based on presentations made at the 2011 conference in Oxford. It gathers together a sample of contributions from the conference, with others being presented in the special issue of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, titled Computational Picturing. The book presents relations between science and art are dealt with by several contributors. Alma Steingart underscores the cognitive import of visualizations by tracking the way that computer graphics animations were put to use by mathematicians as generative of novel theories. However, there are diverse notions of objectivity in the domain mediated by computational visualization. A relational ontology is also key to the approach developed Annamaria Carusi and Aud Sissel Hoel, as it is to other contributions that emphasize the generative aspect of visualizations.