ABSTRACT
The majority of research about representation in the academy focuses on the natural sciences and, in particular, laboratory studies (see Latour and Woolgar, 1986; Lynch, 1991). However, the notion that certain epistemic possibilities are bound up with the way that things are represented in/to the world extends to all fields of scholarship. Images are laden with scripted meanings and make visible what scholars assume about the world and how they believe people engage with it. Henderson, in a study about engineers, observes
… visual representations shape the structure of the work, who may participate in the work, and the final products of design engineering. They are a component of the social organization of collective cognition and the locus for practice-situated and practice-generated knowledge. (1991, p. 44)
