ABSTRACT
Critical attention to the role of images in knowledge production has a substantial history in science and technology studies. In addition to attention to specific practices and topics, newer work addresses the ways imaging technologies have expanded the cultural role of analogue and digital visualization. The blind spot of art history, its considerable disregard for epistemological images as images, contributes to the disbalanced cultural authority of data visualizations. Visual images participate in the production and transmission of knowledge in many disciplines. In the sciences, they serve particular roles in generating and representing research. In general, less scholarly attention has been paid to diagrammatic and schematic graphical forms of expression, than to pictorial ones. Graphic designers, scholars working in digital humanities, and also those in the history of science, have taken to tracking circles, bar charts, pies, and trees to supply them with origin myths and to recover lost or abandoned projects.
