Making Visible: The visual and graphic practices of the early Royal Society

伦敦皇家学会成立于1660年，是早期现代科学的一个重要机构，致力于对自然的集体研究。它赞助的许多出版物，如罗伯特·胡克的《缩微图》或弗朗西斯·威勒比的《鱼史》，以及它的杂志《哲学汇刊》，都含有大量的插图。该协会的档案还包括丰富多样的图像。然而，在英国皇家学会的案例中，图像在发展和传播科学知识过程中的作用还没有得到充分的研究。格雷沙姆学院学会成立的头五十年是一个形成时期，在此期间，学会努力研究呈现一种新形式的知识的策略，并在科学问题上建立自己的权威。该项目将首次全面介绍早期皇家学会为集体调查自然而部署视觉资源的复杂而巧妙的方式，以及皇家学会如何反过来帮助定义和建立科学的视觉文化。它将更广泛地促进视觉在科学经验和观察的历史中的作用。该项目将揭示迄今为止未知或研究不足的皇家学会图片来源，并将它们与其他早期皇家学会的档案和出版资料一起研究。与科学历史学家、艺术历史学家、书籍历史学家、版画、绘画、科学仪器和植物标本馆的管理员和策展人合作，将导致皇家学会研究员部署的各种可视化技术的全面说明。该项目将首先对皇家学会成立50年来使用的视觉资源和材料进行全面调查，找到幸存的材料，并确定所涉及的图形工匠的身份。这将是调查两个关键主题的基础。我)意象。英国皇家学会在一个动态过程中生成和部署视觉资源，涉及复杂的程序和众多人员，包括对象和仪器（科学和图形）的选择，绘制，复制，校正和授权图像，以及决定是否发布图像，以及以何种媒介发布。幸存的材料揭示了在可视化方面丰富多样的合作：具有各种技能和背景的图形工匠和具有艺术和收藏鉴赏力的皇家学会研究员学会了相互观察和理解自然。这样的合作为科学的视觉素养奠定了基础。(二)Knowledge-making。图像塑造并促进了皇家学会知识的形成和传播，传达新发现，解决冲突，形成和定义一个社区。在建立学会在知识方面的权威方面，图像与文本和物体一起发挥了重要作用。了解皇家学会的视觉和图形实践将有助于揭示科学视觉文化的出现，这种文化塑造并维持了一个自然哲学家群体。艺术、社会科学和人文研究中心充满活力的多学科研究文化是这个项目的理想学术环境。它有一个活跃的博士后社区，从事各种项目，包括视觉和物质文化以及数字人文学科。它与南加州大学早期现代研究所和亨廷顿图书馆的国际合作为思想和方法的交叉融合带来了进一步的机会。除了虚拟和实体展览外，与皇家学会图书馆及其图片库的合作将确保项目的研究成果持续提供给更广泛的受众。

The Royal Society of London, founded in 1660, was an important institution for early modern science, dedicated to the collective investigation of nature. Many of the publications it sponsored, such as Robert Hooke's Micrographia or Francis Willughby's Historia piscium, as well as its journal, Philosophical Transactions, contained extensive illustrations. The archives of the Society also include a rich variety of images. Yet, the function of images in the process of developing and communicating scientific knowledge has been under-studied in the case of the Royal Society. The first fifty years of the Society at Gresham College was a formative period during which it grappled with strategies to present a new form of knowledge and establish its own authority in scientific matters. This project will result in the first comprehensive account of the complex and ingenious ways in which visual resources were deployed for the collective investigation of nature by the early Royal Society, and how the Royal Society in turn helped define and establish a scientific visual culture in the early modern period. It will contribute more generally to the role of the visual in the history of scientific experience and observation.The project will bring to light hitherto unknown or under-researched pictorial sources from the Royal Society, and study them alongside other archival and published sources of the early Royal Society. Collaboration with historians of science, historians of art, historians of the book, conservators and curators of prints, drawings, scientific instruments and herbaria, will lead to a comprehensive account of the various visualization techniques deployed by Fellows of the Royal Society. The project will first carry out a full survey of the visual sources and materials used by the Royal Society in its first fifty years by locating surviving material and identifying identities of the graphic craftsmen involved. This will be the basis for investigating two key themes.i) Image-making.The Royal Society generated and deployed visual resources in a dynamic process involving complex procedures and numerous people in the selection of objects and instruments (scientific as well as graphic), drawing, copying, correcting and authorizing images, as well as in the decision to publish an image or not, and in what medium. The surviving materials reveal rich and heterogeneous collaborations in visualization: graphic craftsmen with a range of skills and background and Fellows of the Royal Society with virtuoso appreciation of art and collections learned to see and understand nature from each other. Such collaborations laid the foundation for a visual literacy of science.ii) Knowledge-making. Images shaped and contributed to the formation and dissemination of knowledge for the Royal Society, in communicating new discoveries, resolving conflicts, and forming and defining a community. Images played an important role alongside texts and objects in establishing the Society's authority in matters of knowledge. Understanding the Royal Society's visual and graphic practices will shed light on the emergence of a visual culture of science that shaped and sustained a community of natural philosophers.The vibrant multi-disciplinary research culture at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities is an ideal academic context for this project. It has an active post-doctoral community engaged in various projects, including visual and material cultures and the digital humanities. Its international collaboration with USC Early Modern Studies Institute and Huntington Library brings further opportunities for the cross-fertilisation of ideas and approaches. The collaboration with the Royal Society Library and its Picture Library in addition to a virtual and physical exhibition will ensure the sustained availability of the project's research results to a wider audience.