Categoría: Bitacora

Sesión 1 de Marzo: Modelos en antropología, A. López Austin.

En la siguiente sesión del Seminario REMO, discutiremos el capítulo 3 ” La construcción de un modelo a partir de las concepciones indígenas actuales”, del libro de Austin, A. L. (1994). Tamoanchan y Tlalocan. Fondo de Cultura Económica.

Presenta: Diego Méndez.

Sesión 15 de Febrero: Dear data y “visualizaciones y cognición”

En esta sesión se discutieron los textos:
Lupi, G., Posavec, S., & Popova, M. (2016). Dear data: a friendship in 52 weeks of postcards.
Latour, Bruno (1986) Visualization and cognition: Drawing Things Together. In H Kuklick (editor) Knowledge and Society – Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present, Jai Press vil. 6 pp. 1-40.
Presentó: Nora Morales

Sesión 1 de febrero: Representaciones sociales y ciencia vernacular.

Wagner, W. (2007). Vernacular science knowledge: its role in everyday life communication. Public Understanding of Science, 16(1), 7–22. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963662506071785

This paper argues that our understanding of how the public understands science is incomplete as long as we do not answer the question of why, under which conditions, and in which form the general public assimilate scientific background knowledge. Everyday life and communication are governed by criteria of social efficiency and evidence. Under the conditions of everyday life, it is sufficient for the lay person to possess and employ metaphoric and iconic representations of scientific facts–called “vernacular science knowledge”–that are wrong in scientific terms, as long as they are able to serve as acceptable and legitimate belief systems in discourses with other lay people. These representations are tools for a purpose that follow local rules of communication. Research within the framework of Social Representation Theory–collective symbolic coping with biotechnology in Europe, lay understanding of sexual conception, as well as traditional versus modern psychiatric knowledge in India–is presented to illustrate

 

Ungar, S. (2000). Knowledge, ignorance and the popular culture: climate change versus the ozone hole. Public Understanding of Science, 9(3), 297–312. https://doi.org/10.1088/0963-6625/9/3/306

This paper begins with the “knowledge-ignorance paradox”—the process by which the growth of specialized knowledge results in a simultaneous increase in ignorance. It then outlines the roles of personal and social motivations, institutional decisions, the public culture, and technology in establishing consensual guidelines for ignorance. The upshot is a sociological model of how the “knowledge society” militates against the acquisition of scientific knowledge. Given the assumption of widespread scientific illiteracy, the paper tries to show why the ozone hole was capable of engendering some public understanding and concern, while climate change failed to do so. The ozone threat encouraged the acquisition of knowledge because it was allied and resonated with easy-to-understand bridging metaphors derived from the popular culture. It also engendered a “hot crisis.” That is, it provided a sense of immediate and concrete risk with everyday relevance. Climate change fails at both of these criteria and remains in a public limbo

Presenta: Octavio Valadez

Sesión 3 de Noviembre. Seeing eye to eye

3 de Noviembre
Presenta: Ruben

GOULD, S. (1998). SEEING EYE TO EYE, THROUGH A GLASS CLEARLY. In Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (pp. 57-74). Cambridge, Massachusetts;
London, England: Harvard University Press

Rudwick, M. J. S. (1976). The Emergence of a Visual Language for Geological Science 1760—1840. History of Science, 14(3), 149–195

Sesion 22 de Julio, Estudios visuales.

Estimad@s:
La próxima sesión cerraremos el programa trimestral del Seminario de Representación y Modelización discutiendo los textos cortos sobre estudios visuales:
Pauwels
Pauwels, L. (2008). An integrated model for conceptualising visual competence in scientific research and communication. Visual Studies, 23(2), 147–161. http://doi.org/10.1080/14725860802276305
Visual representation in both natural and social sciences is an important and growing area of research and an ever‐growing practice, given the rapidly developing visual imaging technologies. This article seeks to contribute to our understanding of the complex processes and decisions that go into producing and using visual representations as prime vehicles of knowledge building and dissemination. To that aim the author develops an integrated theoretical model for disclosing and interrelating the vast array of aspects in representational practices that affect the appearance and the uses that can be made of their visual end products. This knowledge will help towards developing scientific integrity and optimising expressive capabilities in scientific visual culture. In developing the model, explicit attention is paid to the diverse nature of referents in scientific research, the complex interplay across various types of ‘translation processes’ in arriving at legible and valid data, the imminent ambiguities and growing hybridity of visual representational methods and techniques, and the determining role of purpose and the urgent need to develop a more encompassing set of visual competencies among scholars.
Manovich, Lev. 2011. “What Is Visualisation?” Visual Studies 26 (1): 36–49. doi:10.1080/1472586X.2011.548488.
 This article proposes that the practice of information visualisation (infovis), from its beginnings in the second part of the eighteenth century until today, relied on two key principles. The first principle is reduction. Infovis uses graphical primitives such as points, straight lines, curves and simple geometric shapes to stand in for objects and relations between them. The second principle is the use of spatial variables (position, size, shape and, more recently, movement) to represent key differences in the data and reveal patterns and relations. Following this analysis, the author discusses a more recent visualisation method which we can call ‘direct visualisation’ (or ‘media visualisation’): creating new visual representations from the actual visual media objects (images, video) or their parts. The article analyses the well-known examples of artistic visualisations that use this method: Listening Post (Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen), Cinema Redux (Brendan Dawes) and Preservation of Selected Traces (Ben Fry). It further suggests that direct visualisation is particularly relevant for humanities, media studies and cultural institutions. Using the actual visual artefacts in visualisation as opposed to representing them by graphical primitives helps the researcher to understand meaning and/or cause behind the patterns she may observe, as well as to discover additional patterns. To illustrate this idea, examples of projects created in the author’s lab at UCSD (softwarestudies.com) are presented. Founded in 2007, the lab works on techniques and software to allow interactive exploration of large sets of visual cultural data using a direct visualisation approach and supervisualisation systems such as 215 megapixel HIPerSpace. The examples of its work are visualisations of 4553 covers of every issue of Time magazine published between 1923 and 2009; visualisations of all pages of every issue of Science and Popular Science magazines published between 1872 and 1922; and a set of visualisations of 1 million pages on Manga series
Presenta: Nora.
La cita es a las 15:30 en la Casa Galván de la UAM.
Saludos cordiales.