The Origins of Science as a Visual Pursuit: the case of the early Royal Society

From a chart of DNA sequencing to NASA's image of the Horsehead Nebula, science today is highly visual, producing spectacular, intriguing and even baffling images. We take the visual dimension of science so much for granted that it is easy to forget that many of these images involve much processing and manipulating of data and it is even more difficult to imagine that incorporation of visual resources was not a self-evident development in the history of science. This network seeks to investigate the origins of science as a visual pursuit, where naturalists and natural philosophers worked with draughtsmen, painters and engravers and used drawings, engravings, tables and models as a means of understanding nature. In particular, it focuses on activities of the early Royal Society in order to investigate how a collective enterprise to visualize knowledge emerged in seventeenth-century England. The early Royal Society is an excellent case study because it was a collective body with an interest in visualizing knowledge: its Philosophical Transactions regularly included illustrations, it supported various illustrated publications, and a wealth of pictorial material has survived in the Society's archives and elsewhere. Many of its Fellows were also connoisseurs of art in a period when a rich culture of print was developing in England.
By bringing together UK and international historians of science and historians of art and visual culture, and by involving a younger generation of students and scholars, this network asks the following research questions: How did images empower naturalists and natural philosophers to form innovative ideas and develop new practices? Was there any evidence of collective "seeing/picturing" appropriate for the collaborative ideal of the Royal Society? What was the process of publishing images, and what roles did authors, editors and artists play in the publication process of illustrated, scientific books? Did the interest in fine art and connoisseurship of some of the Fellows affect the way they drew or judged the validity of images produced for the Society? Is it possible to distinguish between 'artistic' and 'scientific' images? What were the problems or limitations, if any, perceived by the Fellows, of using images in understanding nature?
By the end of the network, we hope to understand how scientific endeavour came to be an active and challenging process of making visible the structures and processes in nature that are normally invisible to the human eye.

The Royal Society and its Fellows will benefit from having an important aspect of their past history highlighted in research scholarship and on the website.
The network shows how a significant scientific heritage of visualization grew out of a rich and diverse interaction between scientists and non-scientists (such as artists, engravers and publishers).
The network assistant will learn how to organize meetings, unite people from various backgrounds under common themes and questions, and design websites that cater for professional interactions as well as for information dissemination.
Professional natural science illustrators and students attending diploma courses in scientific illustration qualifications will be able to appreciate the historical dimension of their craft through our website.