Technologies of Scientific Visualization

During the past 15 years or so, a community of scholars in the arts and humanities has examined issues of epistemology in scientific imaging of nanoscale objects and explored the question: How do technology and aesthetics affect the relationship between an atom or a molecule and an image of the atom or molecule? Recently this community reached out to scholars examining other methods of scientific visualization such as images of outer space from the Hubble Telescope and brain imaging.

Annamaria Carusi, Andrew Balmer and Brigitte Nerlich organized the multidisciplinary conference Images and Visualisation: Imaging Technology, Truth and Trust, generously supported by the European Science Foundation, to explore these issues. The conference took place at the Norrköping campus of Linköping University in Sweden, September 2012. While the conference offered many excellent presentations, we present here a selection of papers that illustrate the value and the challenges of the three most salient themes that emerged: color, scale and technology.

Contents
Chris Toumey, Brigitte Nerlich and Chris Robinson: Technologies of Scientific Visualization	62
Philip Moriarty: Visualizing the “Invisible”	64
Kathrin Friedrich: Achromatic Reasoning—On the Relation of Gray and Scale in Radiology	66
Liv Hausken: The Visual Culture of Brain Imaging	68
Lars Lindberg Christensen, Douglas Pierce-Price and Olivier Hainaut: Determining the Aesthetic Appeal of Astronomical Images	70
Thomas Turnbull: Scientific Visualisation in Practice: Replicating Experiments at Scale	72
Ingeborg Reichle: Images in Art and Science and the Quest for a New Image Science	74
Catherine Allamel-Raffin: Interpreting Artworks, Interpreting Scientific Images	76
Sky Gross, Shai Lavi and Edmond J. Safra: Visibly Dead: On Making Brain Death Believable	78
Gunnar E. Höst and Gustav Bohlin: Engines of Creationism? Intelligent Design, Machine Metaphors and Visual Rhetoric	80