Former Humanities Center director and Stanford English professor John Bender has co-authored a book with Stanford art history professor Michael Marrinan called The Culture of Diagram (Stanford University Press, 2010).
The Culture of Diagram explores a terrain where words meet pictures and formulas meet figures, foregrounding diagrams as tools for blurring those boundaries to focus on the production of knowledge as process. It outlines a history of convergence among diverse streams of data in real-time: from eighteenth-century print media and the diagrammatic procedures in the pages of Diderot’s Encyclopedia to the paintings of Jacques-Louis David and mathematical devices that reveal the unseen worlds of quantum physics. Central to the story is the process of correlation, which invites observers to participate by eliciting leaps of imagination to fill gaps in data, equations, or sensations. This book traces practices that ran against the grain of both Locke’s clear and distinct ideas and Newton’s causality—practices greatly expanded by the calculus, probabilities, and protocols of data sampling.
“Traditional pictures are said to open windows onto the world. We wanted to show how diagrams broke the window, shattering visual knowledge into multiple scales and points of view.” Bender said. He also observed that: “Diagrams often are drawings like those engineers make in which each thing is shown at whatever size will make it clear to the viewer, but the user is the one who puts it all together into a machine or a building. People often think of pictures as final objects but diagrams are not finished. They are tools for users to work with as their minds encounter the world.”
Read more about The Culture of Diagram on The Human Experience: Inside the Humanities at Stanford University.
To look inside the book, visit Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Culture-Diagram-John-Bender/dp/0804745056.
