I will be giving a brown back talk on visualization as a tool in the humanities tomorrow, September 5th at noon. All are invited!
- Visual Knowledge
- Faculty Work
- VMW
I will be giving a brown back talk on visualization as a tool in the humanities tomorrow, September 5th at noon. All are invited!
Système figuré des connoissances humaines, in Diderot and d’Alembert, Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers . Published by Pellet, Geneva, 1777-1779, text volume 1. Courtesy of Special Collections, Hillman Library, University of Pittsburgh.
Denis Diderot (French, 1713-1784), Jean le Rond d’Alembert (French, 1717-1783). Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers. Published by Brisson, David, le Breton, Paris, 1762, plate volume 1. Reproduction of Plate 4: Anatomie. Collection of Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA.
Denis Diderot (French, 1713-1784), Jean le Rond d’Alembert (French, 1717-1783) and Pierre Mouchon (French, 1733-1797). Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers. Published by Brisson, David, le Breton, Paris, 1762, plate volume 1. Reproduction of plate 103: Histoire naturelle, “Principes de Botanique…tournefort.” Collection of Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA.
Denis Diderot (French, 1713-1784), Jean le Rond d’Alembert (French, 1717-1783) and Pierre Mouchon (French, 1733-1797). Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers. Published by Brisson, David, le Breton, Paris, 1762, plate volume 1. Reproduction of plate 104: Histoire naturelle, “Principes de botanique…Linnaeus.” Collection of Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA.
Denis Diderot (French, 1713-1784), Jean le Rond d’Alembert (French, 1717-1783) and Pierre Mouchon (French, 1733-1797). Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers. Published by Brisson, David, le Breton, Paris, 1762, plate volume 1. Reproduction of plate 1: “gravure en Taille-douce.” Collection of Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA.
Denis Diderot (French, 1713-1784), Jean le Rond d’Alembert (French, 1717-1783) and Pierre Mouchon (French, 1733-1797). Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers. Published by Brisson, David, le Breton, Paris, 1762, plate volume 1. Reproduction of Plate 8: Anatomie. Collection of Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA.
The “Tree of Knowledge” [Système figuré des connaissances humaines] appeared in the first volume of the Encyclopédie, ou, Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (1751), a titanic publishing enterprise produced between 1751 and 1772 and masterminded by Denis Diderot (1713-1784) and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert (1717-1783). The point of the diagram was to demonstrate that all knowledge [Entendement] is the product of sense experience and the workings of three mental faculties – Memory, Reason, and Imagination.
The “Tree of Knowledge” encapsulated in a single image the main goals of the Encyclopédie: to reconfigure the entirety of human knowledge as the basis for future progress in all fields of inquiry. Citing precursors such as Francis Bacon, John Locke, and Isaac Newton, Diderot and d’Alembert based their encyclopedia on empirical and mathematical knowledge, rather than the authority of sources such as Ancient texts or the Bible. An array of contemporary specialists was tapped to write over 70,000 articles on topics ranging from abstract principles of justice to the intricacies of watch-making.
The first folio edition of the Encyclopédie was a luxury product consisting of 17 volumes of text and 11 volumes of plates illustrating an array of sciences, technologies, and arts. The 2,885 engraved plates added substantially to the cost and time of production, but the editors justified the inclusion of this material to better explain complicated processes and unfamiliar things to a curious readership. The Encyclopédie was thus something of a museum of visual specimens as well as an alphabetical dictionary of terms and ideas.
The ambition of the Encyclopédie was to change the way people thought. The audacity of this project is brought into focus when considered in relation to the very limited nature of formal education available in eighteenth-century Europe. Universities were accessible only to a privileged elite and their curricula – inherited from the Middle Ages – remained devoted largely to the study of ancient Greek and Latin authors, law, medicine and, most important, theology. The Encyclopédie, by contrast, reached a European-wide audience. By 1789, it is estimated that 24,000 complete sets in various formats and editions had been printed, more than half of which were distributed outside France.
The plates of the Encyclopédie often represent stages in complex technical processes by juxtaposing images of different types. Vignettes representing human figures engaged in various activities are supplemented by large-scale renderings depicting tools and their proper manipulation. Thus, in the plates that represent “Engraving” [Gravure], the process of transferring drawings to copper plates is illustrated in step-by-step fashion in a perspective view of an engraver’s studio, while the chisel-like tools used in this process are shown with cross-sections through their blades to better illustrate their forms. Numbers adjacent to different parts of the image link each element into articles in the text.
Other visual techniques employed in the Encyclopédie include table-like arrays of specimens grouped to facilitate visual comparisons. Such, for example, is the strategy used in the plate from the Supplément (1777) illustrating the stages in the development of a frog, which breaks down the process of gestation to clarify transformation and mutation over time. Two plates (1768) illustrating different systems of botanical classification – the one developed by the French scholar Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (1656-1708), the other by the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) – are especially striking, permitting the reader to compare two competing systems at a moment when neither had been universally adopted by botanists. Through these images, the Encyclopédie contributed to discussions about the principles of disciplines and disseminated up-to-date ideas formulate by prominent specialists.
The Encyclopédie was not merely conceived as a repository of information, but as an instrument for making new knowledge; as such, its product was ambiguous and open-ended, dependent on the reader making serendipitous juxtapositions. In the course of the eighteenth century, a number of subsequent editions of the Encyclopédie were published, notably the smaller quarto edition exhibited here alongside the first folio edition. Published between 1777 and 1779 in Geneva, the quarto edition consisted of 36 text volumes and only three volumes of illustrations. By this stage, the new publishers regarded the illustrations as cumbersome and largely unnecessary, explaining that while the Encyclopédie had contributed to “accelerating the progress of reason,” the cost of the original edition was an impediment to maximizing its benefits to humanity.
The Artl@s Bulletin (http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/artlas/) recently came to my attention. This is a peer-reviewed online journal published by the École normale supérieure and the Centre national pour la recherche scientifique in Paris. As its editorial statement (part of which I've pasted in below) makes clear, its concerns are quite relevant to those of many of the constellations and related initiatives, including Itinera and Contemporaneity.
From http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/artlas/about.html:
Image Credit: Colby Stuart, "periodic table of visualization methods," https://flic.kr/p/xbFB1.
I will be teaching a PhD seminar this fall in the digital humanities at the iSchool here at Pitt. The draft syllabus is done for those who might be interested in seeing what is going on...check out the PDF attached at the bottom of the post.
There will be balanced focus on the theoretical and practical aspects of producing digitally-inflected work in the humanities and social sciences, and students can expect to leave the course having built something that furthers their own research. Do be in touch if you have any questions or would like any further information (contact information).
ETA: Class will be held on Mondays from 12-3pm in the School of Information Sciences.
Old Media and New Media. Image Credit: Flickr user mermaid, london street art: what are these?.
Cornell University Library has started a project. funded by the NEH, to investigate how best to preserve born-digital art objects. Their preliminary findings (survey-based) have just been published as "Interactive Digital Media Art Survey: Key Findings and Observations." The eventual goal is to publish generalizable best practices in this area. Those of you interested in such things should certainly head over there.
Fritz Kahn (German, 1888-1968). Der Weg der entwikclung (The path of development) from the series Das Leben des Menschen: Eine volkstumliche Anatomie, Biologie, physiologie und Entwicklungsgeschichte des Menschen, vol. II. Published by Franck`sche Verlagshandlung, Stuttgart, 1929, volume IV. Courtesy University of Pittsburgh Library System.
Fritz Kahn (German, 1888-1968). Die prinzipien der warmeschutzes (The principles of Thermal protection) from the series Das Leben des Menschen: Eine volkstumliche Anatomie, Biologie, physiologie und Entwicklungsgeschichte des Menschen. Published by Franck`sche Verlagshandlung, Stuttgart, 1926, volume III. Courtesy University of Pittsburgh Library System.
Fritz Kahn (German, 1888-1968). Das Vegetative Nervensystem (The Autonomic Nervous System), tab. XI from the series Das Leben des Menschen: Eine volkstumliche Anatomie, Biologie, physiologie und Entwicklungsgeschichte des Menschen. Published by Franck`sche Verlagshandlung, Stuttgart, 1929, volume IV. Courtesy University of Pittsburgh Library System.
Fritz Kahn (German, 1888-1968). Muskel-u Klingelleitung in ihrer funftelligent Ubereinstimmung`` (Muscles and doorbell wire corresponding in five parts), Plate XVII from the series Das Leben des Menschen: Eine volkstumliche Anatomie, Biologie, physiologie und Entwicklungsgeschichte des Menschen. Published by Franck`sche Verlagshandlung, Stuttgart, 1924, volume II. Courtesy University of Pittsburgh Library System.
Annika Johnson
The title of Fritz Kahn’s five-volume series – The Life of Man: A Popular Anatomy, Biology, Physiology and Developmental History of Man – reveals his ambition to synthesize new scientific knowledge into texts and images designed for a broad, non-specialist audience. Kahn imagined the human body as a microcosm of both the universe and of the modern world: atoms, cells, and proteins performed their duties within a complex system of mechanical parts like workers in a great modern city.
A team of illustrators working under Kahn’s supervision produced the illustrations for The Life of Man, but establishing a uniform graphic language – something that preoccupied Kahn’s contemporary Otto Neurath – was not a goal. Images for The Life of Man were appropriated from a variety of sources and no effort was made to create a homogeneous graphic style. The diversity of image types – including microscopic photography, graphs, physiognomic illustrations, and three-dimensional photographs (complete with 3D glasses!) – expressed Kahn’s belief that different scientific concepts demanded different and sometimes multiple methods of visualization.
Comparative images dominated Kahn’s approach to scientific visualization. Such images emphasized process over realistic graphic renderings of discrete anatomical parts. Kahn tackled the challenge of representing biological processes by transforming the body into a complex of machine-like organs assembled from gears, levers, conveyor belts and pulleys. Unlike the plates of the Encyclopédie, which broke down processes into discrete stages and favored a “true-to-life” mode of representation, Kahn’s images encourage the reader to reconstruct the internal processes of the body by imagining the living organism to function like a well-designed machine.
The Life of Man established standards according to which the reader could measure progress and difference. Numerous illustrations of bodies deemed abnormal or dysfunctional served to reinforce a norm. Kahn’s definition of “normal” and his constructions of race and gender were based on long-standing visual traditions that will be encountered in other parts of this exhibition. Physiognomic illustrations (strikingly similar to those developed in the eighteenth century by Johann Kaspar Lavater) are not completely at odds with Kahn’s mechanic illustrations: both types of image impose a standardized view of a normal body – often white and European.
To Fritz Kahn (1888-1968), the diffusion of scientific knowledge and its practical applications required compelling visualizations that transformed complex ideas into terms accessible to a modern consumer public. Man as Industrial Palace (Der Mensch als Industriepalast), the image for which Kahn is best known, first appeared in 1931 in the final volume of Kahn’s series The Life of Man. Created for a non-specialist audience, the image was intended to hang in the modern home or classroom.
Man as Industrial Palace graphically illustrates Kahn’s goal to define the workings of the human body “in light of modern science.” The living body as it acts, works, thinks, and dreams is reconfigured according to the author-entrepreneur’s vision for a modern science and pedagogy that demanded a new approach to scientific illustration. Rejecting the anatomist’s cadaver, Kahn’s illustration of the inner workings of the human body drew from the mechanical world of automobiles, cameras, and telephones that surrounded his middle-class readership.
The deconstructed bodies illustrated in the Encyclopédie may have contained much visual information about their subjects, but they revealed little about the function of bodily systems. Kahn built up the body for his readers, beginning with the atom and ending with the senses, each component of which functions as part of a fully integrated mechanic system.
Kahn’s mechanic analogies are fraught with ambiguities: do they educate readers about their own bodies, or about the production and use of consumer goods that position their bodies in modernity? Man as Industrial Palace presents a body of scientific knowledge that was also a microcosm of German society during the Weimar Republic (1919-1933). Kahn’s hierarchical arrangement of the head and torso mirrored departments in a modern factory. Men in suits debate in the centers of reasoning and decision-making, while women operate the switchboards of the nervous system. Below, in the abdomen, uniformed laborers sort starches from fats in the guts of the body. The educated, consumerist audience for such images more likely profited from the industrial complex than labored in its factories. For further images, please visit Der Mensch als Industriepalast: http://www.fritz-kahn.com/gallery/man-as-industrial-palace/.
https://flic.kr/p/fqFKH9. Image from the The Laura Hayes and John Wileman collection of pre-20th century optical toys and illusionary devices. Donated to the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics by Dr. Ralph Wileman. To learn more about this collection visit www.dlt.ncssm.edu/collections/toys/.
This summer has seen any number of "digital art history" institutes going on, from Middlebury to UCLA. Miriam Posner, from UCLA, has just posted a very nice summary of current tools that might be of interest to any or all of you http://www.humanities.ucla.edu/getty/index.php/resources/the-digital-art-historians-toolkit/!
Thursday July 17, 2014 3:45 PM
Frick Fine Arts Building, University of Pittsburgh
Reception and Light Refreshments to Follow
The inaugural lecture in the Bernadette Callery Archives Lecture Series will be held in conjunction with the Archives Educational Research Institute (AERI) being held at the University of Pittsburgh; the lecture is free and open to the public. The lecture series honors the memory of Dr. Bernadette Callery who was a member of the iSchool faculty and who taught in the Archives specialization in the Library and Information Science program. Previous to joining the faculty, Dr. Callery was the Museum Librarian at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Before her death, Dr. Callery thoughtfully established this lecture, which was funded through a generous bequest.
Follow the Bodies, Follow the Names: One Art Historian’s Search Through the Archival Remains of the Civil War Dead
Kirk Savage
During the Civil War the problem of the “unknown dead” became a national crisis. On both sides of the conflict, hundreds of thousands of soldiers who died on the battlefield or in makeshift hospitals or in prison camps ended up as lost bodies, in unidentified graves or no grave at all. Bodies became severed from their names; or, in archival terms, the material object (the corpse) lost its metadata (the headboards or gravestones that physically linked the name of the dead to the bodily remains).
The crisis of the unknown dead was, therefore, an archival crisis, which resulted in the proliferation of new archives devoted to the common soldier. These included cenotaphs (empty tombs) and public monuments inscribed with names of the dead, on a scale never before seen. In this paper I will reflect on the process of following bodies and names through these myriad archives, a process greatly enhanced by digital tools. On an individual level the process looks much like family genealogy, but on a collective level the process speaks to cultural shifts linked to evolving concepts of family, nation, and sacrifice.
Kirk Savage is a professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh. He has published widely on public monuments in the U.S. for the past thirty years. He is the author of two prize-winning books, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth Century America (Princeton, 1997) and Monument Wars: Washington D.C., the National Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape (University of California, 2009).
Otto Neurath (Austrian, 1882-1945). Modern Man in the Making, Knopf, 1939, p. 24. Courtesy University of Pittsburgh Library System.
Otto Neurath (Austrian, 1882-1945). Modern Man in the Making, Knopf, 1939, p. 65. Courtesy University of Pittsburgh Library System.
Otto Neurath (Austrian, 1882-1945). Modern Man in the Making, Knopf, 1939, p. 25. Courtesy University of Pittsburgh Library System.
Otto Neurath (Austrian, 1882-1945). Modern Man in the Making, Knopf, 1939, p. 17. Courtesy University of Pittsburgh Library System.
Otto Neurath (Austrian, 1882-1945). Modern Man in the Making, Knopf, 1939, p. 85. Courtesy University of Pittsburgh Library System.
Drew Armstrong
Referring to the Biblical confusion of languages, Otto Neurath (1882-1945) regarded the “debabelization” of humanity as an urgent task of the modern era that would ultimately serve to create international harmony and understanding. His proposed “International System of Typographic Picture Education” – ISOTYPE – was developed as a means to clarify “complex relations in society and economics, in biology, the engineering sciences, and a number of other fields.”
In the context of post-World War I Europe, Neurath observed that mass media such as print advertising and film permitted the general public to acquire knowledge effortlessly through “optical impressions” – regardless of class or educational background. Inspired by the potential of the modern world but deeply attuned to its pitfalls, Neurath advocated for the development of a common language of images as part of a standardized system of public education. He described ISOTYPE as a “helping-language” – a coherent system of graphic signs for “teaching through the eye.”
Neurath’s “teaching-images” were designed as part of a more general renovation of public education encompassing both classroom instruction for children and museum installations aimed at working class adults. In Neurath’s Museum of Society and Economy (Vienna, 1925-1934), democracy and scientific literacy were to be fostered through displays of statistical data and other representations. Establishing common understanding through the experience of a new kind of museum was a means to counter social fragmentation and the divisive effects of specialization. Models for Neurath’s museum included Universal Expositions held in major European and North American cities since the mid-nineteenth century. These events attracted huge international audiences, bringing a mass public into contact with the products of industry, science, art, and manufacturing.
Inspired by the Encyclopédie but critical of its structure, Neurath wanted his pictorial system to become part of a new encyclopedia project that would present information in a consistent, unambiguous manner intelligible to a global audience. Its goal was “to give all men a common starting-point of knowledge ... to give simple and clear accounts of everything as a solid base for our thoughts and our acts, and to make us fully conscious of the conditions in which we are living.”
First published in 1658, Comenius’s primer – Orbis Sensualium Pictus – was translated into numerous languages and was used for teaching Latin to children for over a century. As a Protestant and early advocate for universal education, the point of Comenius’s work was to make the Bible accessible to all. Neurath admired the pedagogical objectives of Comenius’s book but thought the images lacked clarity.
Containing over 150 cheap woodcuts, the Orbis Sensualium Pictus illustrated “a world of things obvious to the senses, drawn in pictures.” Each image is keyed into words and short phrases in English and Latin placed in facing columns of text, a technique intended to facilitate the acquisition of a basic vocabulary in a range of disciplines.
As the reader proceeds from the beginning of the book through pages illustrating common animals and plants, principles of gardening, the parts of the home, the elements of painting, writing, and printing, she or he (Comenius believe that girls and boys had the same intellectual abilities) is exposed to increasingly sophisticated and modern concepts. The student thus becomes acquainted with simple terms relating to geometry, astronomy, and philosophy while non-Christian belief-systems are illustrated at the end of the book in figures representing “Judaism” and “Mahometism.”
In size and composition, Neurath’s handbook – International Picture Language. The First Rules of Isotype – recalls primers like those of Comenius and through the use small images and a text written in Basic English, served a similar purpose. Neurath, however, was intent not on teaching a verbal language through the use of images, but on developing a language of images based on standardized pictorial forms and consistent principles of graphic composition.
For Comenius writing in seventeenth-century Europe, knowledge of Latin was essential for accessing specialized knowledge in most fields of scholarly inquiry. Writing in the twentieth century between the two World Wars, Neurath proposed the development of a common language of images to serve the needs of business and science.
Neurath’s pictorial language derived from more general investigations in the 1920s that sought to understand how graphic design and typography could respond to life in modern urban environments, characterized by increasing visual distraction and shortened attention spans. He thus eliminated ambiguous conventions like perspective in favor of simplified, two-dimensional symbols, and limited the use of colors in his graphics. Drawing on techniques exploited in mass media and popular culture, Neurath’s visual language attempted to make complex ideas accessible to a general public.
The images from Cellarius and Hubble diverge from one another in regard to relations they may suggest between microcosm and macrocosm. Certainly, in beholding Hubble images, and then considering them in relation to work such as Berenice Abbott’s photography, one might seek out parallels between patterns of order as they exist at the largest scale (images of nebulae) and patterns of order as they exist at the smallest scale (images of ripple tanks).
The search for such patterns may in fact underwrite the most venturesome kinds of scientific inquiry today. Yet, as an explicit subject of commentary, these parallels often lie beyond the workaday concerns of contemporary scientists, and it falls to artists, such as the famous artist-architect Le Corbusier whose work appears on the opposite wall, to scrutinize them closely. Not so when Cellarius worked. As Johannes Janssonius (1588-1664) remarked, Cellarius’s work was part of a “general description of the entire world, namely Heaven and Earth,” that avowedly sought to “discover the Harmoniam Macrocosmicam, the concordance and harmony of the Great World,” one that required terrestrial phenomena to “correspond… correctly to the heavenly bodies in a given proportion and comparison.”
Colleen O’Reilly
In 1958, Berenice Abbott (1898-1991) was hired by the Physical Science Study Committee (PSSC) at MIT to work on the development of a new physics textbook for American high school students. In the wake of the launch of Sputnik and anxieties about the global competitiveness of American science and technology, the National Science Foundation offered funding to the PSSC and other organizations who wanted to revitalize science education so that more young people would pursue scientific professions.
Abbott, who had been working on science as a subject of photography since 1939, endeavored to make high quality images for the PSSC that clearly explained laws of motion, wave behavior, magnetism and other phenomena. For Abbott, this required the active intervention and creative imposition of an artist, traits that people sometimes imagine lie outside the realm of scientific images.
Like many scientific images, Abbott’s photographs visualize principles that have no essential visual form. She represents abstract concepts as concrete visual events. As much as Abbott may reveal or penetrate nature, she also actively generates visual forms. The apparently straightforward images belie the complexity of the processes by which they were made, which included the orchestration of lights, the deployment of mechanical devices, experiments with equipment, and the coordination of a team of people. These methods were designed to result in images that would answer to her artistic, pedagogical agenda.
Physics was published in 1960, and Abbott was subsequently pushed out of the project, in spite of the success of her photographs and the extent to which they were used. She expressed deep disappointment with how the reproductions looked in the textbook, but always said that the work she did at MIT was some of the most exciting of her career. Abbott continued to work with these images, which were circulated in the early 1960s by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service as an exhibit entitled “The Image of Physics”, and continued to be published in science journals, art magazines, and books for general audiences. They also were and continue to be shown in museums as art objects.
Berenice Abbott
American, 1898-1991
Documenting Science, ed. by Ron Kurtz
Published by Steidl, Göttingen, 2012
To me photography is a means, perhaps the best means of our age - of widening knowledge of our world. Photography is a method of education, for acquainting people of all ages and conditions with the turth about life today."
-Berenice Abbott, "Statement in Regard to Photography Today," unpublished text, 1964
On loan from Frick Fine Arts Library, University of Pittsburgh
Astronomical images have undergone enormous changes over the past few centuries. Such pictures present a coherent set of issues, as they strive to picture celestial objects, provide visual supports for human knowledge of them, pack information into images, and make manifest patterns of order.
What Hubble space photographs show are not things a human observer can ever perceive, even when the observer looks through a telescope. Hubble space telescopic images present us with data that only emerge, as data, from the particular artifices that bring them into being: above all, compositing photographs taken at different moments in time, and coloring them in accordance with protocols that theoretical knowledge dictates. This fact does not imply that Hubble photographs are unreliable, but simply means we cannot view the information they offer as possessing straightforward counterparts in observation.
Plate 6 of Harmonia Macrocosmica by Andreas Cellarius (c. 1596-1665) pictures the world system of the sixteenth-century Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546-1601); In Brahe’s schema, the planets revolve around the sun, but the sun and moon revolve around an unmoving earth.
As is the case with most of the images in Cellarius’s monumental work, his depiction of Brahe’s system shows us something that itself can never be seen, the network of trajectories that celestial bodies follow. At the same time, the system in question rests entirely on visual data, information available to human observers that they subsequently integrate into an account of the heavens. Brahe, in fact, belonged to the last generation of astronomers who worked entirely with the naked eye. Cellarius has taken some liberty in updating Brahe’s system, including the four moons of Jupiter that Galileo had only discovered after Brahe’s death, with the aid of a telescope.
Both the Cellarius images and the Hubble photographs are not themselves agents of investigation—neither the Cellarius images nor the Hubble “outreach” photographs aim to establish things we do not already know, but strive to communicate pre-existing knowledge to non-specialist audiences.