Choice Review
This book begins and ends with the example of robotic-assisted surgery as a case study in the interrelationship between visual information and conceptual knowledge: namely, image and word or picture and text. This dualism, debated since the Renaissance, is a central issue in postmodern theory. Bender and Marrinan (both, Stanford) believe a third element bridges such dualism, the diagram (a hybrid), whose essence is the correlation between two variables. What they call diagrammatic knowledge is a leitmotif they trace historically from the landmark Encyclopedie of Diderot and D'Alembert in the mid-18th century to today's quantum physics, emphasizing historical continuity rather than epistemic breaks commonly posited among visual culture theorists. The multivolume Encyclopedie, a prime example of post-Renaissance print culture with more than 2,500 plates of disparate images, exhibited diagrammatic knowledge by cross-referencing images and text. Ranging from the 19th century to the present, Bender and Marrinan's topics go beyond, and often integrate, the sciences and the arts, as the authors read diagrammatic knowledge into prints and oil paintings and thread statistics and probability theory through the social sciences, human vision theory, and into modern physics. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty/researchers. D. Topper University of Winnipeg
Library Journal Review
This wide-ranging study boldly connects elements of visualization, fine art and literary analysis, science history, and virtual reality. Stanford faculty members Bender (interdisciplinary studies) and Marrinan (art history) call themselves cultural historians, interested in diagrams' "emerging ability to concretize process" since the Enlightenment. They examine some of the diagrams or tableaux illustrating French philosopher and writer Denis Diderot's great 18th-century Encyclopedia and compare them to contemporary paintings then move on to the text. After theater architecture and history painting, further chapters discuss use of diagrams as "working objects" by selected engineers and scientists into the 1920s, in such fields as descriptive geometry, statistical analysis, and probability theory. Scenes featuring current robot-assisted eye surgery reveal the diagrammatic effects of its software, designed to increase the accuracy of the surgeon's cuts. Verdict An ambitious work that will likely fascinate faculty and students in various disciplines. [Ebook ISBN 978-0-8047-7325-6.]-David R. Conn, Surrey P.L., B.C. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
![Cover image for The culture of diagram [electronic resource] / John Bender, Michael Marrinan.](/client/assets/5.1326/ctx//client/images/no_image.png "Cover image for The culture of diagram [electronic resource] / John Bender, Michael Marrinan.")