Objectivity

Four versions of "seeing" scientifically are succinctly summarized (pp. 412-413): 18th century (classical) "four-eyed" sight -- truth-to-nature depiction; 19th century "blind" sight of mechanical objectivity; 20th century "physiognomic" sight of "trained" judgment; where the first three give way to "haptic" sight by means of image-as-tool, inseparable from the scientific-self, made visible to the acolyte: --subject to simulated manipulations --machine-generated virtual artifact, expertly extracted from an artificial reality -- a model --altered in aspect, hue, or scale to make it artistically pleasing --no longer held to be a copy --the True and Beautiful necessarily converging for the sake of presentation -- not representation --deliberately enhanced to clarify, persuade, and/or please.

This is the best book I have read in a decade. It is breathtaking in its scope and its depth of detail.

This really should get more stars, but I keep thinking that people could save themselves about 350 pages and read the journal article that the authors originally wrote: "The Image of Objectivity." That is really a good article regarding scientific atlases and the differing concepts of what a scientific image should be (should it be normed to conform to the "ideal" specimen?