Haptic Visions. Valerie Hanson
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The expression of data in image form, common to visualization technologies such as the STM and the MRI, raises questions about how the use of data-images, or informational images, affects the ways in which images function in discourse and in reading practices or assumptions about what the images convey. Amann and Knorr Cetina’s observation that the significance of data must be discovered highlights the importance of exploring how the presentation of data in electronic and image form affects the practices scientists use to discover or interpret the data. The fact that concerns about communication with informational images is common to a group of digital visualization technologies such as PET, MRI, STM, and ultrasound suggests that while the details of the context of practice for each visualization technology offer unique insights, a study charting the rhetorical effects of one visualization technology (like the STM) can be relevant to the study of the others. Further, few studies exist on the rhetorics of the creation of data images by these technologies, or on the rhetorics of digital images such as those the STM, MRI, and related technologies produce.25
The complex mediation and interpretation practices needed to express data in images also affect users in ways that suggest directions for further study of the rhetorics of instruments. Scholars in art history, science studies, and media studies recognize the importance of investigating the effects of an instrument on the experimenters or users of the instruments; the insights of these scholars provide a basis for extending analysis to rhetorical aspects. For example, Crary argues that optical instruments reconfigured the position of the nineteenth century observer, creating a change in visual practices (see 8-9 for a brief summary of his main argument as it relates to instruments). Galison and Daston examine the identity of the scientist in Objectivity, recounting how the scientific self has been shaped by historically specific scientific practices that are associated with the main “epistemic virtue” of the time, such as objectivity (191-251) or, more recently, trained judgment (357-61). Curtis explores the ways in which photography trains medical observers. While Crary, Daston and Galison, and Curtis do not focus on rhetoric, their detailed analyses of instruments in practice present historical and social models of how instruments may affect users, perhaps informing rhetorical analyses of how users are influenced by using instruments.
A Method for Analyzing Material, Embodied Interactions
This chapter performs a close reading of the operations and productions of the STM as it demonstrates how the specific rhetorical influences of a technology affect its productions (such as STM images). I focus on the rhetorics of the STM as part of the complex, material, and embodied practices of scientific knowledge-making and communication. Attention to the production processes of technologies is likely to become more and more important for analyzing the productions of those technologies, whether those productions take the form of images, databases, or other digital objects; how we make arguments with visualization technologies can be informed by the productive capacities and effects of those visualization technologies. In performing a close reading of the operation of an instrument, and considering the ways in which the STM is imbricated within social and material practices as an inscription device, this chapter highlights the material and embodied rhetorics at play in the formation of scientific knowledge, adding a rhetorical dimension to science studies of embodiment, and a science studies dimension to rhetorical studies of embodiment.26
My close reading of the STM through the dynamics of its operation also necessitates analysis of interaction; interaction is crucial to the operation of the STM. As the summary of the STM’s operations above suggests, creating images of the nanoscale involves interactions between electrons, material apparatuses (including scanning and computer components), human actions, computer software, and cultural practices—practices of seeing and organizing as well as coordinating information and things. STM operation relies on interactions among the constitutive elements of the instrument, interactions that exist not only between user and sample, as in most microscopical work (Keller, “The Biological Gaze” 112), but also at other levels, such as the interaction between the sample and the STM. Therefore, closely reading the interactions that compose STM dynamics reveals rhetorical dimensions of scientific practices of making knowledge.27
What interaction means, however, also becomes a question: In casual use, “interaction” is often over-generally applied to anything involving a computer, and the term’s definition is disputed among scholars studying digital media and technology.28 Janet Murray clarifies that what is often meant by interactivity in computers is that “they create an environment that is both procedural and participatory” (74). Rhetoricians analyzing the context of writing in new media or digital media environments focus on the participatory aspect of interactivity, without paying much attention to the participatory aspect that Murray identifies, using the term to indicate the ability of the user/reader to communicate with the user/writer. A few rhetoricians, such as Teena A. M. Carnegie, James Porter, and Ian Bogost, however, examine procedural as well as participatory aspects of interaction.
Porter, Carnegie, and Bogost suggest that the value of interaction lies in shaping audience response as a structural element, as opposed to only content—that form and content are both components of the rhetorics of interaction. Carnegie argues that the computer interface functions as a Ciceronian exordium, a rhetorical opening strategy that aims to engage the audience so that the audience is receptive to hearing the argument (165). Carnegie claims that three modes of interactivity, drawn from new media and human-computer interaction (HCI) research, multi-directionality, manipulability, and presence, are also the rhetorical modes of the interface (166). Carnegie links these three modes to higher levels of audience engagement, drawing from Sheizaf Rafaeli and Fay Sudweeks’s finding that encouraging interactivity in users produces higher levels of engagement (166). Carnegie’s exploration of how the rhetorics of engagement function in visuals such as interfaces helps make interfaces visible as rhetorical sites that structure interaction. Carnegie’s focus on modes of participatory interaction further articulates details of how the user becomes involved in the operating dynamics of an instrument.
Porter’s description of digital composition includes interaction as one element that writers in electronic spaces need to consider in their delivery decisions, acknowledging that “different types of computer interfaces and spaces enable different forms of engagement” (“Recovering” 217). Porter suggests that interaction forms a significant part of productive rhetoric for writers in digital spaces, especially with attention paid to how participation and procedure may be linked. Like Carnegie and Porter, Bogost develops a structural analysis of the rhetorical components of interaction, emphasizing the procedural rhetoric of interactivity in the context of videogames. Bogost argues that interactivity can be understood in relation to the Aristotelian enthymeme, in that videogame players supply the warrant as they play (43). Interaction allows the player to proceed through the content, or “argument,” of the game in ways that are mental, but also are embodied—such as using the joystick or pressing keystrokes to respond. Bogost also analyzes the procedures of computer games to interpret messages created by how computer games structure narratives according to user responses. While Bogost does not analyze the production processes of procedural rhetorics per se, his approach of considering the structuring of interactivity as rhetorical—and involving the user as well as elements of what the user engages with—is one applicable to production practices such as those used to create interfaces.
The concept of affordances presents one way to focus on what interactions may be most significant, and as such, most significant for understanding the rhetorics of procedural and participatory components of interaction. Carolyn Miller argues for understanding parallels between rhetoric and technology (particularly communication technologies) through the idea of affordances, quoting psychologist James Gibson’s formulation of affordances as what an environment “provides or furnishes, either for good or ill” (Gibson 127). In Miller’s view, affordances help explain how technology, like rhetoric, can lead users toward some possibilities, and away from others. Miller argues for how affordances of communication technologies function:
[A]ffordances take the form not of material properties or ecological niches [as they do for physical environments like an animal’s habitat] but rather properties of information and interaction that can be put to particular cognitive and communicative uses. Thus a technological affordance, or a suite of affordances, is directional, it appeals to us, by making some forms of communicative