For a book that attempts to explain how to understand visuals in life sciences, it seems prudent to first explain what we mean by “visual,” even if it may seem quite a common word.

In everyday conversation, “visual” is often used as an adjective and means “relating to seeing or sight,” as in “visual impression” or “visual effect.” In the context of this book, “visual” is used similarly as an adjective, but in addition, and more often, it is used as a noun. As a noun, it refers to the variety of images used in life science communication. For example, photographs are a type of visual commonly used in life science communication, and so are drawings.

Illustrations are a visual staple in life science communication. Despite being commonplace, they are in many ways a blackbox. They mask the creative – and scientific – decisions that go into making them. They present an end product that says, as it were, “this is how you look through life to its essence.” The use of precise lines and explicit shapes helps to convey this scientific authority. In contemporary illustrations, pseudo-details such as colors and dimensions further prove that “this is what life looks like.”

Micrographs, like the little (pun intended) cousin of photographs, are considered by some as an objective portrayal of nature. Why, they are photographs of the microscopic world invisible to the naked human eye. As such, what you see is what you get, and what you get is nature unveiled.

Particularly because the microscopic world is invisible to us in everyday life, we find it even more urgent to behold that world. We assume that if and when we see, we will automatically understand. If and when we observe microorganisms in their smallest components, we will be able to “get” them and conquer them.

Contemporary life sciences are big data sciences. The human genome, for example, contains about three billion DNA base pairs and an estimated 20,000 protein-coding genes. Public health data, as another example, are endlessly enormous and encompass electronic medical records, health monitoring data, environmental data, and more. When it comes to analyzing and presenting these big data, interactive online visuals – maps, graphs, three-dimensional models, even computer games – have inherent advantages. They are dynamic and easily updated. They support user interaction and allow users to create displays that make sense to them. Being “hands-on” also makes these visual displays more interesting. As computer visualization technologies continue to advance, we are guaranteed to see faster, more fluid, more ingenious interactive displays.

As we have seen throughout this book, standalone visuals like photographs and illustrations are promising ways to communicate science to the public – and they carry their fair share of misconceptions and complications. These promises – as well as challenges – are multiplied in infographics.

The word “infographic” comes from the phrase “information graphic.” Originally, the term referred to the production of graphics for print media such as newspapers and magazines. Today it refers to a unique multimodal genre that combines data visualizations (i.e., graphs such as lines, pies, bars, and pictographs), illustrations (such as icons and drawings), photographs, and small amounts of text. When designed for online use, infographics can also have interactive components. For example, putting the mouse cursor somewhere on the infographic may reveal a small pop-up window with additional information. Some infographics are also animated: bars in a bar chart may grow, colors may change, or characters may move. This is often achieved by using animated GIF files that display a sequence of static images in a repeating loop, which creates the illusion of motion.

Graphs – such as line graphs or bar graphs – convey numerical data. They are commonly used in life science communication as well as other communication contexts, such as when conveying stock market data, crime statistics, or real estate trends. The prevalence of these graphs doesn’t mean, as some may assume, that they are always easy to understand. Depending on design choices, some graphs will be able to shed light on important numerical data for public understanding of science, while others are likely to confuse or leave readers with a heightened conviction that science is an inaccessible enterprise.

Photographs are often considered an “easy” and accessible type of scientific visual. After all, they are commonplace in everyday life and not exclusive to scientific research. Everyone takes photographs and knows what photographs are. As long as one can physically see, one (so it is thought) can get what a photograph is about. Unfortunately, when it comes to life science photographs, much of this is misconception. This chapter explains why.

This chapter considers how Puccini was represented visually, predominantly through the still fairly new medium of photojournalism. The author discusses the marketing strategies devised by the Ricordi publishing house in order to promote Puccini to the readers of its various illustrated magazines as the successor to Verdi. Initially portrayed as a rather Bohemian young student, Puccini soon came to be depicted as the epitome of stylish Italian manliness. Visual representations of the composer – not only photographs but also paintings and sketches – exploited his connections to the Tuscan landscape of his native region, as Puccini was increasingly co-opted into the project of forging a national identity for the recently unified country. Care was taken to represent Puccini as an emblem of modernity and dynamism, and this was an image of the composer that was presented not only at home in Italy but all around the world.

Despite a rich range of varied styles and modes of production of fine arts and crafts during the fin de siècle in Britain, a relatively small set of imagery – the decadent stylings of Aubrey Beardsley, for example – has come to define the age. Drawing on the contemporary idea of the “unity of the arts,” this chapter seeks to expand an understanding of 1890s visuality through the potential of the digital. It first explores the literary/visual/artistic intersections of the 1890s, from Pre-Raphaelite antecedents through the Arts and Crafts movement and book illustration. It then turns to the digital, especially advances in interoperability and rich metadata, to consider the ways that technology can both simulate and illuminate fin-de-siècle artistic intersections, complementing previous modes of thinking about the 1890s while offering a more comprehensive view of the diverse visual culture of the period. Like ideals about the unity of the arts, these new transmedial approaches offer enormous promise but are not without their challenges and limitations.

Herman Melville’s most famous illustrator, Rockwell Kent (1882–1971) designed and illustrated Moby Dick in 1930. At the same time, he was writing and illustrating his own book, N by E, an account of his recent misadventures on the crew of a small boat sailing to Greenland. In both projects, Kent depicted ship, ocean, sailor, and creature with obsessive accuracy. Such a devoted socialist that he donated a trove of paintings to the Soviet Union in 1960 even after revelations about the regime that disillusioned many lifelong socialists, he was also a keen observer of the coastlines of Maine, Newfoundland, Alaska, and the Arctic. The specificity of his knowledge and the fervor with which he sought out adventures show in his inky, fantastic tableaus and head- and tailpieces for Moby Dick. His edition coincided with and helped solidify Melville’s canonization in the twentieth century – the so-called Melville revival – while also reaching a new kind of reader through the Book-of-the-Month Club. His was perhaps the most beloved American illustrated reprint of its time, and certainly the best known of the reprints examined here.

The coda traces the ways that the reprints featured in this book have continued to reverberate in the culture at large. It asks what to make of the reprinted book and the home library in our current age which is, on the one hand, increasingly online, and, on the other, increasingly preoccupied with the aesthetics of books and bookshelves.

Paratexts of all kinds became more significant as antiquity wore on. The Homeric epics, for example, and Herodotus’ Histories were not originally divided into books; the canonical book divisions were made only in the Hellenistic period. Despite evidence for the spread of paratexts, editors and scholars often ignore them. They do so, in part, because paratexts are inherently unstable texts; and yet, as ephemeral products of their own literary culture, paratexts provide precious evidence for how poetry was read at any given time or place. The first goal of this chapter is to the collate evidence for section headings, illustrations, and prefaces being produced for poetic texts in the East and West in Late Antiquity in Latin and in Greek. The second goal is to compare their use in each tradition and to analyze where the cultures either converged or departed in their use of paratexts. The evidence collated reveals that new paratextual forms appear around the same time in Greek and Latin, but that there are also separate developments in each tradition.

Mid-century public libraries legislation in Britain was directed mostly at the use of modern books, but some of the larger libraries also built up substantial collections of early books. Specialefforts were made by some to collect local literature of all kinds, as awareness grew also of the importance of the mass of published ephemera that underpinned social activity.

This chapter proposes that if scholars accepted the idea that authorship was but one form of creative contribution among many to the production of literary texts, our recognition of the breadth, impact, and influence of African Americans in all kinds of presumptive white literary production would allow us to expand the category “African American literature” considerably. Book history offers empirical and conceptual measures for conceiving “African American literature” as (1) texts read or consumed by African Americans, (2) texts that are about African Americans or that represent the experiences of African Americans, (3) texts to which African Americans deployed trades or skills (such as engraving, typesetting, bookkeeping, shipping) that may not bear the dignity of creative genius, or (4) texts that are edited by African Americans – in addition to and overlapping with (5) the more familiar conception of “African American literature” as texts authored by African Americans. Drawing examples from Phillis Wheatley’s Poems, Frederick Douglass’s Paper, and The Prodigal Daughter with illustrations by the enslaved Peter Fleet, this essay does not dispute the historical significance of African American literary and textual production so much as to think historically and theoretically about why authorship has been such a prominent part of that significance.

Chapter 3 analyzes Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s illustrations alongside a formal analysis of Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market (1862) to draw further attention to the creative and communal processes associated with intertextual collaborative production. Reading this collaboration through the lens of sympathetic collaboration allows for an understanding of fellow-feeling dependent on the articulation of both individual and communal viewpoints – acknowledging difference – and the means of self-assimilation to form community. Reading Goblin Market as a collaborative lyric establishes how the poem constructs a reproduction of the Rossetti collaboration and underscores the interrelationships between word and image and community development. Placing the poem alongside the reformative work Christina Rossetti completed at Highgate Penitentiary, this chapter provides a direct contextual link to sympathetic concord and its inflection of moral reform. Reading the Rossettis’ contemporaneous literary productions as sympathetic collaborations that inform one another reveals, more broadly, the interlacings of shared experiences and literary and artistic productions within the Pre-Raphaelite movement.

During the search for Franklin, it was common for expeditions to intentionally winter over in the Arctic sea ice. Indeed, some ships remained in the Arctic for up to six years. The ships in winter quarters provided space and time for cultural production; a lively homosocial life inspired material for illustrations and articles that were compiled as handwritten ‘magazines’ intended to be read solely by the ship’s company. This chapter takes a closer look at the production of these fascinating and revealing illustrated on-board periodicals, which were a key part of the maritime culture during the Franklin search. The illustrations in the periodicals are, in the main, human-centred, turning inwards to observe the ship’s inhabitants in winter quarters, focusing on social interaction and incidents. The Arctic itself and expedition members’ incongruous domestic life was the source of a humour that was personal and particular to the expedition members’ situation. Intended both for amusement on board and as future objects of nostalgia, the periodicals satirise the British experience in the Arctic and effectively utilise the Arctic environment as a rich resource of humour.

This chapter uses contemporary readers’ marks in anonymous English herbals to argue that Renaissance readers used printed texts as opportunities to record their own experiences of native plants and medical experiments, pushing back against a pervasive view of early herbal readers as credulous and unsophisticated. Printed books like The Grete Herball (1526), the first illustrated printed herbal in England, were the products of publishers who were evaluating the market for particular texts in print and who tested new affordances and marketing strategies on their readers as they published and republished old herbals. Some publishers, like Thomas Gibson, saw in their editions of the herbals an opportunity to endorse medical practitioners’ authority over the body.

Chapter 4 shows dinosaurs’ link to concerns about secularisation and specialisation contributed to Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous romance The Lost World. It argues that the text can be understood in relation to Conan Doyle’s romantic approach to scientific knowledge, especially his strident anti-materialism and aversion to technical jargon. Examining archival material from New York Public Library’s Berg Collection, including the original manuscript, Fallon weaves the content of The Lost World together in surprising ways with Conan Doyle’s palaeontological forays, cryptozoological sightings, and interest in psychical research, showing that noting the differences between the US and UK serialised and book versions provides a more precise understanding of Conan Doyle’s intended romantic effects. In particular, Fallon emphasises the illustrations by Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law, Patrick Forbes. Alongside the text, these subtle and meticulously planned images make clear the author’s desire to convince readers that the world is full of unexplained wonders. As such, the British book edition in which Forbes’s images appear was, for Conan Doyle, the correct way to experience The Lost World.