This chapter outlines the theoretical and practical processes of teaching arts integrated curriculum through a transformational learning framework (Mezinow, 2009). A key aim is to highlight how relational knowledge built through dialogic meaning making strategies in visual art provides an approach to curriculum design where students can interrogate their standpoint. We outline pedagogical approaches under the banner of creative and body-based learning (CBL) that focus on transformational learning underpinned by standpoint theory and illustrated by vignettes of three visual art strategies.

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.

Migraine headache is a highly prevalent and disabling neurological primary headache disorder. It is characterized by disabling, throbbing, episodic, unilateral headaches associated with neurologic features such as photophobia, phonophobia, or autonomic symptoms like nausea and vomiting lasting 4 to 72 hours at a time. Patients will often avoid bright lights or loud noises. About 30% of migraine patients experience auras which are unilateral focal neurological disturbances prior the headache onset, often manifested as visual, sensory, or motor symptoms. Pathophysiology of migraine headache is still unclear and is being studied; however, calcitonin gene-related peptide (CGRP) is believed to play a major and important role, and therefore has become a primary therapeutic target. This was supported by the finding of CGRP release during acute migraine attacks and then subsequent normalization of CGRP levels after efficacious sumatriptan treatment. These findings have been a focal point in recent pharmacological developments in managing migraine headaches.

Early Christian theologians regarded the sense of sight, along with the other bodily senses, as an essential aid for comprehending invisible and transcendent realities. Although Christ’s incarnation was regarded as divine condescension to the human need for eyewitnesses, a profound and complex theory, partly influenced by ancient and contemporary philosophical sources, judged visual perception of the external, material world as playing a key role in judging, retaining, and transmitting knowledge about the immaterial realm. The essential connections between physical sight and spiritual cognition were seen as pathways that engendered appreciation both for the divine presence and for the human potential for enlightenment, in this life and in the age to come. Such cognition thus depended not only on words read or heard, insofar as the action of seeing became an equally dynamic and effective means for attaining knowledge of the nature and purposes of God.

This chapter focuses on recent scholarly discussion of how the visual arts may be considered capable of “visual exegesis” (a term first coined by the art historian Paolo Berdini and now widely used). It argues that, when we read the Bible in the company of visual art, we are asked to countenance our implication in each other, in a single world full of many meanings, in the shared conditions that sustain human communication across difference and in the encompassing existential questions that the biblical texts pose.

Design patents are meant to promote designs that are “pleasing,” “attractive,” and “beautiful.” Yet judges fret that they will inject their own prejudices into such aesthetic determinations and have adopted a permissive nonobviousness standard that only rejects designs when they are exact copies of what came before. Neuroscience sheds light on the mechanics of design perception and appreciation. Visual processing is arguably the best understood mental process in modern neuroscience. Recent studies show that aesthetic preference is strongly tied to the ease with which an observer can mentally process a particular design. Although a limited amount of innovation may be needed to gain the observer’s attention, consumers insist on simplicity, familiarity, and congruence in designs. Rather than correlating with what an audience considers pleasing, innovation in design, after rapidly reaching an optimal level, begins to trigger aesthetic distaste. I use a variety of examples from popular products and actual cases—like Herman Miller’s Aeron chair and Lego blocks—to illustrate this audience preference for designs in the “aesthetic middle.”

This chapter is centered on the scientific conceptualization of the term “photography” and its relationship with the photographer, the photographed, and the viewer, including that which is existent between the photographer and the camera, especially the chemistry between both lenses — biological and technological — the synergy and the differences. Photographs, according to the chapter, are representations of the reality of a particular timeframe. By answering certain expedient questions, the author engages his collections (with pictorial evidence) to illustrate the nature of photography vis-à-vis other factors that contribute to the shot, such as the camera and how it is received by the people. Moreover, the chapter views photography as a “social contract” between the photographer and the photographed, and “construction” as the process of taking the shot and reproducing the image. As for the interpretation of the picture by the viewer, it is believed that the pictures themselves dictate how they are to be interpreted or engaged, although this is also highly dependent on the viewer’s understanding. In addition, the chapter explores the effect of photography at its dawn and what its exclusion of African peculiarity, color-wise, meant.

Conrad eloquently wrote about his inability to write; he stuttered his way through his texts with nonlexical grunts, snarls, howls, murmurs, gurgles, snorts and hems; and he sought to stay true to “the stammerings of his conscience” (xliii), a working method alluded to in the Preface of The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897). In this chapter, I argue that distraction – usually a writer’s enemy – is another one of these unexpected features that Conrad used to propel his writing; his seemingly rambling digressions are part of a quest for verbal precision. Although he is frequently conceived of as a methodical and philosophical writer, distraction was a fundamental and serious part of his literary enterprise. By allowing distraction, inattentiveness and absent-mindedness to become part of his fiction, he was able to stay productive, steal the reader’s attention and add a level of everyday realism to his texts. Conrad, I maintain, writes in medias distractionis and consistently pays attention to those who do not pay attention.

This chapter connects Conrad’s delayed decoding with Russell’s logical atomism, arguing that what the latter sought to do for philosophy, the former attempted to do in literature. Both delayed decoding and logical atomism communicate elementary sense-impressions; they construct a truth hierarchy where the particular is above the abstract. The chapter analyses how the language use of each concept corresponds to a host of assumptions about how we experience reality and what constitutes truth, assumptions that aid in explaining their extraordinary friendship. The chapter continues by explicitly calling into question Ian Watt’s concept of delayed decoding using my category, “delayed miscoding.” The chapter contains a lengthy demonstration showing that the most quoted example used to illustrate this hallmark of Conrad scholarship is inconsistent. My reading is not an attempt to discard Watt’s delayed decoding but an attempt to show that there is a discrepancy between what it names and what it explains. Delayed decoding’s binary structure and bivalent logic are limited ways for analyzing a text that is paradigmatically ambiguous.

The introductory chapter provides geographical contexts and briefly outlines both the history of the search for the Northwest Passage and the Franklin expedition. It gives an overview of the searches that ensued for the missing expedition over twelve years and emphasises the centrality of visuality and the importance of skills like drawing to shipboard life, as well as highlighting the gaps in the literature that this book will fill, in particular the neglect of rich primary-source visual material (such as on-the-spot sketches and watercolours) as a key source of information and evidence. It notes, too, the sparseness of scholarly work addressing this period of Arctic exploration history and the absence of detailed visual analyses of documentary art from the Arctic. This chapter introduces the key debates in the study of exploration literature, Victorian visuality, and historical geography. These include the gendered space of polar exploration, the imperial gaze, and theories of space and place. It looks too at how visual evidence can be seen as layers of representation, with each response departing further from the original sketch.

Histories of dissolving high/low culture divides inform Katalin Orbán’s discussion of contemporary graphic fiction, as she posits the critical and popular emergence of long-form, verbal-visual works that push narrative conventions in new directions, such as spatial-temporal experiments (e.g., by Chris Ware and Richard McGuire), the use of visual metaphors and other conventionally linguistic literary devices, and genre blurring distinctive to the drawn medium.