· Book
University of Porto Press

From Wisdom to Data: Philosophical Atlas on Visual Representations of Knowledge

José Higuera Rubio, Alberto Romele, Dario Rodighiero, Celeste Pedro, eds.
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This book collects results from the research project “From Data to Wisdom. Philosophizing Data Visualizations in the Middle Ages and Early Modernity,” funded by the FCT (Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia), POCI-01-0145-FEDER-029717. The project had a double purpose: (1) to create a repository of medieval visualizations of information and knowledge, proposing a distinction between different kinds of representation: relational schemes, knowledge-experience simulations, data (storage/indices/tables/charts), elemental schemes, text-diagrams, and demonstrative graphics; and (2) to make these visualizations interact with modern and contemporary visualizations, in particular contemporary data visualizations. More generally, the aim of the project was to show how the history of Western thought is not only a history of texts but also (and perhaps increasingly) a history of images and visual representations of concepts and knowledge.

The purpose of these texts is to gather in a single volume the multiplicity of approaches, perspectives, and contexts in which the research project has been developed. To achieve this, we believe, a synthesis is not necessary. A totalizing synthesis would be contrary to the very spirit and results of the project itself. Indeed, one of the theoretical results achieved is the idea that contemporary visualizations have abandoned the desire for absolute, synthesizing representation in favor of a representation that is always imperfect and, so to speak, “in the making.” The very idea that data visualizations are representative, i.e., that they refer to “reality,” has been widely discussed and criticized as well. Our intention, therefore, is to present a series of analogies between texts and images. In short, this book will be a mise en abyme of the even incomplete synthesis, but for this very reason richer in meaning, which in our opinion is, or at least should be, at the heart of today’s visual representations of knowledge. Our theoretical model is not that of the summa, but rather that of Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas. Warburg’s atlas was entirely made of images put next to one another not according to a single culture, discipline, or timespan, but according to affinities related to cultural memory tout court. Similarly, our intent is not to offer an orderly account of the data visualization history, but rather to disrupt it, to “reclaim the power of the atlas as a fragmentary, unfinished site of resistance” (Sherman 2020, 20).

References

  • Sherman, Bill. 2020. Atlas of Anomalous AI. Edited by Ben Vickers and K. Allado-McDowell. London: Ignota.