November 3, 2020, via Zoom webinar Co-sponsored with UMKC Cockefair Chair Part 1 of 3 of the Cockefair Course: Novel Graphics! Innovative Images in the History of Science About the course: Not long after the introduction of printing, scientific books began to provide illustrations. Often the image was simply an aid to identification, as in a woodcut of an iris, or a hedgehog, or an ammonite; sometimes it assisted in explaining the text, as with a diagram of a cosmological system. But occasionally an artisan and/or an author found a way to tweak an image in a new way to provide visual understanding that was far superior to what one could do with words. Those are the images that will attract our attention: cut-away views, exploded drawings, time-lapse images, moveable diagrams, images with flaps, simple graphs, pie-charts, periodic tables, thematic maps—the list is quite long. Each of these novel conventions had to be invented, and that is what we will pursue in this course—the step-by-step history of graphical innovation in scientific publications in the West, enriched by narratives of the people who wrote and illustrated these books. The speaker: William Ashworth, Ph.D., Associate Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, is a historian of science, with an emphasis on the Renaissance and early modern periods. His research interests focus on Renaissance and early modern natural history and early scientific illustration, especially emblematic imagery. Dr. Ashworth is also a consultant for the history of science at the Linda Hall Library, where he writes the Library’s daily blog, the Scientist of the Day, and has curated or co-curated 28 rare book exhibitions, many of which are available online.

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