In successive drafts of scientific papers their writing is the site of theory production. The Writing Science series brings together textual studies and science studies, which share an epistemological and historical concern with the conditions grounding the emergence of meaning and signification. Its authors are interested in tangled and layered political and economic histories and the way they become naturalized by signs. Inscribed into society through technologies of writing, photography, film, museum exhibits, teaching materials, and guidebooks, such signs subtend struggles to define both society and nature. But language is not pure sign, it is also a thing.
Language is tied to voice, to typeface, to bitmaps on a screen, to materiality.
But graphic traces, visualizations are irreducible to words. Their interpretation is never fully controllable by the writing scientist. Writing Science volumes examine the ways scientific images and models depend upon material technologies of representation and reproduction at work in society. These resources include the media for producing signs, such as standardized paint pigments, photographic equipment, and phonographs - the materialities of communication. They invoke systems for delegating power.