Toward a Social Practice Perspective on the Work of Reading Inscriptions in Science Texts

Abstract

In the social studies of science, visuals and graphical representations are theorized by means of the concept of inscription, a term that denotes all representations other than text inscribed in some medium including graphs, tables, photographs, and equations. Inscriptions constitute an intrinsic and integral part of scientific practice; their development and the development of science are tightly interwoven. A focus on inscription therefore goes together with the social psychological study of the cultural practices that embed inscriptions. Thus, scientists produce line graphs to convincingly show relationships; they use histograms to show distributions; or they combine multiple graphs to show contrasts or correlations between different entities and contexts. Inscriptions are also present in school science textbooks with great frequency and high school science activities, including teaching, demonstrations, and laboratory tasks. However, to read inscriptions successfully, students need to develop a special kind of literacy that is related to the use of inscriptions, which, in turn, is tied to the way in which these inscriptions are produced within an authentic science environment. The situated and highly contextualized nature of inscriptions renders them meaningful only within and through particular interpretive practices that are developed concomitantly with their production and use in authentic science settings, to which students may not have access in their daily school activities. Moreover, the representational (rhetorical) power of an inscription is related to the amount of information it may carry and to its level of abstractness, which are also proportional to its complexity and, thus, to the difficulty in reading it. In this article, we review the literature on reading inscriptions in science contexts from a social practice perspective as it has by and large emerged during the past two decades.

Notes

1. We follow Arsenault et al. (2006) in their classification of inscriptions into visual (e.g., graphs, photographs, maps, charts, diagrams, drawings) and nonvisual inscriptions (tables and equations).

2. The term inscription will be used here as synonym with graphical representations, which are visual, external representations and which have been also referred to in the literature as graphics, (visual/graphic) images, and (visual/ graphic) illustrations.

3. Hard sciences include mainly the natural sciences, whereas soft sciences refer to the social sciences. This distinction has been reported as consensual (e.g., Lodahl & Gordon, 1972; Smith et al., 2000).

4. This classification was originally developed in the context of the role of photographs in high school science textbooks and was based on the integration of photographs, captions, and main texts, including the following categories: (a) decorative (without any caption or indexical reference linking them to the main text); (b) illustrative (whose captions only named the topic of the photograph); (c) explanatory (caption explained or summarized information already available elsewhere); and (d) complementary (relatively extensive captions that provided new and relevant information, which was not available in the main text).

5. Although it is possible that the visible leg and foot were torn out from the rest of the body and were in fact lying on the grass by themselves, apart from a living human body, this is not likely the way in which we would interpret this picture. However, this interpretation could be more likely if the picture were to appear in a medium (culturally, socially) known for presenting gory images, for example.