How do scientists make sense of what appears (in their community) to be a new phenomenon? In this paper the department’s Professor Mary S. Morgan and co-author Professor Marcel J. Boumans investigate the way in which visualisations can be sense-making.

If we start with evidence about a new phenomenon, such records or traces do not make sense by themselves, therefore they need to be organised together and processed to see whether they show some patterns, or some inter-relations. This processing is usually done by translating the relevant information or data into a common medium (such as a mathematical model, a narrative, or a diagram) where they can be examined for patterns, compared directly, and meaningful relations can be established between them.

This paper considers the visualization of business cycles. ‘Observing business cycles’ is a figurative expression. What we actually see are tables of figures or charts that purport to show in standardized symbols one among several species of changes found in time series, which are themselves bleak numerical records of certain mass activities.

These series give many glimpses of our cycles, but none of them gives a well-rounded view. The changes on which we focus attention never occur by themselves in the way our symbols suggest. Like other scientific concepts, ours is a man-made entity, created by pulling apart items of experience that can be observed directly; then putting like parts together into a new whole that cannot be seen by the eye or touched by the fingers.

Sense-making visualisations, like narratives, enable scientists to think, reason, explore, and understand their materials, but their specific visualisations also set boundaries on that activity.

Read the full article here: Do you see it this way? Visialising as a tool of sense-making,  Studies in History and Philosophy of Science (Vol 101, pp 30-39).