Visual communication, popular science journals and the rhetoric of evidence

Abstract

While the use of scientific visualisations (such as brain scans) in popular science communication has been extensively studied, we argue for theimportance of popular images (as demonstrated in various talks at#POPSCI2015), including pictures of everyday scenes of social life orreferences to pictures widely circulating in popular cultural contexts. Wesuggest that these images can be characterised in terms of a rhetoricaltheory of argumentation as working towards the production of evidentialityon the one hand, and as aiming to link science to familiar visualities on theother; our example is da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man”