The Telling Image

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 845 The Telling Image: The Changing Balance between Pictures and Words in a Technological Age. By Duncan Davies, Diana Bathurst, and Robin Bathurst. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Pp. xvii+ 166; illustrations, appendixes, bibliography, index. $55.00. The Telling Image takes on an ambitious task. In the space of 159 pages, it explores the changing balance between pictures and words and finds pictures becoming ever more central. With the growth of easily generated images starting about thirty years ago, including those created by computers and video, pictures have “suddenly and explosively become the main means for ‘reading’ and learning,” leaving us, Duncan Davies argues, “reeling from the shock” (p. 2). The book’s emphasis is on the increased use of electronic images, and its chapters focus on the use of these images in the fields of engineering, physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, and education, as well as everyday use. Davies, an Oxford-trained British chemist, joint author of The Humane Technologist, and former chief scientist for the British Depart­ ment of Trade and Industry, died in 1987 before completing this book, leaving only a first draft that was later edited and amended by his friend Robin Bathurst, with Diana Bathurst supplying the book’s (fittingly) ample number of illustrations. As Geoffrey Allen writes in the foreword, the book largely consists of Davies’s “reflections and speculations”—and indeed, the author covers a wide spectrum of topics including computer-generated models of proteins in molecular biology; magnetic resonance imaging in medicine; the importance of pictures for understanding genetics, biophysics, and biochemistry; the use of computer images in engineering design, geology, geophys­ ics, astrophysics, and cosmology; the use of pictorial symbols in electrical and electronic-circuit diagrams; satellite picture taking and mapmaking; and the uses of interactive video. One of the author’s repeated themes is the urgent need for improved methods of storing, sorting, and indexing this huge influx of images so that we can retrieve electronic images in a systematic manner. He observes that computers have not gotten very far on image recognition, so that the mechanized and automated sorting and searching of pictorial information on the level of competence of the brain still await further progress and development. Many of his comments speculate about future trends: although scientists and engineers have only reacted “patchily” to new image-making capabil­ ities, with chemists showing the most sophisticated use of pictures, he predicts that research results in science and technology will benefit from increased use of computer and video images. With its broad scope in a limited number of pages, the book inevitably poses some difficulties. Because the field of image process­ ing is changing so fast, some of Davies’s observations are almost inevitably dated: for example, although he briefly refers to pictorial 846 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE simulations where the viewer looks at a video monitor and uses a computer joystick to simulate walking, driving, or flying through a prerecorded environment, today’s developments in Artificial Reality or Virtual Reality allow the user, wearing data gloves and specially designed goggles showing three-dimensional video images, to expe­ rience a more convincing illusion of moving within and manipulating objects in an imaginary, computer-generated “cyberspace.” And more important, perhaps because the author died before the book was finished, the text is sometimes sketchy and epigrammatic, doing little more than just touching on the cultural, philosophical, and psycho­ logical implications of living in an image-laden information age. Nevertheless, one of the book’s strongest points is its ability, in a short space, to provide vivid, detailed, and intriguing specific exam­ ples of computer imaging in engineering, science, and chemistry, illustrated with a variety of black-and-white and color diagrams, maps, and photographs. Although Davies is somewhat of a pessimist (arguing that “conservatism, bewilderment, and custom” are holding us back from increased use of pictures, leaving only “generally slow progress accompanied by Luddism” [pp. 142, 150]), his own obvious enthusiasm ultimately comes through as he explores the increased uses of pictorial images, particularly in biology and chemistry, and allows us to briefly share his sense of wonder at the exciting world of image processing

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