In the scientific discourse (not the discourse on science but the discourse by scientists), images are no longer just illustrations. Nor are they just part of the evidence produced by a text or discourse. They are, rhetorically speaking, powerful tools for making an argument more attractive, more seductive—which means for some readers also more treacherous—and difficult to refute, as demonstrated by Bruno Latour in his analysis of scientific reasoning as the building of a network of multiple linked cross-references. Images have become a way of writing, exposing, exploring, demonstrating, communicating, in short doing science, with or without the help of a supporting text. Roland Barthes was right in suggesting in his seminal 1961 text on the photographic message that the conventional relationship between illustrated and illustrating medium, that is, between text and image, should be reversed, for in modern communication media it is no longer the image that illustrates the...

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