Arising from the need to go beyond the semiotic, cognitive, epistemic and symbolic reading of diagrams, this book looks at what diagrams are capable of in scholarly work related to the social sciences. Rather than attempting to define what diagrams are, and what their dietic capacity might be, contributions to this volume draw together the work diagrams do in the development of theories. Across a range of disciplines, the chapters introduce the ephemeral dimensions of scientist’s interactions and collaboration with diagrams, consider how diagrams configure cooperation across disciplines, and explore how diagrams have been made to work in ways that point beyond simplification, clarification and formalization.

Arising from the need to go beyond the semiotic, cognitive, epistemic and symbolic reading of diagrams, this book looks at what diagrams are capable of in scholarly work related to the social sciences. Rather than attempting to define what diagrams are, and what their dietic capacity might be, contributions to this volume draw together the work diagrams do in the development of theories. Across a range of disciplines, the chapters introduce the ephemeral dimensions of scientist’s interactions and collaboration with diagrams, consider how diagrams configure cooperation across disciplines, and explore how diagrams have been made to work in ways that point beyond simplification, clarification and formalization.

List of Illustrations

Introduction: Diagrams beyond Mere Tools
Lukas Englemann, Caroline Humphrey, and Christos Lynteris

Chapter 1. Revisiting Sigmund Freud's Diagrams of the Mind
Ro Spankie

Chapter 2. Dis/working with Diagrams: How Genealogies and Maps Obscure Nanoscale Worlds (a Hunter-Gatherer Case)
Nurit Bird-David

Chapter 3. On Visual Coherence and Visual Excess: Writing, Diagrams, and Anthropological Form
Matei Candea

Chapter 4. Configurations of Plague: Spatial Diagrams in Early Epidemiology
Lukas Engelmann

Chapter 5. A Nomadic Diagram: Waddington's Epigenetic Landscape and Anthropology
Caroline Humphrey

Afterword: Abstraction and Schematization in the Repeated Copying of Designs
Philip Steadman

Conclusion: The Work of Diagrams
Lukas Engelmann, Caroline Humphrey, and Christos Lynteris

Index