Emotions of Observation: Affective Investments in Visualized Research Objects

It is well known that scientific images have evoked emotional responses from (to name but a few) wonder to boredom, fear to possessiveness, and puzzlement to mastery. Yet outside certain specific contexts, notably Romanticism and the sublime, historians of science have paid more attention to the visual experiences of popular writers, students and laypeople than to those of researchers, whose efforts to drain observation of emotion have been a more prominent concern. This session proposes to take a more concerted approach to the emotional relations of observational scientists to their research objects. These affective investments encompass long-term attachments to classic images, with their comforting familiarity, and the thrills and spills of discovery. Discovery accounts have celebrated work and skill, but also invoked more complex emotions, especially various kinds of loss. On the one hand, new sights have threatened the status of much-loved pictures and models. On the other, observers tended to worry until confirmation that the putative novelties, if not lost to one accident or another, might themselves be revealed as artefacts. There is a rich field here for the exploration of appropriately historicized observation, discovery, and emotions.