Netter Images Without Labels

[Nayra Waddles]

Diagramaticpictures allow more focused, tighter commentary on pictures, compared to text or captions outside the picture frame. I've long been concerned at how the format of this board seems to enforce a separation of text and image. I'll be trying out more mapped pictures here and would appreciate good examples of mapped pictures (for thinking about the issue in Beautiful Evidence). Instead of a mapped picture with direct labels, here's an impediment visual-verbal encoding: A' = Anna Z = Zerlina A'' = Alex A''' = Abby

-- Edward Tufte Response to Mapped Pictures I have seen many poor attempts of this concept: theyusually involve bold black text in tiny white boxesand lots of arrows.

True languages get much of their power by breaking complex ideas into small pieces, such as words, which can then be rearranged to form innumerable new ideas. "It's like building with bricks rather than building with clay," Senghas explains. To look for this feature in NSL, the researchers played a cartoon showing a cat wobbling down a hill after eating a bowling ball. When asked to describe the motion, Spanish speakers who can hear often augment their verbal description with a gesture that combines the ideas of "wobbling" and "down" in a single motion (top). Deaf students from the early years of the school use a similar gesture, which is a direct analog of the distinctive motion. In contrast, later generations of students separate the ideas of "wobbling" and "down" into distinct signs (bottom). Although the separation actually weakens the description, it is an important feature of abstract language, the researchers note.

Response to Mapped Pictures The sciences, and anatomy in particular, do seem to lead the way when it comes to this sort of picture mapping. I can remember marveling at those transparent overlays that were mentioned earlier, in the Encyclopedia Britannica when I was a boy. Take Henry Gray's Anatomy of the Human Body as another case in point.

Notice the different typefaces and colors used to distinguish between various tissues, such as muscle and bone (although they do not seem to be completely consistent in this example), and the hyphenation of the digastricus as it passes beneath the stylo-hyoideus. Note also the inconsistent type orientation, how some of the vertical muscles are labeled with the text running up-to-down, while others run down-to-up.

I assume that the drawings in the early editions of the book were quite a bit larger than the one shown here. The illustrations in my commercial paperback edition from the 1970s are a little bit bigger, but not much, and the type in the diagrams is still fairly difficult to read. (Indeed, some of the diagrams are much more detailed than the one shown here and are nearly illegible at their currently published size.)

One wonders if these particular labeling techniques weren't in part a deliberate means to promote more careful study of the very rich illustrations in Dr. Gray's book. After all, the medical student is presumed to have seen all of these structures in the flesh (so to speak), and can study their names more clearly in the text. The object of the diagram is to associate the names of the body parts with the actual elements the students have already seen during a dissection.

Many of the other diagrams in the book use callouts with thin, arrowless lines pointing to the subject of the label. Still others use a combination of callouts and subject labels directly on the structures. In fact, it's interesting to think about why Gray chooses to use callouts instead of direct labeling in various situations. Sometimes it is simply a matter of available space, caused by the need to specify a long name for a small body part. In other cases, the use of callouts seems also to be related to the overall shape of the subject he is diagramming. Cranial diagrams, for example, seem to use direct labeling more often, and avoid callouts except for structures near the outer edges of the picture. A diagram of an arm or leg, by contrast, might use callouts exclusively. Gray seems to try to avoid callouts with long lines wherever possible, which would obviously be more difficult to parse.

This book has fascinated me for years. I'm glad for this discussion that has urged me to pull it out and pore through it again. Sometimes, you have to be reminded that there is as much detail looking inward as there is looking outward.

Response to Mapped PicturesWhat a thoughtful contribution, an interesting example right on point from Kindly Contributor Craig Zacker.Let us all now locate our sterno-cleido-mastoideus. -- Edward Tufte

Response to Mapped PicturesA hidden gem in Craig Zacker's post is the source of the picture: bartleby.com. With its host of free, classic references and a reading list to aspire to, this site alone motivated me to learn how to set bookmarks in my browser and make hyperlinks in documents. -- Niels Olson (email)

It is worth noting that Gray names 28 structures, while, by using callouts, Netter can name 38. Netter's decompressed style also minimizes the need for line-breaking hyphens (Sterno-cleidomastoideus). Gray's cartographic style may be a nice bit of visual confection, but Netter ties more information to his image (if only I could find the image with callouts out on the web!).

Response to Mapped PicturesGray's drawings exaggerate the figure-ground contrast, the thick black lines on the lighter ground. Color is an after-thought. Netter's drawings avoid the black stripes, resulting in a more subtle, 3-dimensional effect, closer to reality. -- Edward Tufte

Aerial photography, arguably consisting of images/pictures, is commonly overlayed with annotations and then used as basemapping in land use planning and natural resource management (as well as obvious military applications and other fields).

For a recent open space exhibit, we displayed maps and photomaps of identical areas, at the same scale, side-by-side. The public seemed to extract information from both, in a parallel yet combined form, as both versions have strengths and weaknesses.

Response to Mapped Pictures Some additional Brodel images.These are available at the National Library of Medicine's profile of Florence R. Sabin, but aren't laid out together there. The style is very similar to Wolf-Heidiger's. Interestingly, Powell's was selling Kelly and Brodel's two volume Gynecology and Abdominal Surgery for $45, while another seller on Amazon was selling it for $270. I bought the copy from Powell's; I hope it's still readable.Between Google and the continued exponential growth of on-line content, it is becoming remarkable easy to add information (and hopefully content) to these threads. I wonder if initiatives like The Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program will help further the trend or if more content will be put behind firewalls, only accessible to intranet computers and subscribers. -- Niels Olson (email)

Response to Mapped Pictures I should mention that the department of Art as Applied to Medicine at John's Hopkins University has an large trove (probably most of the finished work of his long career)of original Brdel pen and ink and carbon dust illustrations in their archives. Unfortunately, they are not usually on public display. But, for the students and faculty of the program he founded at JHU, they provide extraordinary inspiration.

Response to Mapped Pictures Tufte's text asks: "Should not every explanatory image of DNA - from journalism to science - show the molecule with a scale of measurement?"I think not. Not every image, and particularly not every scientific image. As discussed in other threads here, biochemical diagrams often are used summarize information about diverse genetic and chemical interactions. Single diagrams often incorporate graphical representations of objects ranging from a dozen base pairs (a footprint that can be recognized by a transcription-regulating protein) to cells (>10^3 larger), tissues (another 10^3-10^7), or even organs. In such diagrams, which are extremely common, scale is not the point - informational or chemical topology is. In a diagram of the topology of a computer network that incorporates both local and large-area information, scale bars showing the diameters of Cat5 or T1 cables would be chartjunk, and nothing more. The same is true in many diagrams that include pictures of DNA.Moreover, for biologists who focus on molecular structure, a detailed scale drawing that includes a DNA helix (2 nm diameter, 10 base pairs per turn, 3.4 nm per 10 base pars), or an alpha-carbon backbone in a protein (0.5 nm backbone diameter, 3.5 amino acid residues per turn, spaced about 0.15 nm apart), those elements provide implicit scale bars. These are scale indicators as recognizable to a molecular biologist or biochemist as a person standing next to Tufte's Spring Arcs sculpture would be to most people. It is for this reason that one rarely sees scale bars in specialist papers about protein and DNA structure.Certainly, scale bars should be present much more often in diagrams of DNA and other macromolecules. But scale bars are certainly not desirable in every illustration of this kind. -- Alex Merz (email)

Response to Mapped Pictures Watson and Crick's 1953 proposal in Nature for the structure of DNA included a graphic but didn't include a scale bar, although scale could be interpreted from data in the article.

As a student taking Biochemistry right now I concur with Prof. Merz's opinion. In addition, I would add that scale bars are of minimal utility when trying to figure out mechanisms (is this carboxyl oxygen close enough to that amine to abstract a hydrogen? Can a hyrdrogen bond form there?) when compared to the 3-d ruler functions in the visualization programs. Like engineering and architecture visualizations, visualization of macromolecules is generally done with specialized software. PyMol and RasMol are examples. If they're known, the coordinates of each atom in a biomolecule in a particular conformation are available from various sources like the Protein Data Bank, which are constantly growing and provide the raw data for the visualation programs. The image below is from A. Geva, et al's report in this week's New England Journal of Medicine on a novel hemoglobin mutant, hemoglobin Jamaica Plain. The red lines represent 3-d ruler measurements, the lengths of which are reported in another frame of the visualization program this image was taken from. In this case the authors merely used the lines to indicate steric interactions created when the bulky amino acid phenylalanine is coded for where a smaller leucine should be. One (small) reason for these authors to not provide a scale bar would be that, as they state in the article, the mutant's structure has not yet been determined by x-ray crystallography (the same technique Rosalind Franklin used in her study of DNA), they just took the next closest structure, sickle cell hemoglobin, and stuck a phenylalanine in where a leucine should be.

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