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Science, Technology & Human Values
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From Thing to Sign and "Natural Object": Toward a Genetic Phenomenology of Graph Interpretation

Wolff-Michael Roth

University of Victoria, Canada, mroth{at}uvic.ca

G. Michael Bowen

Lakehead University, Canada

Domenico Masciotra

L’Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, Canada

This study was designed to find out what scientists and science students actually do when they are reading familiar and unfamiliar graphs. This study provides rich details of the subtle changes in the ontologies (ensemble of elements perceptually available) of scientists and science students as they engage in the reading tasks assigned to them. In the course of the readers’ interpretation work, initially unspecified marks on paper (" its ") are turned into objects with particular topologies that are said to correspond to specific features in the world. We theorize this interpretive work as a transition of graphs from things to signs that come to stand for natural objects. Especially among physicists and theoretical ecologists, graphs enter new relations and become natural objects in their own right.

Science, Technology & Human Values, Vol. 27, No. 3, 327-356 (2002)
DOI: 10.1177/016224390202700301
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