Drawing and writing number among the most widespread scientific practices of representation. Neither photography, graphic recording apparatuses, typewriters, nor digital word- and image-processing ever completely replaced drawing and writing by hand. The interaction of hand, paper, and pen indeed involves much more than simply recording or visualizing what was previously thought, observed, or imagined. Both writing and drawing have the power to translate concepts and observations into two-dimensional, manageable, reproducible objects. They help to develop research questions and they open up an interaction between the gathering of phenomena and the formation of theses. Related to the manifold studies of representational activities in the sciences and the humanities, this topical issue tries to refine our understanding of the capacities of drawing and writing as research techniques; i.e. as productive epistemic practices. In particular the contributions address three aspects: the material conditions and configurations of the “scene of drawing and writing,” the involved procedures of production, and the languages of inscription.

In 1787 an anonymous student of the Perth Academy spent countless hours transforming his rough classroom notes into a beautifully inscribed notebook. Though this was an everyday practice for many Enlightenment students, extant notebooks of this nature are extremely rare and we know very little about how middle class children learned to inscribe and visualize knowledge on paper. This essay addresses this lacuna by using recently located student notebooks, drawings, and marginalia alongside textbooks and instructional literature to identify the graphic tools and skills that were taught to Scottish children in early modern classrooms. I show that, in addition to learning the facts of the curriculum, students participated in educational routines that enabled them to learn how to visually package knowledge into accessible figures and patterns of information, thereby making acts of inscription and visualization meaningful tools that benefitted both the self and society.

Keeping records has always been an essential part of science. Aside from natural history and the laboratory sciences, no other observational science reflects this activity of record-keeping better than astronomy. Central to this activity, historically speaking, are tools so mundane and common that they are easily overlooked; namely, the notebook and the pencil. One obvious function of these tools is clearly a mnemonic one. However, there are other relevant functions of paperwork that often go unnoticed. Among these, I argue, is the strategic use made of different procedures of record keeping to prolong observational time with a target object. Highlighting this function will help us to appreciate the supporting role played by the notebook and the pencil to extend the observational time spent with a target object. With objects as delicate, faint, and mysterious as the nebulae, the procedures used to record their observations helped nineteenth-century observers overcome the temporal handicaps and limitations of large and clumsy telescopes, mounted in the altazimuth manner. To demonstrate the importance of paper and pencil, I will closely examine the observing books, the drawings found therein, and the telescopes of three nineteenth-century observers of the nebulae: Sir John F. W. Herschel, Lord Rosse, and William Lassell.

The paper focuses on the instrumentality of writing in the context of scientific research. It is suggested that the tool-character of writing is related to specific writing procedures, such as the list. These procedures can vary in their degree of complexity and often follow rules that are not codified. In any case, writing procedures can be characterized as non-material devices of “concretion.” Two examples from the notebooks of the physicist and philosopher of science, Ernst Mach (1838–1916), will help to develop the notion of writing procedures. Typical for Mach's use of his notebooks, they highlight the effects of writing in the context of reasoning and reflecting.

The famous Cahiers of Paul Valéry (1871–1945) cannot be reduced to a single scientific discipline, a specific philosophical tradition, or a literary genre. For today's reader these notebooks constitute a format sui generis, one very often characterized by an “observation of a second order”: in the Cahiers Valéry uses writing, drawing, and calculating not only for purposes of argumentation; he also pays attention to the significance of such writing, drawing, and calculating processes for the production of knowledge. It is particularly the practice of note-taking and sketching in Valéry's notebooks that documents, rehearses, or questions the medial and instrumental conditions of both scientific research and artistic production. This is especially true of the early stages of the Cahiers in the years beginning around 1894 when Valéry was intensely searching for notation systems that would be conducive to his research interests. At the time the problem of how to write (as well as calculate and draw) was intrinsically bound up with the way he established his notebooks as a specific scene of writing. By closely examining a number of pages from the early notebooks I hope to show that the emerging regulation of Valéry's writing in the Cahiers results from simple operations that are noted and repeated by the writer until they gradually become procedures. What Valéry's Cahiers show us, however, is that procedures do not always work in favor of a final synthesis, but may also give rise to a format of eternal beginning. In the following I will present some of the constitutive procedures found in Valéry's early notebooks, procedures that range from a tentative gathering together and simple forms of recursion and variation to the rehearsing or invention of symbolic or graphic forms of notation.

The use of diagrams is pervasive in theoretical physics. Together with mathematical formulae and natural language, diagrams play a major role in theoretical modeling. They enrich the expressive power of physicists and help them to explore new theoretical ideas. Diagrams are not only heuristic or pedagogical tools, but they are also tools that enable developing the content of models into novel implications.

Biological drawings of newly described or revised species are expected to represent the type specimen with greatest possible accuracy. In taxonomic practice, illustrations assume the function of mobile representatives of relatively immobile specimens. In other words, such illustrations serve as “immutable mobiles” in the Latourian sense. However, the significance of drawing in the context of first descriptions goes far beyond that of illustration in the conventional sense. Not only does it synthesize the verbal catalogue of the type's morphological characteristics: it also enables the examination of these traits. The efficacy of drawing is thus closely related to its power to direct and redirect observation; it is inextricably bound up with the act of making a drawing. Although the invariance of the “immutable mobiles” is a key virtue of the logistics of “paperwork,” the recovery of graphic knowledge requires a much stronger dynamic activity – a process of sequential processing that brings out differences by translating the phenomenon under examination into various modes of graphic representation.