Entangled hybrids, material and corporeal enactment, ephemeral instruments, qualitative versus quantitative negotiation, dynamic simulation, incorporated measurement and the ethics of digitization – these are just a handful of the themes that emerge in Representation in Scientific Practice Revisited. The volume, edited by Catelijne Coopmans, Janet Vertesi, Michael Lynch and Steve Woolgar, takes stock of the manifold approaches to scientific imaging that have emerged in the twenty-five years since Lynch and Woolgar published Representation in Scientific Practice (1990). If the earlier volume awakened a consciousness about graphic intervention, this collection of essays lays bare two important vectors along which such study has expanded: first, the profusion of visualization techniques that complicate the production of contemporary scientific knowledge; second, the multiplicity of ethnographic, sociological, phenomenological and descriptive hermeneutics with which to examine those techniques. In thirteen chapters and eight responses, the volume's authors cut paths through contemporary fields as varied as nanotechnology, mathematics, space exploration, computational biology, economics, neuroscience and law. As a result, all of Revisited's readers will find themselves on a number of interdisciplinary excursions, learning manifold ways of approaching the images that comprise so much of scientific practice.

A number of authors do this with particular insight. Janet Vertesi examines how Mars Rover scientists process the same photograph in myriad ways. She lands on a new conceptual approach – ‘drawing as’ – which finds theory in imaging as each practitioner enacts a ‘purposeful visual construal’ (p. 17) of his or her objects of analysis (whether Galileo drawing a telescoped moon, or the teams working on the Rover's ‘pancams’). Via Merleau-Ponty's ‘habit-body’, Rachel Prentice observes that delicate shifts of embodied skill and mediating technologies make for a ‘taking place’ (p. 91) in which surgeons can now perform minimally invasive cuts into their patients. Michael Barany and Donald MacKenzie's account of chalk, blackboards and scrap paper in contemporary mathematics probes how analytical rigour and atypical co-understanding are constituted by the mundane, the short-lived and even a ‘self-effacing materiality’ (p. 107). In stressing the difference between representing according to convention and representing in order to break convention altogether, Cyrus Mody offers a revelatory window onto imaging disputes in the earliest days of nanotechnology. And most provocative is a set of illustrations in Morana Alac's article on teaching student workers to extract meaningful data from fMRI machines for cognitive neuroscience. Produced by the author herself, these pictures distill real-time conversations between Alac's ethnographic subjects into contour drawings, lines of dialogue and descriptions of gestures akin to stage directions. Whether the effect was intended or not, those five figures invite scholars to work reflexively with graphic representation. That is, they pose a cogent question: might visualization present yet another medium for scholarly analysis – one that those who write about the scientific image have explored little of as yet?

What all Revisited's contributors do explore is the vexed question of representation. Taken to be synonymous with mimesis and reference, the word remains a bogeyman, assumed to be a pale adjunct to a world ‘out there’. Many of this book's contributors – Vertesi's, Mody's, and Barany and MacKenzie's contributions being notable exceptions – dispense with the term altogether, and subscribe to an alternative view. Sometimes refined through Donna Harraway's term ‘worlding’ or Jakob von Uexküll's Umwelt, this alternative sees virtual realities and digital models as consequential things that meaningfully, and even physically, construct the world. Lorraine Daston echoes these sentiments, and, in calling for representation's retirement, also encourages a pivot away from epistemology and towards ontology. Steve Woolgar then stands back and asks, ‘To what extent are epistemology and ontology distinct?’ (p. 331). And Lucy Suchman completes the deed by assessing the dialectic at play: ‘Knowing subjects and objects known, in other words – the distinction that underwrites the classic Western philosophical differentiation of epistemology from ontology – are mutually constituted, including in their enactment as separate things’ (p. 333). Could it be, then, that representation is itself a kind of ‘worlding’ – just one of ontology's many epistemic forms?

To this gauntlet we might also add the question of history. The intricacies of producing scientific knowledge – a result, paradoxically, of both academic specialization and interdisciplinarity – also leave one wondering about the contemporary cultural pressures exerted on these fields. What does the Mars Rover team's switching between visualizations – and extracting different information from varying pictures of the terrain – say about the premium placed on manipulability in our digital age? Is there an epistemic difference between chalk on a blackboard and markers on a whiteboard? Why have microbiologists become dependent on analogizing cells as machines – and even erasing the boundary between the two? Is there anything particular about the twenty-first century's obsessions with engineering that can explain this? Are computational biologists coopting any procedures of filmmaking when they turn to their microscopic camera to observe the spatiotemporal mechanisms of the heart? That such questions can be raised not only throws light on the ample opportunities for inquiry that remain, but also reveals the great distance travelled beyond initial approaches to scientific imaging, such as Bruno Latour's ‘immutable mobiles’. Indeed, as Revisited demonstrates so well, change, alterity, variety and the mobility they entail guide today's most vital engagement with science and its pictures.