Image and Meaning
b'This Apple in science podcast features the \\u201cPicturing to Learn\\u201d program. The event was held at Apple headquarters in Cupertino, the third in a series of regional workshops growing out of an innovative project launched in 2001 by Felice Frankel, then a science photographer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Frankel brought leading scientists from a wide range of disciplines together at MIT with graphic designers, writers, animators, critics, cognitive psychologists and others for the groundbreaking Image and Meaning Conference. The conference started as an experiment in developing visual thinking and communication skills. Participants from diverse fields of science, graphic arts, communication, technology and mathematics came to search for better ways to use visual representations to communicate scientific concepts and data. Individuals emerged with a remarkably unified sense of purpose, and a goal: to continue building an interdisciplinary community of visual practice and solution-sharing that would develop improved techniques for representing science for research, education and communication. They compared visual expressions of research across many fields, and discovered that a single scientific concept or phenomenon can often be expressed in remarkably divergent ways. They were surprised to find that multiple fields share the many challenges in visual representation. The conference explored the power of visual media, from simple drawings to rich animations and interactive online graphics, in helping the public understand science. As computers pump vast quantities of data into fast-growing fields like genomics, visualization tools that can handle massive datasets with ease of use and fast results are becoming increasingly important for data exploration and discovery.'