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Despite our increasing dependence on tools which gather information unseen to the naked eye, and the use of the computer to digitize, create, and replicate images, material images are still important vehicles of knowledge, especially diagrams, models, and maps which describe what we otherwise cannot see. Even the category of "art" -- one of the most privileged categories of images in the sixteenth-century and in the present day -- increasingly crosses the boundaries between physical object and electronic image. For example, the computer-generated images from the geology and art studio departments appear to be as "artful" as the hand-made images of Hogarth and Thoreau.
