Práticas informacionais na produção da comunicação científica visual: ficções e realidades (re) construídas sobre a esquistossomose na década de 1940

Abstract

The present thesis presents an inter-conceptual approach about scientific communication and visual language, which is named Visual Scientific Communication (CVV). This concept is referred to the process of selection, organization, use, production and publishing of scientific information. It is elaborated from a multimodal language, which is understood as the interaction between imagery language and verbal language, especially the scientific illustrations (ICs). This approach is placed emphasis on information practices, comprehended as a manner of receiving, managing and transferring information that are produced and developed in information circuits occurred in the scope of cultural contexts. The research problem was based on the absence of a perception in relation to the communication process founded on the imagery documents, because there were not identified works about the publishing of scientific information using images as a communication channel. In this aspect, when there are selected and analyzed the works that have being developed in Information Science about scientific communication, there is, above all, an emphasis on journals, that is, on textual documents. The central objective of the discussion is to analyze how scientific illustrations about schistosomiasis produced in the 1940s at Oswaldo Cruz Institute are consisted of information practices of visual scientific communication. It is a descriptive research with qualitative and quantitative approach and a documentary research. The analysis corpus was the album Schistosomiasis mansoni, composed by thirty-three photographs and thirty watercolor drawings about schistosomiasis and it was organized by a group of researchers (César Ferreira Pinto, Joaquim Pinto da Silva, Antonio Firmato de Almeida e Raymundo Honório Daniel) and sent to the doctor Luiz Carvalho Tavares da Silva. This album demonstrates the information practices of visual scientific communication occurred in the States of Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais and Pernambuco in the 1940s. This way, the present doctoral research contributes to the accomplishment of future researches in Information Science, in the sub-area of Scientific Communication, whose theme is an approach directed to visual language and information practices, besides papers based on the areas of Visual Studies and Visualization of Information.