Something old, something new, and something odd in between. I decided to leave the realm of books for an evening and try out my new DH skillz on the more artistic, aquatic, and animalistic topic of sharks...in pictures! Initially I thought of doing something with sharks and keywords surrounding sharks, starting with the hypothesis that as scientific reason begins to overtake artistic impulses, so will descriptions of these toothsome creatures move from fearful to a more reasonable, objective view of sharks that we see today. But as the saying goes, a picture says a million words; and so I decided to visualize in timeline form drawings (and, later, formaldehyde creations) of sharks, beginning with a 1560 pencil drawing and going all the way up to 2013 Deviantart.com examples. A big issue with the earlier drawings was deciphering exactly what animal the artist or scientist was attempting to depict, as art pieces in the 16th and 17th century tended to fall under the umbrella label of "sea monsters." It became clear that many of these early drawings were based on word of mouth descriptions of the animals, rather than any physical proof, as this 1561 "sea cow" drawing attests:

Literal sea cows aside, I used the Dipity timeline tool to create the following timeline, sample screenshot below (please follow the link for the full, navigable timeline!: http://www.dipity.com/east2eden/DH-Test/)

The timeline allowed me to see three rather clear divides, from the sample pictures I included after a bit of research. In the 17th century and prior pieces, the sharks are drawn by themselves in a somewhat textbook style; not to say that they are especially accurate or anatomically detailed, but rather that they do not include humans or landscapes, instead standing alone in sketchbook style. The 18th and 19th century drawings, in contrast, are dramatic and include people and or landscapes. The sharks in these drawings can be read perhaps as symbols of death, as cold hunters surrounding isolated humans who venture out into the vast ocean depths. These sharks, then, despite the higher accuracy of anatomical detail, really play more of a background role to the humans in the drawings. Finally, the 20th and 21st century art pieces, including Damien Hirst's famous 1991 tiger shark in formaldehyde exhibit, mark a move toward highly realistic/purposefully fantastical depictions of these animals. I found that this and the select pieces from Deviantart removed the human from the art, instead using fantastical elements or extreme realism (as in the two Deviantart examples). These artists create an image of a shark that is either as close to real life as possible, or that abandons realism for a fantasy style piece that takes for granted the viewer's familiarity with shark images, understanding that a fantasy-style image is taking elements of shark imagery and mixing them with whatever the imagination provides. Hirst's formaldehyde, of course, is a whole statement on art by itself. I was reminded of David Lowenthal's example of Theseus' ship in his "Material Preservation and Its Alternatives" article that Alan asked us to read, where he wrote "Brought into port for repairs, every old plank in Theseus's ship was replaced by new planks. Was it still the original ship?". Hirst's piece was revamped in 2006, when the original tiger shark began to decay, and was replaced by another shark altogether. Is the piece's intended statement about "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Still Living" (the title of the piece) more important than the physical shark itself? One response to this piece was especially amusing, as the art movement Stuckism claimed Hirst was not the original dead shark artist, using the slogan "A Dead Shark Isn't Art" as well as a display case to signify their unhappiness (read more on that here if you'd like: http://www.stuckism.com/Shark.html)