#graphic method

"First, the accident must be written faithfully (indexically, automatically, authentically); second, it must be read forensically. To read the accident forensically is to perform a certain kind of scientific exegesis. It is to painstakingly analyze and rigorously interpret what is simultaneously a book of revelation (about 'what really happened') and a book of judgment (about 'what went wrong')."

"[...] Forensic techniques (the analysis and interpretation of the apparatus's inscription) and forensic technologies (the promise and productivity of the apparatus itself)."

"Whether implicit in the design of their experiments (as in Babbage's case) or explicit in the content of their writings (or both, as in Marey's case), the graphic methodologist of the nineteenth century thought it imperative that the phenomenon under investigation author its own inscriptions [...] The requirement that the motional body originate its own tracings -  a requirement that represents the cornerstone of the graphic method - assumes and implies the automaticity of the recording process and the authenticity of its products. Discursively, such assumptions and implications serve to naturalize the apparatus's operations and inscriptions, to make the machine an ahistorical, noncultural thing."

"Combining the functions of detection, inspection, representation, and preservation in a single ostensibly objective image, mechanical-inscription devices could 'see' more clearly and rapidly, 'feel' more acutely and discriminatively, and 'remember' more accurately and enduringly than their corresponding human modalities or faculties."