You should take less than ten minutes for this activity.
Look at Figure 2. It shows four sides of an object. This is probably the first time you have met this object. In order to answer the questions below, you will need to:
Now answer the following questions:
It is worth remembering that you have been looking at photographs. If you had been able to hold the object in your hand, you would have had an immediate impression of its size (rather than having to get this information from the caption). By using your sense of touch you would have been able to make more observations – about the object’s weight and texture, for example. While holding it, you could have rotated the object to understand it in three dimensions, looked underneath it, examined the material (ivory) from which it has been crafted. With a magnifying glass, you could have seen more detail and been able to observe aspects of the object not visible to the naked eye.
Any observation of any object will always be limited in some way. Perhaps the object is dimly lit, or behind glass, or perhaps touching it is prohibited. Or, as in this case, perhaps you are seeing only a representation of the object. Nevertheless, our brains subconsciously do a lot of work on our behalf and help us to understand what we see in an image of an object as if it were a real object in front of us. Some aspects are difficult to grasp from a photograph, particularly a sense of scale (this object is only 4.7cm long) and an accurate perception of colour. So, all in all, any description based on photographs will never be able to capture all aspects of an object.
If observations are limited by various factors, then our ability to interpret what we observe is also limited by our previous knowledge or our ability to work out what we are looking at. With the object you have been studying, you might have observed the shape and details making up the various parts of an elephant. You probably also observed and recognised the ladder and the human figures. Some of the smaller parts are more difficult to observe and identify. As in the poem by Saxe, your interpretations are shaped by what you can observe.
OpenLearn - Looking at, describing and identifying objects Except for third party materials and otherwise, this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence, full copyright detail can be found in the acknowledgements section. Please see full copyright statement for details.