Harold Craft, the creator of the graph on Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures album, was a former graduate student in my department 44 years before I arrived. The figure was originally published in his thesis which lay on a shelf just down the hall from my office. As I became sensitive to the power of visuals, Craft's graph and it's story became a frequent slide in my lessons on scientific figure design. Once during my harrowing graduate experience, I visited Harold's thesis as one would a sacred text and imagined both the unknown pleasures and horrors that filled the same halls 40 years back...
4 years, a Ph.D., and an M.F.A. later, I visit an exhibit about the album cover where artists have been asked to take inspiration from the image. While the artists' work was interesting on its own, the lack of engagement with the source material left me with a sunken feeling. CP1919, the pulsar depicted in the graph, was discovered by Jocelyn Bell Burnell who was snubbed for the Nobel Prize won by her advisor because of her student status. Harold Craft was not given any reference on the album, despite almost no modification by the designer. These student stories repeat in academia every day, time after time like the perfect clock of a pulsar.
To do this figure justice and bring catharsis to my frustration, I asked fellow astronomers what it's like to be a student now in the field. Like the persistent pulsar, what repeated phrases define their experience? I present the story of Jocelyn and Harold in parallel to the struggles of many students throughout academia and showcase the commonly repeated phrases from the surveys I conducted as reimagined figures.