Written Language and Picture Language after Otto Neurath—Popularising or Humanising Knowledge?

Abstract

The 'Vienna method of pictorial statistics', created by Otto Neurath (1882-1945) and his team in the Social and Economic Museum in Vienna (1925-1934) and developed, after his forced emigration, into the 'Isotype' (International System Of TYpographic Picture Education), constitutes to this day a relevant contribution to educational work and the communication of knowledge and science.The reconstruction and renewing of this Enlightenment concept through both pictures and writing, within the context of a 'scientific world conception' and the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, offers a fruitful perspective on the current possibilities and limits of visual communication between 'science and the public'.The integration, as pushed for by Neurath, of this picture language of 'figurative constructivism' (Gerd Arntz) into a comprehensive critical concept in the tradition of Comenius, Leibniz and the French encyclopédistes, running all the way to the Vienna Circle, leads to a remarkable, but unfortunately incomplete treatise on 'Visual education: humanisation versus popularisation' (Neurath 1945) as a model for a modern museology.Neurath's posthumous publication, a comprehensive sketch of a cultural history of Visual Education (excerpts of which were printed in 1973, the complete version in 1996), served as an illustration of this topic and can in hindsight be fairly judged a concrete contribution towards highlighting the relation between science, politics and the public.Fortunately, his visual autobiography was published in the meantime and is accompanied by recent research.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 3 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.