A modern symbolic language in the “century of the eye”: Otto Neurath’s “international picture language” and the democratisation of knowledge in illustrated non-fiction books (working title)

The interdisciplinary research project studies the relationship between the development and promotion of a new symbolic language and the origin of illustrated non-fiction books as an instrument of knowledge transfer during the 20^th century: Isotype (International System of Typographic Picture Education) was created by the social scientist and philosopher Otto Neurath (1882–1945) with a view to a “democratisation of knowledge”, respectively a method of “humanising” scientific information. Within this research project Neurath’s picture education is interpreted in the context of the “scientific world view” as put forth by the Vienna Circle. According to Neurath this “scientific world view” was supposed to form the basis of an egalitarian concept of modern society. Later his approach could be described as a form of integrative encyclopedianism. Neurath’s work and influence in the field of museum education has been thoroughly examined as well as his international scientific cooperations and publications. But he did not exclusively advance his aim via these channels.
During his exile in Great Britain he cooperated with Jewish émigrés and leftist intellectual publishers from Vienna and Berlin. Driven by the desire for content that was both objective and rational they developed “integrated” text-image structures that were visually modern and sematically closely linked. In order to do this they established creative practices in specialised teams and specific organisational and economical structures. In the course of the internationalisation of the book market after 1945 and by using successively improved production techniques to produce visualised subjects in high-quality they eventually reached the mass market.