Einleitung: Wissensvermittlung für ein „neues Zeitalter“ (original) (raw)

Veröffentlichungen des Instituts Wiener Kreis, 2022

Abstract

The first half of the 20th century was a time of massive social, economic, technical and scientific developments. With the emergence and widespread reception of modern mass media, new concepts and standards of information transfer were established and explored. This applied in particular to the communication of factual, social, natural and cultural scientific knowledge to the ‘common reader’, i.e. non-specialist laypeople and citizens. The ideas on the dissemination of scientific information were also linked to ideas on the implementation of this process, for example through cooperation between specialised agents, as well as knowledge concepts adapted to the changing media and their impact on visual media in particular. These connections between the development of a new type of symbolic language called Isotype (International System of Typographic Picture Education) and the ‘picture-text style’ based on it by the Austrian social scientist and philosopher Otto Neurath (1882-1945), which was promoted in the sense of a ‘democratisation of knowledge’, are examined here - as a method of ‘humanising’ scientific information for a mass audience on the one hand and the genesis of a modern type of illustrated non-fiction book in the 20th century on the other. In exile, Neurath co-operated with other emigrants, Jewish and left-liberal publishers and the so-called book packagers, and their staff from Vienna and Berlin. Together they developed modern, semantically close image-text combinations, especially as non-fiction series. Creative practices and organisational structures were successively established and adapted for this purpose, which were expanded after 1945 and made usable for the international book market. As a result, a mass audience was reached with high-quality visualised non-fiction topics and contemporary forms of knowledge transfer were created, which shaped their visualisation strategies in the long term.

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