The Job Title Nobody Has Any More
Isotype had a job title for the person who turned data into a form a picture could carry. Marie Neurath called it the central role. Nobody employs one now, and the work still has to be done by somebody.
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In 1971 Marie Neurath retired and gave away her working life. The contents of the Isotype Institute, the charts, the sketches, the carbon-copy notebooks, the correspondence, the printing blocks, went to the University of Reading, to the Department of Typography and Graphic Communication, where they are still held as the Otto and Marie Neurath Isotype Collection. Reading describes it as the most comprehensive archive of Isotype materials anywhere, running from 1920s Vienna through The Hague, Oxford and London. It includes business records from 1941 to 1967, original 1930s exhibition charts, photographs going back to the 1920s, films, and works by Gerd Arntz and George Grosz.
What interests me about that archive is not the charts. It is the notebooks. Because the notebooks belong to a job that no longer exists, and the job was the whole point.
A museum that was really a production workshop
The Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum in Wien, the Social and Economic Museum of Vienna, was established in 1924 and opened in January 1925. Otto Neurath directed it from 1924 until 1934. Its subject was Red Vienna: housing, public health, mortality, employment, the municipal building programme. Its audience was people who had not been to university and in many cases had not finished school. Its method was called the Wiener Methode der Bildstatistik, the Vienna Method of Picture Statistics.
In 1928 Neurath recruited Gerd Arntz (1900 to 1988) from Düsseldorf to lead the art and design side. Arntz came out of the Cologne Progressives, a politically committed group of artists, and he brought with him a linocut and woodcut sensibility: flat, black, frontal, no modelling, no perspective. Over his career he designed something in the order of four thousand pictograms for the system. Marie Reidemeister had arrived earlier, in 1925. She was born in Braunschweig on 27 May 1898, had studied mathematics and physics at Göttingen from 1917 to 1924, and had taken art school classes in 1919. She was not hired as an artist.
She was hired to do the thing in the middle.
A card catalog. Another system where a trained specialist stood between the material and the person looking for it. Photograph by TBurmeister (WMF), CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
The rules, and what people get wrong about them
Popular accounts of Isotype treat it as a style: little black figures, the ancestor of the airport toilet sign. That is a real part of the legacy, but it gets the emphasis backwards. The symbols were downstream. The system was a set of conventions about how quantity and comparison behave on a page, arrived at by testing, and the symbols existed to serve those conventions.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry on Neurath's visual education summarises the governing rules of the method as nine:
Rule seven is the one everybody half-remembers and the one that matters most. In International Picture Language, the 118-page postcard-format book Neurath published in London in 1936, written inside C. K. Ogden's 850-word Basic English vocabulary, the rule is stated plainly: a sign is representative of a certain amount of things; a greater number of signs is representative of a greater amount of things. Eye magazine's account of the book puts the working version even more briefly: repeat a unit, do not enlarge it.
The reason is not aesthetic. If you double a figure's height to show a doubling, you have quadrupled its area, and the reader's eye responds to area. The chart lies while remaining arithmetically defensible. Repetition removes the ambiguity: the reader can count, and counting is a check the reader performs rather than a claim the designer makes. The same instinct produced another of Neurath's working rules that Eye records from the book: do not say more than you know. If your data are five annual observations, you show five units, not a smooth line implying you measured the days in between.
The transformer
Between the expert who held the data and the artist who drew the symbols, the Vienna team put a third person, with a title: the transformer.
Marie Reidemeister, later Marie Neurath, was the principal one. Her own description of the work, quoted by Jason Forrest in the Data Visualization Society's journal Nightingale, is the plainest statement of it I have found:
From the data given in words and figures, a way has to be found to extract the essential facts and put them into picture form.
Sue Walker, writing from the Reading collection, quotes Marie Neurath setting out the job as three duties: to understand the data, to get all necessary information from the expert, and to decide what it is worth transmitting to the public, then to make it understandable. Note the middle clause. The transformer was not a formatter waiting for a finished brief. The transformer interrogated the source.
Marie Neurath also described the sequence, and it is worth reading slowly because it is a workflow, not a philosophy: an idea was formed by Otto, he discussed it with an expert, and the transformer was present at those discussions in order to get acquainted with the subject. Only after that did the sketching start: pencil layouts, carbon-copy notebooks with the transformer drawing in colour on the top sheet, miniature dummy books to test how a spread would sit, then a blueprint that told the artist exactly what to draw. Text and picture were developed together rather than one after the other.
Michael Twyman, introducing the 1975 exhibition catalogue that marked fifty years of the Vienna museum, records the phrase Otto Neurath used for the role. The transformer was the trustee of the public. That is a legal metaphor, chosen on purpose. A trustee does not own the asset and does not benefit from it. A trustee is liable for handling it badly on behalf of someone who is not in the room.
Why the job needed a separate person
The obvious objection, then and now, is that this is just what a good designer does anyway, or what a good statistician does anyway. The Vienna answer was that neither of them does it, because neither of them is accountable for it.
The expert is accountable for the data being correct. The artist is accountable for the drawing being well made. Nobody in that pair is accountable for the question of whether the reader ends up with a true impression, which is a different question from whether the numbers are right and a different question from whether the picture is good. The transformer owned that question and nothing else.
Twyman's argument for why Isotype mattered turns on exactly this. What distinguished it from earlier pictorial statistics was not that the drawings were better. It was that there were formal conventions, applied consistently, developed through systematic testing, so that a series of charts could be compared against one another. He describes the state of graphic statistics before Isotype as being as chaotic as written language had been in pre-classical times. A convention only holds if somebody is employed to hold it.
Exile, and the export of a method
The Vienna museum was suppressed by the Austrofascist regime in February 1934. Neurath, Reidemeister and Arntz went to The Hague, where they set up the International Foundation for Visual Education. Arntz stayed in the Netherlands, and after the war he worked at the Dutch Central Bureau of Statistics until he retired in 1965, which is to say the method outlived the movement and ended up inside a national statistics office.
The Soviet chapter is less comfortable and less often told. IZOSTAT was founded in Moscow in 1931, with Neurath and Reidemeister invited in to establish it on the Vienna model. Neurath committed to spending sixty days a year in the Soviet Union. Arntz and Peter Alma contributed between 1931 and 1934. The institute grew to around seventy staff and its output moved from education towards presenting the five-year plans. Neurath's collaboration ended in 1934 and the organisation was shut down in 1940. A method built to stop charts lying was, within a few years, employed by a state with an active interest in charts that lied. I do not think that invalidates the method. I think it is the strongest available evidence that the method alone was never the safeguard, and that the safeguard was a person with a defined duty.
Otto and Marie escaped to England in 1940, were interned as enemy aliens, married in 1941, and founded the Isotype Institute at Oxford. Otto Neurath died in 1945. Marie ran the Institute for another twenty-six years and produced more than eighty illustrated books, many of them science books for children: Visual History of Mankind in 1948, the Visual Science titles from 1950, the Wonder World series through the 1950s and 1960s. She died in London on 10 October 1986.
Her account of the role was published only after her death, in The Transformer: Principles of Making Isotype Charts, edited and co-written with Robin Kinross for Hyphen Press, a 128-page book whose central chapter is called, simply, "The work of the transformer".
What replaced it
Nobody has the job title now. What happened to the function is that it was split three ways and each part was given to somebody whose main responsibility is something else.
Transformer duty (Vienna) | Where it sits now | What gets lost |
|---|---|---|
Interrogate the expert until the data is understood | Analyst or data scientist, who usually owns the query rather than the reading | The question of what a lay reader will conclude is never asked |
Decide what is worth transmitting | Product manager, editor or stakeholder, deciding by priority rather than by comprehension | Selection becomes a matter of emphasis, not of honesty |
Choose the form that carries the fact | Designer, working from an agreed chart type | Form is picked from a library before the argument is settled |
Hold the conventions across a whole series | The design system or charting library | Consistency is enforced on appearance, not on meaning |
The last row is the one I keep coming back to, because it is the substitution that looks most like a solution. A charting library does hold conventions. It holds axis treatment, colour ramps, label placement, tick density. What it cannot hold is rule seven, because rule seven is not a property of a chart, it is a judgement about whether this particular quantity should be shown as a length, an area, a count of units, or not shown at all. A library will happily draw you a bubble chart scaled by radius, which is the exact error the repeated-symbol rule exists to prevent.
I have worked the way everyone works: a spreadsheet arrives, a chart type is chosen in the first ten minutes, and the rest of the work is refinement of something already decided. The Vienna sequence puts the chart type almost last. That is not a stylistic preference. It is a different allocation of responsibility, and it costs a salary.
What I could not settle
Three things, and I would rather flag them than smooth them over.
The date Arntz joined is inconsistent across otherwise reliable sources. The Wikipedia article on the Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum says Neurath recruited him in 1928; the article on Isotype says Neurath first saw his prints in 1926 and that Arntz moved to Vienna full-time in 1929; the Gerd Arntz article says he began work there in early 1929. These are probably describing different stages of the same arrangement, but I cannot confirm that from what I have read.
The naming is similarly soft. The Stanford Encyclopedia says the Vienna Method was relabelled Isotype during the exile phase; the Wikipedia account puts it at around 1935. Neurath's own 1936 book gives the expansion, International System Of Typographic Picture Education, and the acronym is clearly retrofitted to the word "isotype", but I have not seen a primary document fixing the month it was adopted.
And I have not read the interior of The Transformer. I am relying on Marie Neurath's words as quoted in the Nightingale article and in Sue Walker's paper from the Reading project, and on Twyman's 1975 essay. If the fuller text qualifies any of this, the qualification is not in what I have cited.
The part that is actually transferable
The pictograms are not the inheritance. They were tuned to letterpress, to exhibition panels, to a specific reading public in a specific city, and Marie Neurath herself, testing the work in Africa, concluded that the methods and the approach were more universal than the symbols were.
The inheritance is the seat at the table. Somebody sits between the person who has the numbers and the person who makes the picture, and that somebody's entire job is the reader's eventual understanding, with nothing else in their remit to trade it against. Vienna paid for that seat. Almost nobody pays for it now, and the charts show it.
Sources
Nemeth, Elisabeth and others, "Otto Neurath: Visual Education", Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Nine rules of the Vienna Method, museum chronology, the move to The Hague in 1933 and to Britain in 1940, the ISOTYPE acronym. plato.stanford.edu/entries/neurath/visual-education.html
Neurath, Otto, International Picture Language: The First Rules of Isotype, Kegan Paul, London, 1936 (Psyche Miniatures). Full text scan. Quantity rule and "words make division, pictures make connection". archive.org/details/internationalpic00neur
Eye magazine, "Archive: International Picture Language". Publication format (118 pages, postcard format, 850-word Basic English), "repeat a unit, don't enlarge it", "don't say more than you know". eyemagazine.com/feature/article/archive-international-picture-language
Forrest, Jason, "The Missing Legacy of Marie Neurath", Nightingale, Data Visualization Society, 20 January 2020. Marie Neurath on extracting essential facts, the discussion-and-sketch sequence, the span of her Isotype work. nightingaledvs.com/the-missing-legacy-of-marie-neurath/
Walker, Sue, "Marie Neurath: designing information books for young people", University of Reading. The transformer's three duties, the carbon-copy notebooks and mini books, the 1971 donation, the eighty-plus books. research.reading.ac.uk/picturingscience/
Twyman, Michael, "The significance of Isotype", 1975, introduction to the fiftieth-anniversary exhibition catalogue, reproduced by the Isotype Revisited project. "Trustee of the public", formal conventions, the comparison with pre-classical written language. isotyperevisited.org/1975/01/the-significance-of-isotype.php
Isotype Revisited, "Otto and Marie Neurath Isotype Collection", University of Reading. Scope and contents of the archive, the 1971 donation. isotyperevisited.org/isotype-collection/
University of Reading Special Collections, "Marie Neurath Collection". Dates 1898 to 1986, education, career, the transformer role. collections.reading.ac.uk/special-collections/collections/marie-neurath-collection/
Neurath, Marie and Kinross, Robin, The Transformer: Principles of Making Isotype Charts, Hyphen Press, 128pp, ISBN 978-0-907259-40-4. Contents list including "The work of the transformer". hyphenpress.co.uk/products/books/978-0-907259-40-4/
Wikipedia, "Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum". Founded 1924, opened January 1925, Neurath director 1924 to 1934, suppressed by the Austrofascists in February 1934, Arntz recruited 1928. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gesellschafts-_und_Wirtschaftsmuseum
Wikipedia, "Gerd Arntz". Dates 1900 to 1988, around 4000 pictograms, woodcut technique, the Dutch Central Bureau of Statistics until 1965. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerd_Arntz
Wikipedia, "Isotype (picture language)". Repetition rather than enlargement, the transformer's definition, naming around 1935. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotype_(picture_language)
Wikipedia, "IZOSTAT". Founded Moscow 1931, seventy staff, Neurath's sixty days a year, collaboration ending 1934, closure 1940. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IZOSTAT
Wikipedia, "Marie Neurath". Birth 27 May 1898 Braunschweig, death 10 October 1986 London, Göttingen 1917 to 1924, marriage 1941, Isotype Institute at Oxford, 1971 donation. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Neurath
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