Published in Harrow, Susan (ed). 2012. The Art of the Text, University of Wales Press. Draft version – not for distribution – please see published version for pagination and illustrations. 129 7. Isotypes and Elephants: Picture Language as Visual Writing in the Work and Correspondence of Otto Neurath Michelle Henning In 1920s Vienna, as part of the larger socialist experiment that earned the city the nickname ‘Red Vienna’, the picture language of Isotype was born. It was the invention of the Vienna Circle philosopher and sociologist Otto Neurath, working with a team of artists and researchers at his Gesellschafts-undWirtschaftsmuseum (museum of society and economy, hereafter GWM). Isotype began as the Vienna method of pictorial statistics, a means of making statistical information and comparison legible to non-expert and even semi-literate audiences through the use of pictures. Later, it became Isotype, an acronym for International System of Typographic Picture Education. Individual symbols or pictograms were made as ink drawings, then lino-cuts (later metal letter-press blocks). These were printed, cut out and pasted onto charts for display in exhibitions or for publication. A key innovation of Isotype was in the way it represented quantities as repeated pictograms of identical size, not as differences in size or volume. In this way Isotype made visual statistics measurable, because the number of pictograms could be counted and compared to the given numerical figures, but it was also far less dependent on written labels and contextual information than previous methods. Isotype was among the first standardized systems for representing social facts in pictures, and the elegance of its visual solutions arguably remains unsurpassed. 1 [fig1] 1 On the importance of Isotype see Robin Kinross, ‘On the influence of Isotype’, Information Design Journal, 2, 11 (1981), 122-30; Michael Twyman, ‘The Significance of Isotype’ in