Sybilla Nikolow

Bilder zwischen Öffentlichkeit und wissenschaftlicher Praxis. Neue Perspektiven für die Geschichte der Medizin, Naturwissenschaften und Technik

The paper investigates how visual resources can be fruitfully used to study the history of science, medicine, and technology from a practical point of view. Two new international and interdisciplinary trends within recent historiography are reviewed: the history of visualisation and the history of popularisation. The results of both trends need to be combined in order to understand the ways in which images of science have been used to communicate science from its place of production within the laboratory to its users within the wider society. From the proposed perspective, visual representations of science (i.e. portraits, images of scientific instruments, measurement results and abstractions) are discussed as a distinct medium in which knowledge producers have transmitted and transformed their findings to the acquirers of knowledge. The paper introduces the wider historiographical framework for a discussion of the following four papers published in this issue of NTM.

Statistische Bilder der Bevölkerung in den großen Hygieneausstellungen als Wissensobjekte

Fragt man danach, an welchen Orten die breite Offentlichkeit im ersten Drittel des 20. Jahrhunderts in Deutschland die Ergebnisse der Bevolkerungsforschung besonders eindrucksvoll vor Augen gefuhrt bekam, dann sind die beiden Internationalen Hygieneausstellungen 1911 und 1930/31 in Dresden sowie die Grosse Ausstellung fur Gesundheitspflege, soziale Fursorge und Leibesubungen (kurz Gesolei genannt) 1926 in Dusseldorf zu nennen. Allein eine fluchtige Durchsicht der dort behandelten Themen zeigte: hier wurden nicht nur rassenhygienische Paradigmen1 und medizinische Deutungsmacht2 zelebriert, sondern auch dem Blick der Statistiker auf die Bevolkerung offentlich gehuldigt.

Planning, Democratization and Popularization with Isotype, CA. 1945: a Study of Otto Neurath’s Pictorial Statistics with the Example of Bilston, England

In Otto Neurath’s pictorial statistics (“Bildstatistik”), statistics communicate not through numbers or graphical representations but through larger and smaller numbers of symbols. We are dealing with an attempt to create a visual, transparent and universal language for the global communication of information and arguments. Here, I want to further explore Neurath’s pioneering work as a visual pedagogue and as an expert on the popularization of knowledge on the example of how his International System of Picture Education (ISOTYPE) was used in an exhibition on new housing in Bilston, a town in the Midland Counties of England. I use this case in order to expound the design and practice of his picturestatistical method in the context of contemporary scientific, artistic, political and pedagogical culture.