Counting But Losing Count: the legacy of Otto Neurath's Isotype charts

Abstract

Since its invention by Otto Neurath in 1920s Vienna, the Isotype system of statistical visualization hasn't gone out of fashion. Isotype charts with their rows of aligned pictograms are common today but were a novelty one hundred years ago. Some praise Isotype charts for their accessible style of repeated pictorial symbols. Others correctly believe that this figurative characteristic often gets in the way of the data-message being presented. This paper questions the soundness of requiring the viewer to engage in such a cumbersome strategy to extract information from a typical Isotype chart: counting the symbols in each row and multiplying by the given scale to get the totals. Recent psychological findings on the limitations of working memory reveal why this strategy is inefficient, and renders Isotype ineffective for displaying data greater than the number seven plus or minus two – the famous finding of George A. Miller on the limitations of human working memory. The effectiveness of the Isotype method is therefore higher and its disadvantages less noticeable when small quantities are involved, and when other refinements can be added to the charts to aid the viewer. This paper notes that Isotype charts are subject not only to the limitation of working memory but also to the inherent ambiguity of words and images. Being culturally constituted, both words and images elude universality and are always in need of disambiguation. It suggests that Neurath was unaware of how deeply his pictograms are culturally constituted – not universal. The paper shows how these mental and cultural limitations can be mitigated or even eliminated by the use of means that are less ambiguous because more widely dispersed globally in almost every modern culture – namely by written arabic numerals showing absolute quantities and fractions. In many cases, written numbers are the best pictures. In today's world, they are pictures that are transcultural and psychologically immediate. By viewers throughout the world, they are so familiar that they require little mental processing time or effort. A picture is worth a thousand words. The picture of a number is worth almost any number of Isotype pictures.