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In this chapter, I discuss two unfamiliar actors of the process of information production in the newspaper: typographers and subeditors. I focus on a particular aspect of the continuum of information production: the prepress. Subeditors and typographers made the newspaper together and in their own respective ways. Traces of these collaborations can be found in the newspaper object – and that is what I am going to try to demonstrate here.

When you read an article in ICT, can you easily understand what the writer is saying? Or do you have to struggle through it, wringing the meaning out of each complex sentence, one by one? When someone in the training world writes an article for publishing it is generally because he has something to communicate—some message that he wants to get across to fellow workers in the field of training. (It may just be that this month he needs the money, but let's ignore that reason.) If he has a message to convey, then it is reasonable to expect him to write the article in as clear a manner as possible to make sure that you can understand and remember it. In other words, you might expect the article to be readable!

Major initiatives in advanced information technology are under way or have been proposed in the UK, Europe and Japan. ‘Information technology’ is an umbrella expression with different interpretations: it has been adopted in these policy contexts to refer to all areas of computer (and communications) technology, including hardware and software and both to computing in itself and to the applications of computers; it refers in the broadest sense to the technology of and for information processing.

JingWei BIAN is Director of Urban Construction Environment and Resources Committee of Xiamen Municipal People's Congress. He graduated from Tongji University with doctor's degree in urban planning and design. He is Professorate Senior Urban Planner and National Registered Urban Planner. He is a part-time Professor at Xiamen University, Huaqiao University and Jimei University. He has served as President of Xiamen Urban Planning and Design Institute and Deputy Director of Xiamen Planning Bureau. His main research interests are the urban planning theory and design, urban traffic planning, urban and rural planning management and regulations. He has published 4 books and over 50 papers on these topics.

This article critically reconstructs how Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer outlined the new scientific discipline of sociology in the nineteenth century. It aims to demonstrate how their ideas for founding sociology creatively responded to the challenges of creating a new science from scratch. Finally, a different view of the so-called “founding fathers” will enable a new self-conception of sociology today. Analyzing classical sociological works usually entails focusing on authors' ideas and concepts. This paper, on the other hand, takes into account the self-descriptions of these authors and examines how they present themselves as founders of sociology. It conducts a close reading of the sociological concepts and autobiographical texts written by both Comte and Spencer. This allows us to highlight the conceptual tension between the sociological subject matter, society as an ordered object, and the self-descriptions of the authors as exceptional scientists. It also demonstrates how important the figurative elements are in this analysis. This new approach contributes to the history of ideas in general and the history of sociology in particular by offering an exploration of narrative and figurative elements in the sociological “classics.” It thus creates a deeper understanding and clearer image of the foundations of what later became sociology. Founding a new discipline is a creative act that not only consists in theoretical conceptualizations but also implies figurative aspects. These can be found primarily in the way the authors describe themselves. Furthermore, their textual and diagrammatical articulations can be understood as “founding figures” on which the idea of a figurative sociology is based.