Visualization Rhetoric: Framing Effects in Narrative Visualization

Abstract

Narrative visualizations combine conventions of communicative and exploratory information visualization to convey an intended story. We demonstrate visualization rhetoric as an analytical framework for understanding how design techniques that prioritize particular interpretations in visualizations that "tell a story" can significantly affect end-user interpretation. We draw a parallel between narrative visualization interpretation and evidence from framing studies in political messaging, decision-making, and literary studies. Devices for understanding the rhetorical nature of narrative information visualizations are presented, informed by the rigorous application of concepts from critical theory, semiotics, journalism, and political theory. We draw attention to how design tactics represent additions or omissions of information at various levels-the data, visual representation, textual annotations, and interactivity-and how visualizations denote and connote phenomena with reference to unstated viewing conventions and codes. Classes of rhetorical techniques identified via a systematic analysis of recent narrative visualizations are presented, and characterized according to their rhetorical contribution to the visualization. We describe how designers and researchers can benefit from the potentially positive aspects of visualization rhetoric in designing engaging, layered narrative visualizations and how our framework can shed light on how a visualization design prioritizes specific interpretations. We identify areas where future inquiry into visualization rhetoric can improve understanding of visualization interpretation.

Design and Data: Strategies for Designing Information Products in Team Settings

“…Transparency links to the degree of access to the original dataset or data sources, whereas honesty links to the question on how a reduced image of the original can still truthfully convey a gist of what has been captured originally (Hullman and Diakopoulos, 2011). In most data design projects, there comes the point when the original view of the raw data is lost.…”

The Role of Visual Rhetoric in Semantic Multimedia: Strategies for Decision Making in Times of Crisis

“…It is enough to look up the list of publications from the premier venues for semantic web, multimedia or information visualization publications (Journal of Web Semantics, ACM Multimedia, IEEE Multimedia, IEEE TVVG, ACM TOMCCAP) during the last years (2008 -2012) to discover that some of the articles that received a lot of attention (Best Paper Awards, quotations, discussions in other papers, even sequels) apply ideas inspired by visual rhetoric like: visual query suggestion [30], narrative visualization [20], affective image classification [18], framing effects [13] and color naming models and their applications [10]. Hullman and Diakopoulos [13] apply their ideas on visualization rhetoric to a class of visualizations identified by Segel and Heer [20] as narrative visualizations.…”

“…Narrative visualizations do not just visually present some numbers, but also draw attention to the story behind those numbers, and in doing so they need to deploy an entire arsenal of techniques like provenance rhetoric, mapping rhetoric (visual metaphors, contrast, etc), linguistic or procedural rhetorics [13]. The paper about color naming models [10] is important mainly for library builders (especially JavaScript libraries), while [18] uses features generally used in psychology and biology to create an affective image classification.…”

“…After proving how to build the "framing" mechanisms using semantic graphs, they conclude that the role of visuals in providing support for the subject matter in documentaries needs to be further developed. We used this assumption as a What we noticed by reviewing the literature is that while these articles are hardly related when it comes to subject (apparently there aren't many connections between visual query suggestion, information visualization or color naming models), and some of them do not even mention the term visual rhetoric (except for [13] which refers to "visualization rhetoric"), almost all of them quote some of the pioneers of the field (Rudolf Arnheim [2], Johanes Itten [14], Roland Barthes [3], or Jacques Bertin [4], for example), and some were influenced by the research group led by Alberto del Bimbo [7]. This suggests that a third group is gaining lots of traction in the area of semantic multimedia, and that this group embraces theories from art, psychology or biology.…”

“…In today's connected world, where most of the governments put their data online (including financial data), we think that this dual nature of visualization rhetoric is something we must carefully address. [13] shows how to "frame" narrative visualizations to present different points of view related to the same event (poll predictions). Another method to insert more information into visualizations would be to combine various visual metaphors as demonstrated in [12].…”