Twelfth International Conference on The Image

Abstract

The pandemic has provided a real-time test of public-facing data visualization. Ben Schneiderman (2020), a leading visualization researcher, writes that “The complexity and importance of COVID-19 has put data visualization center stage in worldwide discussions,” as specialists in academia, journalism, government, and the corporate world create data visualizations to guide leaders and inform the public. The hope is that the data will convey what is truly happening, and that the visualization of data will make it easier for people to gain insight and ultimately make good decisions. It is precisely because data visualization has become such an important mode of COVID-19 communication that we need to apply our full rhetorical attention in examining how data about the virus is visually represented. As Collins and Ball (2013) put it, “Visualization is the latest in a long line of media that exhibits the expectation of objectivity while being inherently rhetorical” (p. 174). Data and its visualizations are the result of choices made by humans, and those choices must be examined in order for us to understand both the insights and the limitations of data visualization. Anthropographics—design strategies that highlight the connection between data and the humans represented by that data—play a role in making COVID-19 data visualizations more accessible and impactful as communications to a general audience. This presentation looks at several projects that use anthropographics rhetorically—along with animation, interactivity, and textual annotations—to increase the engagement and insights of readers.