Information visualizations (“infographics”) have long been part of the production of knowledge, although the rise of digital media brought about a significant expansion in both their volume and their use for political purposes. This article provides a first overview and typology of the emergent genre we term “digital political infographics.” Informed by literature and theory about visualizations, political persuasion, interfaces, and digital sharing, we aimed to reveal the “data-politics” unique to this expression form. A grounded analysis of 200 politically oriented infographics on Twitter yielded a two-dimensional typology relating to the narrative strategies and the interfaces underpinning users’ engagement with data in this discursive format. An integrative evaluation revealed that digital political infographics are hybrid communicative forms, characterized by three influence trajectories between political persuasion, infographic conventions, and digital environments: “politicizing” infographic traits, “infographing” political tactics, and creating a new common ground, featuring a rhetoric of “tactile data experience.”
Digital visualizations have seen an exponential rise in use by politicians, candidates, and other political actors. Digital visualizations are an informative and engaging genre, but when applied by political candidates, they may also be used to persuade or mislead. However, the ways in which different actors utilize them have yet to receive systematic scholarly attention. Informed by a comprehensive theoretical framework related to political power, digital visualizations, and social media campaigns, I perform grounded qualitative content analysis of all cost-of-living visualizations posted to Facebook during the 2015 Israeli election period, by both peripheral and primary political actors. I define two main argumentation strategies ( Progress Makers & Hinderers and Re-Visualized Economy) reliant on different narrative, visual, and information-oriented strategies by different actors. An overview of the findings reveals digital visualizations as a meeting ground between the political power of actors, the rhetorical power of emotionality, and the cultural-political power of numbers. I conclude with a reflection on re-visualization as a means of expanding a fourth type of power, discursive power, wherein visualizations are used as a tool for resistance by weaker actors, against the narrative of reality promoted by stronger actors, relying on the rhetorical affordances of the digital political visualization genre to increase their political power. Digital visualizations thus offer a uniquely agile tool for political actors of all types to utilize in gaining discursive power in the competition over election narratives in the digital arena of social media.
This paper explores trust-building strategies in future-oriented news discourse, marked by a high degree of uncertainty. While current research mainly focuses on audiences’ perceptions of news credibility, this study addresses news trust from a production standpoint. We examine the trust-building efforts of media actors, focusing on their discursive labor within the context of election projections. Drawing on rich data from five election rounds in Israel and the US, we qualitatively analyzed 400 news texts and 400 tweets that were produced by 20 US and 20 Israeli media actors. This textual analysis was supplemented by 10 in-depth interviews with Israeli journalists. Our findings demonstrate three types of journalistic trust-building rhetoric in election coverage: facticity, authority, and transparency. These strategies result in a two-fold form of trust, which re-affirms traditional notions of accuracy and validity, while also challenging the ability of newspersons to obtain them in contemporary political and media cultures. Overall, these strategies hold unique opportunities and challenges for sustaining public trust in journalism and illuminate the complex communicative labor involved in building trust with news audiences. Our findings also highlight the importance of studying trust not only in relation to the past and the present, but also in future-oriented discourse.
Visualizations are reliant on visual encoding, in which attributes of data are depicted through graphic symbols (Cairo, 2019). As such, they are placed as a transitional mode between data and information in the linear framework of the "wisdom hierarchy" (DIKW). In the digital information environment, both the linear learning process and the distinction between data and information merit a re-evaluation. This paper seeks to create a better understanding of information's role in digital culture, by venturing to re-examine its attributes. Relying on a sample of all visualizations posted by the top four candidates of the 2016 US elections (n=252), I applied qualitative grounded analysis informed by theory: First, I constructed a conceptual model for the attributes of information, which relies on three layers – (1) foundation (substantiation/sources); (2) building blocks (data components); (3) data-structures (analysis). Second, following a classification of all units according to this model, I defined types of visualization rhetoric that each rely on specific formulations of information attributes (foundation, building blocks and structure) to make a political argument. Finally, I identify two modes of visual information-rhetoric in elections: unveiling and imagining. The model and categories defined in this study demonstrate how the rhetorical agility required for modern political campaigning seems to muddle the axiomatic distinctions of data and information and create new, unpredictable hybrid information and rhetorical types, some of which rely heavily on estimations and fantasy, rather than empirical observation and evidence.
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