Digital political infographics: A rhetorical palette of an emergent genre

Abstract

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.”

A multimodal perspective on data visualization

“…Data visualizations are used in different kinds of communicative situations across a wide range of media. They are presented on websites, printed on newspapers, shared on social media feeds, and projected on public displays, to name just a few examples (Lima, de Castro Andrade, Monat, & Spinillo, 2014;Bounegru, Venturini, Gray, & Jacomy, 2017;Amit-Danhi & Shifman, 2018). For this reason, identifying the medium in which the data visualization is presented is a natural first step for their analysis, which has far-reaching consequences for a description of their multimodality.…”

The 2018 World Cup in Russia and Its Regimes of Visibility: The Cases of Nizhny Novgorod and Kazan

“…The “emotional contagion” (Mutz & Gerke, 2018, p. 606), with the concomitant “affective, rather than purely cognitive, aspects of infographic consumption” (Amit-Danhi & Shifman, 2018, p. 3555), are powerful drivers for manipulation, totalization, and “modes of control” (Fazi, 2019, p. 12). In the specific domain of sportive politics, the hegemonic regime of visibility aims at fabrication of consensual and standardized representations of mega-events and their commercial promotion as beautified and co(mmo)dified products, and as elements of the system of surveillance and control authorized by the FIFA-patronized symbolic order.…”

Data journalism’s many futures: Diagrammatic displays and prospective probabilities in data-driven news predictions

“…Data journalistic presentations rarely work only through visuals but orchestrate images, texts, and numeric information in meaningfully structured compositions. Since it is difficult to communicate the insights gained from computational analyses in linear news text only, data journalism therefore uses displays that combine statistical charts and maps with images and written narratives (Amit-Danhi and Shifman, 2018). This should allow journalists to more accurately capture the insights gained from an investigation, tell a cogent story, and allow people to engage with the presentation and the underlying data.…”