BETWEEN GRAPHICAL 'EXCELLENCE‘, LITERACY, AND POLYSEMY: A BI-NATIONAL STUDY OF DIGITAL POLITICAL VISUALIZATION RECEPTION

Abstract

Digital political visualizations often highlight an inherent conflict between visualization practitioner heuristics and standards, which are geared towards leading audiences to a ‘correct’ reading, and the use of “strategic ambiguity” (Eisenberg, 1984) to increase political appeal. While excellence in creation and interpretation of visualization is studied and theorized primarily with the visualization’s attributes in mind, the ubiquity of digital political visualizations as a rhetorical genre brings forth a host of audience-side considerations and decoding processes so far neglected by scholars. Thus, this paper amalgamates perspectives onto visualization as a communicative technology, a rhetorical genre, and a persuasion-tool by exploring the relationship between graphical excellence, audience’s graphical literacy, and the ensuing polysemy in personal/group readings of digital political visualizations. Asking: How do audiences decode political messages embedded in visualizations shared online? We conducted a bi-national focus-group study (8 groups, 67 participants), in which participants conduct group- and individual- decoding of digital political visualization stimuli. We find that all stimuli, regardless of design heuristics and/or topic, resulted in starkly polysemic readings, with participants’ attitudes ranging between graphical avoidance, and calls for ‘interpretive freedom,’ suggesting that the epitome of literacy is the ability to see beyond the intended meaning and assert one’s own interpretation according to their worldviews. We thus suggest is it imperative to view digital political visualizations’ reception as a result of both visualizers’ choices and audience’s individual/collective interpretive freedom, striving for ‘graphical excellence’ as a shared pursuit of both audiences and visualizers, aimed to bring forth more benign digital deliberation.