Article published in:
Information Visualization
Edited by Marian Dörk and Isabel Meirelles
[Information Design Journal 25:1] 2019
► pp. 71–86

Feeling numbers

The emotional impact of proximity techniques in visualization

| MIT
| Northeastern University

For means of communication, persuasion is a natural and critical part of conveying a message. Data visualizations, being means of communication themselves, are used as rhetorical instruments, but how they persuade has yet to be fully understood. Based on George Campbell’s rhetorical theory, this paper presents the results of an empirical study testing the effectiveness of appeals to emotion through proximity techniques – the contextual framing of a visualization. The findings indicate that people feel greater interest towards a topic when the visualized data are more relevant to them, and that data representing events closer in time are more affecting.

Keywords: data visualization, rhetoric, pathos, emotion
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1Rhetoric in design and visualization
      • 2.1.1Data storytelling
      • 2.1.2Persuasive cartography
    • 2.2Visualization and rhetoric: Points of discomfort
      • 2.2.1Bias and deception
      • 2.2.2Visual embellishments
  • 3.The study
    • 3.1Case study selection
    • 3.2Methods
      • 3.2.1Measurements
      • 3.2.2Chart design
      • 3.2.3Treatments
    • 3.3Procedure
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Demographics and involvement
    • 4.2Attitudes and changes
    • 4.3Emotion
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 16 March 2020
https://doi.org/10.1075/idj.25.1.06cam
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