{"id":19132,"date":"2023-11-21T10:21:06","date_gmt":"2023-11-21T15:21:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dvsnightingstg.wpenginepowered.com\/?p=19132"},"modified":"2023-11-21T10:21:19","modified_gmt":"2023-11-21T15:21:19","slug":"can-datavis-make-unpalatable-data-more-enjoyable","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nightingaledvs.com\/can-datavis-make-unpalatable-data-more-enjoyable\/","title":{"rendered":"Can Datavis Make Unpalatable Data More Enjoyable?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In the autumn of 2020, I came across a news article from The Guardian<\/em> discussing audience beliefs and responses to graphs, charts, and maps. The article, titled \u201cFacts v feelings: how to stop our emotions misleading us<\/a>,\u201d posits that if the title of the graph makes a claim about, for example, climate change, it attracts attention and engagement not because it is true or false, but because of the way people feel about the issue. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I believe this to some extent, given my PhD research on audience responses to datavis about climate change, where I asked 34 study participants to provide emotional reactions to different types of climate-related data visuals. My work investigated elements of color, hand-drawings, animation, and interactivity using 13 different graphs, charts and maps. I sought to gather empirical evidence about whether and how these elements play into audiences\u2019 engagement with the datavis. Based on my findings, I argue that design and visual style of datavis can be just as emotionally appealing as the subject matter or represented data itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The growing recognition of emotions in datavis<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The increasing importance of datavis as a means of communicating information to the public has prompted visualisation designers to deliberately consider emotions in their work. For example, data journalist and illustrator Mona Chalabi suggested in 2016<\/a> that \u201cthere is no such thing as an emotionless data visualisation.\u201d As she explained, datavis always has an emotive charge because emotions and feelings are often, consciously or not, embedded in the design decisions of the creators. On the other hand, Giorgia Lupi highlighted in 2017<\/a> datavis’ potential to evoke emotions and connect with people’s lives, transforming and simplifying quantitative data into something that can be both seen and felt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Existing social science literature supports the idea that individuals respond emotionally, as well as rationally, to datavis. In the journal Sociology<\/em> in 2017<\/a>, U.K. researchers Helen Kennedy and Rosemary Hill identified emotional responses to various aspects of datavis, such as the visual style, the underlying data, subject matter, source or where the datavis is published, and skill levels for making sense of visualisation. As the authors point out, it was much easier for people to engage with datavis when they felt confident about their numeracy skills. Effectively, this means that people\u2019s experiences and understanding of datavis depends on how much confidence they have. Other authors, including Catherine D’Ignazio, Rahul Bhargava, Jill Simpson, and Jonathan Gray, all explored the importance of emotions in datavis in their respective chapters within the book Data Visualization in Society<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Exploring emotive datavis features<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Drawing on the work of Kennedy, Hill, and others, I investigated the emotional responses of Polish and British audiences to different datavis features, focusing on the following elements: color, hand-drawn elements, animation, and interactivity. These features were chosen based on their potential to evoke emotions in my research participants. While some relationships between these datavis features and the emotional responses to them seem logical and have been discussed by scholars and datavis designers (including Eric Margolis and Luc Pauwels in 2011<\/a>; Lisa Charlotte Muth in 2018<\/a>, Anna Feigenbaum and Aria Alamalhodaei 2020<\/a>), there is still little empirical evidence about whether and how they shape and influence audiences\u2019 engagements with datavis. I focused on climate change as a case study, investigating data produced or disseminated by six climate and environmental organisations from the UK and Poland including Carbon Brief UK, Climate Science Poland (Nauka o klimacie Polska), Greenpeace UK, Greenpeace Poland, WWF UK, and WWF Poland. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The emotive power of color<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Color emerged as the most emotive feature in climate change datavis. Participants often cited color as the initial aspect that attracted their attention, evoking positive emotions and a desire to explore the datavis further, even when they did not know what the image was about. <\/p>\n\n\n

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Credit: Professor Ed Hawkins (University of Reading)<\/a>. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

For example, one study participant, Aurora from Poland, described her experiences with the datavis Warming Stripes for Poland<\/em>, which she encountered on Facebook: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I remember flying somewhere, coming across this beautiful… scrolling on my phone and seeing bars in weird colors. I had no idea what was going on. I didn’t quite see the gradient. The colors passed through each other nicely. And I remember thinking it was so cool, pretty, and fascinating that I had to pause and look at it, not sure what I was looking at, thinking \u201cWhat is this?\u201d<\/em> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, red, in particular, was often associated with warnings and evoked fear, reinforcing Muth\u2019s argument<\/a> that certain colors may intuitively carry certain metaphors in a given culture. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hand-drawn datavis: embracing intimacy and playfulness<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hand-drawn datavis or elements of datavis evoked strong positive emotional responses among my study participants. For example, Rachel based in the UK discussed the Mona Chalabi datavis of the annual increase of CO2 emission from 1850 until 2010 that she encountered on the Greenpeace UK Instagram account. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A post shared by Greenpeace UK (@greenpeaceuk)<\/a><\/p><\/div><\/blockquote>