RUNNING HEAD: INFOGRAPHICS

Infographics: getting the message

By Jennifer Leask and Kris Hodgson

Dr. Mark Wolfe

Comm 504

University of Alberta

Nov. 1, 2015

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Table of Contents

Table of Contents ..................................................................................................................... 1

Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 2

Background .............................................................................................................................. 2 Historical Context ................................................................................................................ 2 Infographics turn data into an image ................................................................................ 3 Infographics during a crisis ................................................................................................ 4

Theoretical Perspectives ......................................................................................................... 5 Images, information Control and Democracy ................................................................... 5 Visualizing Communication ................................................................................................ 6 A Global Audience ............................................................................................................... 6

Data Journalism and Visualization ........................................................................................ 7

Real World Applications of Infographics and Data Visualization ..................................... 8 Newsroom resources ............................................................................................................ 8 Education .............................................................................................................................. 8 Style and substance .............................................................................................................. 9 Information access ............................................................................................................. 10

CONCLUSION .......................................................................... Error! Bookmark not defined.

References .............................................................................................................................. 12

Appendix A: Data Journalism Course Offerings at Canadian Universities .................... 15

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Introduction

As journalistic organizations have moved away from the traditional split-media lines

of print, radio and television and moved online with multimedia delivery platforms, the way

they present information has evolved. The purpose of this paper is to explore how turning

complex information into graphic, sometimes interactive, images for an online audience,

known as data visualizations or infographics, serves to better deliver that information in an

understandable way. While graphical interpretation and illustrations have been a tool in news,

marketing and communications for as long as people have been able to publish them, the

difference today is the growth in interactivity, improved access to the technology to produce

the images and the ongoing need for better understanding of complex ideas. Through an

exploration of the ascendency of the image in modern communications and a foundation in

communications theory, we will identify the reasons infographics and data visualization serve

a need for the modern news consumer: graphics make complex ideas clear, the global internet

audience is comfortable with the proliferation of online illustrations and as we enter a time

where we are reading more content at a faster rate, images allow us to dissect ideas at a pace

that will be conducive to understanding.

Background

Historical Context

Reading text has been a capability in development by the human brain for the last

5,500 years (Wolf & Barzillai, 2009). Before the development of modern alphabetic writing,

as opposed to character-based languages like Chinese and Japanese, people read pictures.

Consider the sculptural art around Notre Dame, the Catholic cathedral in Paris, France.

Because most parishioners were illiterate until the mid-nineteenth century, the sculptures

were used as a way to explain Christianity to those who could not read the bible. While the

written language has been developing over time, widespread literacy is a more recent

phenomenon and much of the world still struggles with basic reading skills. According to the

United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, 785 Million people cannot

read and 14 countries have literacy rates lower than 50 per cent, (United Nations Educational,

Scientific and Cultural Organization, 2015).

Throughout most of the developed world, literacy rates are much higher and many

countries have had a rich reading and culture of literacy. Over the last century, the image has

begun to re-ascend through media like television, photographs and now through the Internet

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(Benitez, 2009). The globalization of communication has allowed the image, instead of text

alone, to become essential to online communications. While concrete numbers are hard to

calculate, one estimate by the Swedish scholar Mikael Parkvall was that 80 per cent of people

speak 1.69 languages, not enough to be truly bilingual, meaning the majority of the world can

only communicate well in one language. However, communicating through images can be a

much more efficient way to cross the language barrier, making people more skilled at reading

images once again, (Benitez, 2009).

Infographics turn data into an image

Infographics are used in a wide variety of applications but are most commonly used

by media departments and graphic designers to transform complex information into easy-to-

understand pieces. As we consume more news and information on a daily basis, infographics

are great at showing patterns and trends with large datasets. At the New York Times, there is a

whole department dedicated to Interactive News Technology (INT). This department's

primary focus is “making news products that engage the user and that often use a database to

populate the information. The data came come from a variety of sources or can be the result

of user input. These presentations can include interactive maps, visualizations, timelines and

graphics,” (Royal, 2010, pg. 7).

Infographics outside of news departments at various media outlets are also used in

many ways: to help ease panic during emergencies, identify evacuation routes on airplanes

and provide instructions to those where literacy may be an issue. For example, the World

Health Organization in partnership with Unicef and the Community Health Global Network

used infographics to help educate the public in Liberia during the Ebola crisis (Chgn.org,

2014).

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When misinformation was being circulated by the media surrounding the amount of

radiation leaking from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in Japan in 2011, Rama

Hoetzlein, an interactive media artist, took it upon himself to create an infographic that cut

through the clutter. One comment expressed the phenomenally positive response: “Your

charts are providing useful context and calming the anxiety for many people living here.

Thank you for making the time to do this. My Japanese friends are grateful that there are

people all around the world who are using their talents to help them” (Hoetzlein, 2012,

pg.118).

Infographics during a crisis

During a crisis, journalists scramble to report technical information and strive for

accuracy, as the world is watching. Unfortunately, during the Fukushima Daiichi disaster in

2011, several media outlets broadcast misinformation in an effort to be first. “The media is

certainly profiting off of drumming up public fervor with wild nuclear scare stories.

Unfortunately, many of these stories appear to be utterly factually inaccurate,” (Mick, 2011,

dailytech.com). Hoetzlein applied facts from verified sources and turned them into an

infographic which compared global disasters and showed the context of ground-level

radiation in Fukushima. “When the project began, I imagined the Fukushima radiation map

serving as a public grounding point for understanding radiation levels, providing a

counterpoint to the news media. I presented each fact and recorded level as objectively as

possible to reduce fears regarding widespread radiation,” (Hoetzlein, 2012, pg.118). As

shown below in an infographic created by James Abundis of the Boston Globe on March 16,

2011, (Abundis, J., 2011) images are an effective way to display data from several events.

They help to put issues like radiation exposure in perspective when there are similar disasters

throughout history.

Source: http://patrickgarvin.com/blog/?p=940

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Educational Infographics While journalism is the main area where infographics are used, in all levels of education,

teachers can use them to help students understand concepts through “visual appeal, comprehension

and retention” (Kibar, 2014, pg. 456). Whether you are a student or a consumer of the news, there are

three types of learners: visual, auditory and kinesthetic. Infographics can help bridge the gap between

the types to appeal to several audiences. “Visual literacy allows a deeper interaction with messages of

all kinds and introduces the process of analytical thinking about representation and meaning...teaching

visual literacy helps students [readers or viewers] interpret visual media and access a much broader

and more extensive body of learning and comprehension in education” (Kibar, 2014, pg. 456).

Theoretical Perspectives

Images, information Control and Democracy

As noted by Harold Innis in Media in Ancient Empires, it was the Babylonians and

Assyrians who formed pictures on blocks of clay (a time-based medium) which only reached

a limited audience, but lasted for thousands of years, (Crowley & Heyer, p. 25). The

Sumerians took the ideas introduced by the Babylonians and took it one step further to create

cuneiform. “Cuneiform writing was partly syllabic and partly ideographic, or representative

of single words … Pictographs and ideograms took on abstract phonetic values and the study

of script became linked to the study of language,” (Innis, in Crowley & Heyer., p.28). This

development of language, as Innis explains, was controlled by “priests, scribes, teachers and

judges,” (Innis, in Crowley & Heyer., p.26) which is paralleled by the accessibility of

computer generated graphic images, which until recently, were tools available only to people

fluent in computer programming languages or complex software packages.

Eric Havelock’s work in The Greek Legacy, has a similar parallel: he theorizes that

the introduction of Greek letters, which in his view “democratized literacy,” (Crowley &

Heyer., p.53) in that more people, including children, could be literate. Using images to

explain complex scientific, technical or social topics allows more people to access the

information through this new pictorial language. This should lead to a greater understanding

of these topics, democratizing information across literacy levels and even language barriers.

Another benefit of adopting simple to interpret images is that for competing media outlets, no

longer tied to traditional newspaper, radio and television formats, it can increase their

audience by publishing data visualizations for various topics which attracts more viewers.

Havelock writes of a similar trend when classical period authors tried to rebundle their

content for interpretation for various audiences: “The writers of the classical period consulted

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each other's works and wrote what they had to say out of what others had written before them

to a degree difficult for a modern author to appreciate” (Crowley & Heyer., p.59).

Visualizing Communication

For many of us in North America, whether we like it or not, we have allowed our

electronic devices to become an extension of ourselves, telling us when to wake up, keeping

us connected to our community and managing our busy lives. This is a reflection of how we

as a society also have become addicted to current events and entertaining tidbits that are

quick to share and easily understandable. And through it all, speed is everything. As Google’s

head of news Richard Gingras told Wired Magazine: “Anything less than instant simply

shows a degradation and decline in engagement” (Lapowski, I., 2015). This statement

indicates how the modern consumer has high expectations for the speed of production and

absorption of writing and ideas. Before medieval times, the alphabet was not widely adopted

because monks could only work so quickly scribing out beautiful texts that had intricate

details and colour. Literacy was centralized through religious institutions passing on

information. When Gutenberg first created the printing press, literacy spread around the globe

because of the speed and the mechanization of writing. Up until the dawn of the internet,

infographics had not been widely adopted or created because of the time required to create

them. What’s happened in recent years is that people have the tools like InDesign and

Photoshop which allow these visual representations of data to be created in minutes. We are

both producing and consuming at a faster rate than ever before.

As concluded by Manual Castells in The Rise of the Network Society, we are living in

a predominantly social word and infographics are part of the defining element of our human

experience: “Information is the key ingredient of our social organization and [it is] why flows

of messages and images between networks constitute the basic thread of our social structure,”

(Castells, 2010, p. 508).

A Global Audience

Infographics have been shared in prehistoric caves many years ago as a form of

rudimentary communication, but what’s changing is they are now being created and

distributed more quickly, as well as used more extensively to help people consume

information faster and more easily through extensive research. As Walter Ong describes in

Orality, Literacy and Modern Media, we are are now in an age of secondary orality, in which

communications generate “a sense for groups immeasurably larger than those of primarily

oral culture” (Crowley & Heyer., p.69). In primary orality, prominent people in the

community needed the power of storytelling to paint a picture to break down complex ideas

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with mnemonic rhythms and patterns (Crowley & Heyer., p.68) so they would be stored as a

memory. Ong describes the difficulty in imagining a culture where there was no text,

(Crowley & Heyer., p.64) and a similar question could be posed today in asking what text

would be like without pictures when presented online. As text gives a visual presence to

words, images which enhance text are becoming more important in understanding complex

ideas. Infographics advance primary and secondary orality and are created for a global

audience. In Ong’s exploration, he declares sight, unlike sound, can allow an audience to

“dissect” (Crowley & Heyer., p.68) by looking at something from “one direction at a time.”

Because a modern news reader (who uses a smartphone, laptop or tablet) is inundated with

information and updates throughout the day, the practice of pairing complex text with a

graphical representation allows the audience to take in the ideas in a slower, less immersive

way which leads to more comprehension. On space-based medium like online platforms, in

newspapers and on television screens, infographics help decipher statistics and large pieces of

information.

Data Journalism and Visualization

With this context of interpreting complex information, the image is a useful and

popular tool across the internet for journalists. Computer-assisted reporting has been

developing parallel to the growth of computers and has traditionally meant various

journalistic research used computer technology like databases, archives and online searches

(Yarnall, et. al, 2008). As computational power and computer literacy have developed, so too

has the way journalists have found sophisticated ways of analyzing and presenting data by

using computational “processes such as searching, correlating, filtering, identifying patterns,

and so on,” (Flew, Spurgeon, Daniel, & Swift, 2012, p.158). Journalists are using computers

both to find and analyze data, acting as statisticians and computer programmers, but many are

also applying the power of the computer to put those findings into meaningful images. Data

visualizations, rich graphics and images explaining complex concepts in news can help both

journalists and readers “cut through dense information in an efficient way,” (Flew, et.al 2012,

p.166). The modern journalist has many tools available to create rich data visualizations:

from easy-to-use programs like Google Maps to more complex visualizations created in

house by teams of programmers and journalists at newspapers like the New York Times,

(Royal, 2010), the image is once again becoming an important part of making sense of

current events.

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Real World Applications of Infographics and Data Visualization

As news production has moved online, more content has become image-based, as

opposed to text only, partly because the image rules the internet today (Benitez, J., 2009). As

the visualization of information is becoming more sophisticated and popular, it remains an

expensive and time-intensive pursuit available to journalists with a unique skill set. While

enhanced graphics and data analysis tools are being developed, making large data sets and

trends easier for an audience to understand, there remain limitations to both the practicality

and usefulness of data visualizations for both journalists their audience.

Newsroom resources

Not all newsrooms have the financial means or staff with the technical ability to

execute stories with a data visualization aspect. Financially, creating a visual image which

explains complex data is much more time and labour intensive than creating text that could

explain the same thing. Both the time to gather the information and the time to analyze it, in

addition to the time to create an image can be much more expensive for a news operation, and

in all but the biggest news organizations, there is not the extra money to make data

visualization common practice (Fink, & Anderson, 2015). Further, the number of journalists

with both journalism skills, data analysis skills and programming skills is small, so in most

cases robust data interactivity and visualization is developed in a team environment made up

of programmers, journalists and statisticians, teams which are out of reach for many

newsrooms (Fink, & Anderson, 2015).

Education

The Las Vegas Sun editors presented a chart at the 2008 Online News Association

conference which showed 22 tools it used to design for interactivity on the news site (Royal,

2010) further illustrating the steep technology learning curve facing journalists in adding

technology tools to their journalism skills. In their 2008 paper, How Post-secondary

Journalism Educators Teach Advanced CAR Data Analysis Skills in the Digital Age, Louise

Yarnall, et. al found that only half of the 232 journalism educators in 33 countries surveyed

were teaching spreadsheet and database software skills. A similar picture can be seen today in

Canada: of the 11 University-level journalism programs across the country (see Appendix A)

while all teach some sort of multimedia storytelling skills, only five of the 11 programs teach

data analysis, coding and/or data visualization. Instead, most journalism programs teach skills

in radio, television, writing or multi-media for broadcasting through the use of digital

technology, rather than analysis. The skill set to program data analysis, graphic design or

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interactive data visualization in journalists remains elusive, and mostly self-taught (Royal,

2010).

Style and substance

Because data visualization tools rely heavily on both the graphic capabilities of the

software and the user’s skills, in addition to what data is available, there can be technical

limitations to what can be shown, and the risk of the audience not understanding a data set

remain just like traditional journalism. In the example below, (Keller, 2013) it is not readily

apparent what the image is showing and it is labour intensive for the audience to check each

to see what each dot represents.

s.

SOURCE: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/05/07/education/college-admissions-

gap.html?_r=0

Another criticism of data visualization and infographics in journalism is the question

remains, is the image newsworthy? In the example below, (Irwin, 2015) an interactive

calculator comparing buying vs. renting has been updated on the New York Times website for

several years, but is this tool journalistic in nature, when the same kind of analysis could be

seen on a bank or financial planning website? In the evolution of data visualization

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presentation, this iteration was created by Mike Bostock, Shan Carter and Archie Tse all

graphics editors, which can be seen in this example as there is a clear link to the

accompanying article, an explanation of the methodology and interactivity that allows the

audience to select their individual circumstances.

SOURCE:http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/buy-rent-calculator.html

Information access

As the name would suggest, data visualization works best when there is a multitude of

reliable data to work with. Data like this is most likely to be available through requests for

public information and documents, or through compiling information that already exists in

other news stories. Many data visualization projects are created from information that is

already accessible to the public (though it may be costly or time sensitive to get). Private

data is less accessible and so is harder and more expensive to get (Fink & Anderson, 2015),

meaning that investigative projects needing private data may take more time to turn into a

data visualization. Further, some public agencies provide journalists information in data sets

that are easy to manipulate into data visualizations, which leads to an important journalistic

consideration in content creation: when is it journalism and when is it public relations? Take

the following graphic, one snapshot of several charts, from the Wall Street Journal, (DeBold

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& Friedman, 2015) which illustrates the decline of infectious diseases as vaccines are

introduced. The webpage contains no accompanying article, nor a link to one, and all the data

comes from the US Centres for Disease Control, which has a mandate to control infectious

diseases.

SOURCE: http://graphics.wsj.com/infectious-diseases-and-vaccines/

Without any accompanying analysis, it is difficult to know if this should be considered

journalistic data visualization, or would be better as data visualization living on the web site

of the CDC.

Conclusion

Throughout history, the use of images has helped cultures break down barriers where

literacy and comprehension have been an issue. From cave paintings to cathedrals, images

have helped large audiences benefit from a greater understanding of culture and community.

In a similar way, technology has helped the modern world evolve into a visually-fixated

society. More recently, it has been the invention of the printing press and the Internet which

has helped publications reach a wider audience, while it has been newsrooms adopting

infographic-friendly software allowing journalists to process large sets of data into easily

understandable visualizations, breaking break down the world’s most complex stories.

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Literacy rates are higher than ever, but visual literacy remains king as consumers of

the news look to become informed of world events faster than ever. We have come to a point

in time in this information age where we are living in a predominantly social world and

infographics are part of the defining element of our human experience (Castells, 2010, p.

508). Throughout this paper we have shown that infographics appeal to those consuming the

news, and can be a benefit to those marginalized by poor literacy and language skills.

Infographic comprehension is one thing, but having the skillset to create infographics that

matter to audiences is the next hurdle. While infographic comprehension is increasing,

equipping journalists with the right skillset remains a challenge in newsrooms around the

world which must be addressed. If journalists want to continue to lead in communication

benefiting society and democracy, they should embrace digital literacy because, as Clay

Shirky writes in his book Here Comes Everybody, “When we change the way we

communicate, we change society.”

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Civilization: The Ascendance of the Image. International Journal Of The Humanities, 6 (12),

111-116.

Canadian Health Global Network. (2014) Ebola is Real, together we can stop the

spread. CHGN.org. Retrieved from: http://www.chgn.org/wp-

content/uploads/2014/11/Liberia-MoH-poster-signs-and-symptoms.jpg

DeBold, T. and Friedman, D. (2015, February 11). Battling Infectious Diseases in the

20th Century: The Impact of Vaccines. The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved from:

http://graphics.wsj.com/infectious-diseases-and-vaccines/

Erard, M. (2012, January 14). Are We Really Monolingual. The New York Times, pp.

SR12. Retrieved from: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/opinion/sunday/are-we-really-

monolingual.html?_r=0

Fink, K., & Anderson, C. W. (2015). Data Journalism in the United States.

Journalism Studies, 16(4), 467-481. doi:10.1080/1461670X.2014.939852

Flew, T., Spurgeon, C., Daniel, A., & Swift, A. (2012). The Promise Of

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Hoetzlein, Rama. (2011, April 8). Visual Communication in Times of Crisis: The

Fukushima Nuclear Accident. Leonardo. Vol. 45, No. 2, pp. 113–118. Retrieved from:

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Irwin, N. (2015, June 17). After an Era of Ups and Downs, Home Prices Return to

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Kibar, Pinar Nugolu. (Oct. 20, 2014) A new approach to equip students with visual

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Keller, J. (2013, May 7). At Top Colleges, an Admissions Gap for Minorities. The

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Appendix A: Data Journalism Course Offerings at Canadian Universities

A survey of 11 university-level journalism programs in Canada was done by reading the

course catalogs on their websites. Only five of the 11 surveyed offer courses in data

visualization, programming language, graphics, or data visualization (noted as “journalism

data courses.”)

Carleton University offers a data journalism elective at the graduate level.

Concordia University offers a Bachelor degree in Journalism with no journalism data courses.

King's University offers a Master's of Data and Investigative Journalism degree, but no

journalism data courses are not offered at the undergraduate level.

Kwantlen Polytechnic University offers a data visualization course and coding classes.

Ryerson University offers data journalism and visualization courses for both graduate and

undergraduate students.

St. Thomas University offers no journalism data courses.

Thompson Rivers University offers no journalism data courses.

University of British Columbia, Masters of Journalism offers no journalism data courses.

Universite du Quebec a Montreal offers no journalism data courses.

University of Regina, Masters and Bachelors, offer no journalism data courses.

University of Western Ontario integrates programming code and graphics into the graduate

program.