Visualization Vibes: The Socio-Indexical Function of Visualization Design
Michelle Morgenstern, Amy Rae Fox, Graham M. Jones, Arvind Satyanarayan

TL;DR
This paper explores how data visualizations convey social cues and identities beyond mere data, affecting public perception and engagement, especially amid misinformation and distrust in science.
Contribution
It introduces the concept of socio-indexicality in visualization, showing how visual features evoke social meanings and influence reception beyond propositional content.
Findings
Readers assess visualizations' social provenance based on design features.
Social attributions impact engagement and trust in visualizations.
Socio-indexicality plays a crucial role in public data communication.
Abstract
In contemporary information ecologies saturated with misinformation, disinformation, and a distrust of science itself, public data communication faces significant hurdles. Although visualization research has broadened criteria for effective design, governing paradigms privilege the accurate and efficient transmission of data. Drawing on theory from linguistic anthropology, we argue that such approaches-focused on encoding and decoding propositional content-cannot fully account for how people engage with visualizations and why particular visualizations might invite adversarial or receptive responses. In this paper, we present evidence that data visualizations communicate not only semantic, propositional meaningmeaning about databut also social, indexical meaningmeaning beyond data. From a series of ethnographically-informed interviews,…
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Taxonomy
TopicsData Visualization and Analytics · Usability and User Interface Design · Digital Humanities and Scholarship
