Beyond immediacy and transparency. A semiotic approach to discursive and rhetorical strategies in media visualization and data visualization

Abstract

Media visualization based on big cultural data, as “visu-alization without reduction” (Manovich 2010) is sup-posed to make data immediately and completely available, in contrast to classic data visualization, which visually translates information by means of “graphical primitives.” On the other hand, from a pure functionalist point of view, also the visual form of diagrams, charts, and graphs, being fully proportion-al to the data values it conveys, is transparent with respect to its object (cf. Tufte 1990, 1997, 2001, and Card, Mackinlay, Shneiderman 1999). In this paper we will try to consider both media visualization and data visualization (across several examples, including some Manovich’s and Accurat’s projects and New York Times graphics) as complex visual communication arti-facts, not only from a purely informational point of view but from a semiotic point of view, by introducing a semiotic re-flection on what we have proposed to call “discourse of data” (Manchia 2020a). From our perspective, situated in the methodological framework of visual semiotics, and of the semiotics of scientific discourse, it might be interesting to pay attention to the whole process of constructing knowledge (and visual infor-mation) from data, understood as a chain of “devices of vi-sualization” (Bastide 1985a, 1990 [1985b], 2001), investigating data as a channelled result, and also visualization strategies of specific–and oriented–discourses across data.