Journalism, data visualization, and perception about readers

Abstract

– In recent years, digital journalism has flirted with the production of new narratives. Among them is the use of data visualization to explain complex information better. There is still a shortage of works that focus on visualization and its narrative potential, especially when it involves the reader. In this article, we investigate how professionals in the graphic departments perceive the reader when producing visualization. We applied a Likert scale questionnaire and obtained 57 responses. We used the Kruskal-Wallis and Mann-Whitney tests to analyze the results to prove our two main hypotheses: (1) that each professional profile has different views on readers and (2) that the innovative character is related to the professionals’ perception of the reader. As a result, we proved the first hypothesis partially: journalists and designers have a more favorable view on the role of data visualization than programmers. It was not possible to obtain valid confirmation for the second hypothesis.