Abstract
Data visualization in the digital age has opened up exciting new avenues for professional communicators who are designing quantitative information, especially large data sets. The scope and pace of recent innovations in data design rival those of the 19th century, with many new varieties of displays now appearing on popular Web sites such as Many Eyes, Information Aesthetics, and Visual Complexity. Data visualization is reshaping and repurposing existing display genres (bar charts, line graphs, etc.) and generating hybrid and novel forms like treemaps, networks, text diagrams, and an array of others.
This rich interactive environment for designing and interpreting data engenders several questions about theory, research, practice, and pedagogy:
Forms, genres, conventions. What new genres (or hybrid genres) are beginning to emerge, and how are these genres transforming how designers visualize and users interpret quantitative data? How does data visualization extend or reshape print conventions?
Rhetorical analysis. How is data visualization redefining the rhetorical dynamics between user, display, and designer? By making large data sets accessible to the public, how does data visualization contribute to civic rhetoric or the rhetoric of science?
Usability and user experience. How do the affordances of interactive data displays affect the user’s experience? What are the perceptual issues concerning dynamic forms of display, including interactivity, animations, pervasive color, and multimodal features?
Media and technology. What role does technology play in designing, interpreting, or teaching data visualization? How do media of digital data design create new options for data exploration and analysis or encourage novelty and expressiveness?
Pedagogy. How is data visualization changing the pedagogy of visual rhetoric and professional communication? What curricular innovations does data visualization afford? What role can it play in assessing communication programs or student performance?
The editor of this special issue of Journal of Business and Technical Communication invites research examining these and other related issues from a theoretical, rhetorical, technological, cultural, historical, or empirical perspective. Send inquiries, proposals, or manuscripts to Charles Kostelnick (