Abstract
We are very pleased to present this special issue on visual communication of science in the digital age. Visuals are (of course) a key aspect of how scientists communicate with one another and with broader audiences—through graphs and photographs, posters and PowerPoint slides, and many other means. In today’s “new media” world, visual representations of science are more pervasive and varied than ever before—in science communication at least as much as in other communication arenas.
Yet this has remained a somewhat undertheorized and underresearched area. The theories and methods typical of empirical communication scholarship do not always transfer easily to consideration of messages in visual form or to the practices involved in creating and disseminating them. The articles here reveal several ways that this can be approached, however.
This issue begins with a study of environmental infographics in which authors Allison Lazard and Lucy Atkinson use experimental methods in conjunction with the Elaboration Likelihood Model to show how including infographics in persuasive messages may stimulate deeper thought. Work by Brooke Foucault Welles and Isabel Mereilles then demonstrates how visualization technology can convey the results of computational social science (in this case, an analysis of the political blogosphere)—and how social representations theory can help us evaluate likely impacts on public understanding. Taken together, these studies provide persuasive evidence of the potential power of visual communication of science.
Two studies concerned with health-related applications follow. Mapping cancer risks associated with air pollution entails finding a way to communicate uncertainty appropriately. In our third special issue paper, author Dolores Severtson assesses experimentally how map features may influence the reactions of those who view them, anchoring her results in a range of concepts from risk communication and visual cognition. Another study by Petronella Grootens-Wiegers and colleagues considers younger audiences and uses qualitative focus group data to investigate how visual information can enhance comprehension of text-based information to better inform children about medical procedures.
Given their importance for effective communication, where do the visuals that scientists use actually come from—how do practicing scientists invent them, in other words? In our fifth research article, Lynda Walsh and Andrew Ross use data from a qualitative survey of researchers and a rhetorical approach to better understand how this group creates the visual materials they use to represent and communicate their results. Fabiola Rodríguez Estrada and Lloyd Davis then end the issue with an instructive commentary that argues that science communicators could be more effective if they paid more attention to design principles—focusing, like all good communicators, on the audiences they hope to reach.
We also want to acknowledge what is missing here but available in other recent issues. Interactive exhibits and even games are an exciting frontier for communicating science, whether by design or as an incidental byproduct of entertainment. Our December 2014 issue included an analysis by Sonia Stephens and colleagues of web-based interactive sea level viewers in use around the world to communicate this dramatic and important effect of climate change. We recommend this article to you, along with Vickie Curtis’s commentary piece in the June 2014 issue on “gamifying” science in a competitive “hackfest” and an article by Anthony Dudo and colleagues on the representation of technoscience in videogames that appeared in the April 2014 issue.
We might also classify as visual communication the demonstrations that have been so characteristic of science popularization for centuries, a practice that continues in today’s science museums and centers, in university lectures and through public festivals, as well as in much science-themed television programming. An article in our December 2014 issue by Susana Biro reminds us of some of this history as it played out at an eclipse event in early twentieth-century Mexico. That same issue also includes a commentary by Robert Brander and colleagues about a contemporary example of the power of demonstration in a very different public communication context: the use of purple dye to demonstrate the dangers of rip tide currents in Australia.
And while we do not have any articles in this particular issue on film or video treatments of science, we do regularly publish these. A few recent examples include a study by Jessica Gall Myrick and Suzannah Evans on the audience impacts of juxtaposing Discovery Channel’s violent Shark Week material with shark conservation public service announcements (October 2014), JoAnn Myer Valenti’s review of the science-themed films at this past year’s Sundance Film Festival (April 2014), and research by Sue-Jen Lin on the impact of An Inconvenient Truth on audiences in Taiwan (December 2013).
Finally, we would very much like to acknowledge in this context the special influence of Jean Trumbo’s work in applying scholarship to the analysis of visual images used in communicating science, something she worked on for many years when almost no one else seemed to be working in this area. As a reflection of her influence, four of the six articles we present in this issue cite her work.
Mary Nucci served as the inspiration and guest editor of this special issue, and her valuable contribution to both its conceptualization and its realization is gratefully acknowledged.