The Impact of Visual Rhetoric

CLICK ON HIPPO TO VISIT THE KAIROS WEB-TEXT WE CHOOSE

This web-text takes the form of a website with seven pages about Visual Rhetoric. Each page covers a specific point the author looked and the first and last page are an introduction and conclusion page. This page was effective because the very front page is bunch of variations of Obamas 2008 HOPE poster and the images change constantly touching on fictional and real characters from all professions. The messages of each poster vary widely from political, to humor, to just plain stupid. The web text is very well organized and easy to navigate and makes the experience pretty seem-less clicking around. Interestingly enough the author choose to use text mostly for their way of explaining their reasoning. Which in essence to make sense because I cannot explain a penny to someone by just giving them a penny. As much as their visual power will take them your going to have to speak to them or write to them one what said car does. Like most rhetoric you have to provide context to your reasoning or your viewer has no anchor to begin understanding your logic.

Summary of Web-Text

This webtext explored how visual rhetoric and its effectiveness in presenting data. In short the web-text found data visualization in a project is useful in multiple ways. An increase in visual rhetoric can add intimacy to the content being presented. When one becomes well acquainted with the data they’ve gathered their ability to transfer into other modes is important in showing how much they care about it and the better your data is the easier it will be able visually convince your peers. 

Visual rhetoric also generates the ability for an audience to capture quantifiable evidence through charts, graphs, or whatever means the author decided. One can write a fat paper about poverty in the world and list off hundreds of statistics but that impact will be limited.

Second, digital visualization techniques can help generate quantifiable evidence to substantiate new claims and either confirm or revise past claims based on qualitative research. Too often scholars wait until after their research has been completed to use visualizations to present their research findings. While useful, such research limits the potential of digital visualization techniques, which if implemented during the research process can help triangulate our data and support our own rhetorical claims. Such use of digital visualization techniques is essential when trying to account for phenomenon such as visual art movements. As I learned in generating the actor-network map (Figure 6), qualitative research does not always uncover the interconnectedness of actants embroiled in collective activities. Actor-network maps can expose such intra-actions and thus provide more accurate and detailed accounts of the phenomenon we wish to expose.

Digital visualization techniques are especially essential to transnational or global visual studies. We don’t share a universal language but the majority of worlds people can see so if you present an visual to them and then assist it with proper captioning and your message already shares common ground in the fact the image stays the same whereas texts may have to be altered due to the fact most languages don’t directly translate smoothly with another. 

Lastly, digital visualization techniques can help boost our own data literacy. Data literacy is a very important skill and the ability to create an infographic is a powerful force in the world of rhetoric because your throwing colors, shapes numbers, and words all at once to maximize your impact. Make said infographic digital and three dimensional and throw that up on a TV screen and boom you’ve got the whole package. For example look at CNN on election day. Instead of just showing you a chart of the incoming ballot numbers they’ve got a three dimensional projection of the capitol building and highlight everyones seat thats up for grabs and then they zoom onto one person and show how each district in their state is voting. All that can be written in a paper but the time it will take to explain such things with a pen will be astronomically larger than the 20 seconds the news anchor tells you the results with their Jarvis like visual aids.