Visual Rhetoric

Visual Rhetoric and Data Visualization in Professional Presentations

Stand-alone Data Presentation

M.A.W.R.M. Components: Rhetorical Situation and Descriptive Components

Rhetorical Situation:

Exigency

I created this Prezi presentation to fulfill a course assignment as part of the M.A. in Writing rhetoric and Media at Clemson University. The challenge was to create a presentation that could be emailed to a conference or presented anywhere without a speaker present. Other challenges in this project was to create all original graphics from raw data and to balance the amount of textual and visual information. Note also that this presentation can be viewed without a speaker present, thus, some slides do contain a lot of textual information that may disrupt theories on letting images speak for themselves, but, without that much text, the presentation would not stand alone. 

My topic of choice hits very close to home since I am an foreign immigrant, and newscasts were highly focused on the number of immigrants that move to the United States in the Fall of 2018, when I created this presentation. Many of the data sets I included are not commonly cited on mainstream media. For example, some of the visuals I created show data that contradict the popular discourse in relation to an eminent “Mexican takeover” of America or that unauthorized immigrants continue to have children while staying in America as a form of obtaining permanent residence. Also, the eminent revision of current immigration laws prompted me to take a closer look at the immigration data.

Audience

The audience for this project is anyone who is affected by immigration laws and the flux of international immigrants moving to the United States.

This presentation could be used in college classrooms, posted on YouTube and used in academic conferences.

Constraints

As a first-year student, the main challenge lied in watching many tutorials in order to use the several applications to create this visual presentation and the visuals included in the slides. Other constraints include having a massive amount of data to draw from and having to narrow the scope of my research; then, I had to decide what data to represent visually, what data to represent textually, and how to arrange the presentation to persuade the audience to look at the many different sides of immigration stories.

Descriptive Components:

Design and Invention Processes

I titled this Prezi as “The Rhetorical Puzzle of Immigration” because it exposes several facts about immigration into the United States that remain a puzzle for authorities and the public. 

I used a template and an image of a map of the U.S. provided by Prezi because the puzzle concept fit my topic well, as immigration discourse is highly multifaceted. A puzzle starts out unclear and disconnected, but, piece by piece, it comes together to reveal its content; that is exactly how this presentation is structured. 

Graphics were created using Numbers and Illustrator, and the data was mostly sourced from The Pew Research website and covered a period of approximately 15 years.

The fonts used (Oswald and Antonio) render a serious tone that is appropriate for this topic. Data is presented and communicated through graphs and infographics. I manipulated the main image, the colors, and the number of slides included in the Puzzle Template to draw attention to the facts, and I saw it fitting to use red, white, and blue, in most slides, but also “break out” that pattern with a pop of orange in contrast with the blue but complimenting the red.

Reflection

I was able to apply my research skills and knowledge of classical and modern rhetorical theories into developing contemporary professional communications assets.

Furthermore, the collection of data for this project also implored that I became familiar data websites. This type of statistical work was entirely unknown to me. I found myself spending a lot of extra time dissecting how statistical data can be used to convey a point of view. I was being careful to not manipulate the data in ways that would display a bias. 

Learning to create graphs in any app was very challenging since it was another first for me, and I found that I did well to use Numbers for most of them, but also tried my hand on Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. These are complex apps and I had not hands on training. I am grateful to Adobe for publishing excellent free online tutorials. 

Demonstrated M.A.W.R.M. Competencies

  • The ability to apply visual communication theories to multimodal design practices
  • The ability to apply classical and modern rhetorical theory to contemporary professional communication practices
  • Demonstrable technological and media production literacies
  • Outstanding writing and editing skills

Apps/Tools

  • PREZI Next
  • Numbers
  • Adobe Illustrator
  • Adobe Photoshop.

Visual and Aural Presentation

M.A.W.R.M. Components: Rhetorical Situation and Descriptive Components

Rhetorical Situation:

Exigency

This Prezi presentation fulfilled a course assignment in Visual Rhetoric as part of the M.A. in Writing rhetoric and Media at Clemson University.

The challenge in this project was to craft a presentation that incorporated visual and aural components. I chose to use PREZI NEXT for the visual component which is accompanied by a script. My presentation was based on a previously written conference-length paper where I applied visual rhetorical theories to complete a visual analysis of a set of visual texts. The main goal of my PREZI was to allow the images in the Prezi to work coherently with  the content of the script and communicate a political message. 

Once more, my topic of choice hits very close to home. Because I was born in Brazil and I was shocked with the character of the elected president, I just had to approach this topic and attempt to draw attention to how images and hashtags — digital hybrid visuals — influenced an entire nation politically, culturally, and sociologically.

Audience

This presentation was created specifically as a visual and aural presentation of a conference-length paper (a Visual Rhetoric Analysis) and is intended to be used at academic conferences.

However, the audience for the message in this project is anyone who is affected by global events and specifically the spread of semi-authoritarian regimes disguised as democracies.

 

Constraints

At the time of submission of the course assignment, I was not able to present this work in class due a change in our course schedule. However, this visual presentation was never intended to be played out without a speaker and a script since it is not the type of presentation that can be played out by itself. 

As opposed to my other presentation published in this Visual Rhetoric section of my portfolio, this Prezi can only be presented with  a speaker present or by having the script recorded. The visuals here are meant to fully compliment the script and vice-versa.

Descriptive Components:

Design and Invention Processes

This project involved a lot of research via scouting Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to find social media posts that were related to the presidential elections in Brazil, which were held back in October 2018 and, more specifically, posts about Jair Bolsonaro’s campaign. 

The selected set of visuals I studied represented a combination of text and images.  The topic is mainly situated within academic studies that scrutinize new media, digital literacy, and visual modes of composition. In my preliminary research, I had encountered a collection of essays which is becoming foundational to my own research: The Multimediated Rhetoric of the Internet: Digital Fusion, edited by rhetorician Carolyn Handa. In the introduction, Handa defines Digital Fusion and in chapter one, the author explores “How the Digital is Rhetorical, Cognitive, and Cultural.” Those concepts informed not only my research in writing the conference paper but also the choices I have made for the PREZI.

Reflection

Time was of the essence in this project from browsing online to find images and writing the proposal to writing the final paper and developing the script and oral presentation into a PREZI. This process was very time consuming with the main obstacle consisting of having to learn how metrics tracking apps works. The methodology for analyzing digital content—hashtags and images—was very new to me, thus, I was also doing preliminary research on the terminology used by the tracking apps and becoming aware of how others have used them to analyze social movements. Furthermore, the digital aspect of the primary texts in this project also implored that I became familiar with digital literacy and digital rhetoric; two fields of rhetoric that were entirely unknown to me. I found myself doing a lot of extra reading beyond the assigned coursework and not feeling confident enough to move from theory to the writing of my visual rhetorical analysis. 

When it came to writing the script for the oral presentation based on my essay, the novelty resided in having to actually submit a printed script to my professor. That was very challenging since it was another first for me, and I found that I do well on oral presentations because of inflection and some improvisation, so I was having writer’s anxiety in having to get my presentation in print.

Demonstrated M.A.W.R.M. Competencies

  • The ability to apply visual communication theories to multimodal design practices
  • The ability to apply classical and modern rhetorical theory to contemporary professional communication practices
  • Demonstrable technological and media production literacies
  • Outstanding writing and editing skills

Apps/Tools

  • PREZI Next

scholarly references:

Both PREZIs in this Visual Rhetoric section are grounded in digital rhetoric, visual rhetoric, and data visualization theories. Every choice made, be it on selecting images or writing text, relates to the purpose of the message and its audience albeit  the two presentations are meant to be delivered differently.  

Visually my PREZIs mainly observe the functionality of images and how they contribute to collective life in the public sphere, which, in turn, connects my works with rhetorician Laurie Gries’ theories in Still Life with Rhetoric. Gries approaches the study of visual rhetoric by considering how visual things gain power and spur changes in certain social and political spheres. She redefines rhetorical agents as actants and treats images as both the thing and the actant which affect collective life because of transformation, circulation, and consequentiality. Gries writes: “Visual rhetoric, I argue, can do its part by disclosing in theory and practice how visual things circulate and acquire power to co-constitute collective life as they enter into divergent associations, undergo change, and spark a wide range of consequences” (85-86). That approach incited me to study visual things as being dynamic and foundational and, most importantly, as having direct agency over cultural changes and collective thought. I observed the presence of movement (circulation) and agency in both topics in my presentations: the Immigration into America and the Presidential campaign in Brazil.

In terms of digital rhetoric, my invention process geared me to look at statistical data and graphs (in the Data Presentation PREZI) and the combination of hashtags and images (in the Visual Analysis PREZI) as hybrid texts an idea that permeates works in digital rhetoric. This hybridity concept was solidified during my research when I came across the concept of “digital fusion” discussed by Carolyn Handa in The Multimediated  Rhetoric of the Internet: Digital Fusion. Handa defines digital rhetoric as “simply (or maybe not simply) traditional rhetoric applied visually as well as textually” (18). Handa paraphrases rhetorician Jay Bolter to amplify the definition of text: “Our definition of text, [Bolter] says, must expand today to allow images and alternative forms of persuasion to figure more prominently in that definition” (qtd. in Handa 17-18).  I basically ran with this concept of fusion to define the visual texts that I analyzed and the visual texts I created specifically for my PREZIs.

Moreover, I aimed to merge images and vernacular to offer a cohesive presentation where each element works as hybrid visual texts. Handa further states that “[d]igital rhetoric includes visual elements —be they complete images, graphic elements, or colors—as equal to and fused with word, phrases, and sentences, in this online art of arrangement for the presentation of a “self” in civic or public discourse. Digital rhetoric differs from purely verbal rhetoric because it considers the simultaneous hybridity of digital text … to convey a certain purpose” (Handa 18-19). Thus, my observations of the visuals texts during my research and the application of these concepts into practical professional communications guided me in creating the two digital assets presented in this section of my portfolio. 

Furthermore, in creating these PREZIs, I relied on Visual Rhetoric theory as a means to convey a message. “Conceptualized as a communicative artifact, visual rhetoric is the actual image rhetors generate when they use visual symbols for the purpose of communicating” (Foss “Theory of VR” 143 ). Each visual choice I made within these two PREZIs is intended to communicate a specific socio-political message. Hence the images I created such as infographics and graphs not only are representations of data but also agents of my discourse. As a whole, the PREZI itself is a symbolic visual, it is directed at the global community as its audience, and it communicates a call for political resistance.

Works Cited

Gries, Laurie. Still Life with Rhetoric. University Press of Colorado, 2015. Kindle Edition.

Handa, Carolyn. The Multimediated Rhetoric of the Internet: Digital Fusion. Taylor & Francis, 2014.

“Foss, Sonja K.. “Theory of Visual Rhetoric.” Handbook of Visual Communication: Theory, Methods, and Media. Edited by Ken Smith, Sandra Moriarty, Gretchen Barbatsis, and Keith Kenney. Lawrence Erlbaum, 2005, pp. 141-52.