Data visualisations : newsroom trends and everyday engagements

This chapter looks at both the production of data visualizations (henceforth “dataviz”) in newsrooms and audiences’ everyday engagements with dataviz, drawing on two separate research projects. The first is Seeing Data, which explored how people make sense of data visualizations, and the second is INDVIL, which explored dataviz as a semiotic, aesthetic and discursive resource in society. The chapter starts by summarizing the main findings of an INDVIL sub-project focusing on dataviz in the news, in which we found that dataviz are perceived in diverse ways and deployed for diverse purposes. It then summarizes our main findings from Seeing Data, where we also found great diversity, this time in how audiences make sense of dataviz. This diversity is important for the future work of both dataviz researchers and practitioners.