Guiding the Viewer´s Imagination: How Visual Rhetorical Figures Create Meaning in Animated Infographics

Some visualizations need not only adequately represent information; their presentation needs also to be effective, leading to a behavior change in the viewer. Rhetorical figures, like metaphors, are said to increase the effectiveness of a message. This position paper first reviews the literature on why metaphors are more persuasive. Second, it presents four distinct meaning creation operations as one dimension of a future classification system. Third, it explains the properties of the meaning creation operations on four state-of-the-art works from infographics. Fourth, it presents an analysis of published empirical studies from the field of advertising, and provides advice on how to best use them in practice.