The Language of Infographics: Toward Understanding Conceptual Metaphor Use in Scientific Storytelling

TL;DR

This work applies an approach from cognitive linguistics by mapping Conceptual Metaphor Theory to the visualization domain to address patterns of visual conceptual metaphors that are often used in science infographics and shows that ontological and orientational conceptual metaphors are the most widely applied to translate complex scientific concepts.

Abstract

We apply an approach from cognitive linguistics by mapping Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) to the visualization domain to address patterns of visual conceptual metaphors that are often used in science infographics. Metaphors play an essential part in visual communication and are frequently employed to explain complex concepts. However, their use is often based on intuition, rather than following a formal process. At present, we lack tools and language for understanding and describing metaphor use in visualization to the extent where taxonomy and grammar could guide the creation of visual components, e.g., infographics. Our classification of the visual conceptual mappings within scientific representations is based on the breakdown of visual components in existing scientific infographics. We demonstrate the development of this mapping through a detailed analysis of data collected from four domains (biomedicine, climate, space, and anthropology) that represent a diverse range of visual conceptual metaphors used in the visual communication of science. This work allows us to identify patterns of visual conceptual metaphor use within the domains, resolve ambiguities about why specific conceptual metaphors are used, and develop a better overall understanding of visual metaphor use in scientific infographics. Our analysis shows that ontological and orientational conceptual metaphors are the most widely applied to translate complex scientific concepts. To support our findings we developed a visual exploratory tool based on the collected database that places the individual infographics on a spatio-temporal scale and illustrates the breakdown of visual conceptual metaphors.

Figures (7)

• Figure 1: Semiotic depiction of the target and source domains and the four types of conceptual metaphors used in this work. Mapping from a source to target in the same conceptual domain (Target A) produces an abstraction. Mapping from a source to target in a different conceptual domain (Target M) produces an conceptual metaphor that can be further identified as a imagistic, orientational, ontological, or structural metaphor.
• Figure 2: An example visual conceptual metaphor of fog for the notion of uncertainty. Uncertainty is an abstract, unfamiliar concept (Target M), graphically mapped to the familiar, more concrete concept of fog shrouding a group of trees (Source).
• Figure 3: Top: a conceptual metaphor, visually depicting the rapid popularity of memes spreading (Target M) as quickly as a wildfire (Source). The concept of physical wildfire and its fast-spreading property describes the concept of rapid popularity increase and usage. Bottom: visual depiction of an abstraction, a graphic of fire around a tree (Abstraction) to denote the concept of a forest fire (Source). This does not provide more understanding of the forest fire beyond graphically depicting the event. Glyph explanations are inspired by Szefliński & Wachowski szeflinski2019metaphor.
• Figure 4: Illustration of the four scientific domains included in our corpus, represented by different saturations of teal. Their overlaps create a set of subdomains that are often found in public outreach. This representation is inspired by the graphic, "What Makes a Good Visualization?" mccandless2014knowledge.
• Figure 5: Screenshot of the Visual Conceptual Metaphor Explorer, developed to support the exploration of collected infographics and analyzed conceptual metaphors. For each of the four domains, a scatterplot depicts the spatial ($y$) and temporal ($x$) coverage of each infographic (left) and serves as the entry point to further exploration. Selection of a point displays the corresponding image and metadata (here, A Human Cell: A Molecular City by Peter Mindek, reproduced with the author's permission) alongside our analysis of the visual conceptual metaphors present (right).