| Popis: |
Experimental pragmatics has mainly focused on verbal communication, yet non-verbal communicative stimuli also trigger pragmatic processes. We will investigate the effect of these pragmatic processes when interpreting graphs, charts, and other data visualizations. The aim of our project is to reveal what pragmatic inferences are at work when interpreting data visualizations. For that purpose, we apply the tools and methods of experimental pragmatics to the study of data visualization. By assuming that readers understand graphs and charts as communicative acts, and that visualizations are taken as evidence of the speaker’s informative intentions, we claim that the same inferential processes involved in verbal linguistic communication are in place when readers interpret data visualizations. If this is true, then the effects documented in the pragmatics of verbal communication should occur when readers interpret graphs. A crucial experimentally attested pragmatic effect is that of context on interpretation. In our experimental setting, we will present our participants with visualizations ranging from bar charts to pie charts. All of them depict change or a difference in magnitude. We reasoned that visualisations as communicative stimuli are interpreted based on the meaning derived from the context. The visualisation does not serve as a mere means of displaying invariant statistics but as consequential evidence of the author's intention. We predict that in order to understand whether the depicted difference is actually consequential or not, the readers will be reliant on the speaker to provide a context. Consequently, different contexts will lead readers to derive different interpretations from the very same graph. We will manipulate the contexts such that in the experimental condition, the difference depicted by the chart will be interpreted as inconsequential or small, while in another condition the interpreted magnitude of this change will be enlarged. Research question: Does the manipulation of contextual elements lead to different interpretations of the same data visualisation (the same graph, line chart, pie chart, bar chart)? |
