OSMO Speaker Series: Dr William Allen on "Visualization Choices about Refugees Have Delimited Impacts Along Partisan Lines"
- Date & time
- –
- Speaker
- Dr Will Allen, Dr William Allen
- Host
- Politics & Int Relations (Department)
- Series
- Sophia Knight
- Location
- Radcliffe Science Library - Seminar Room, Seminar Room, Radcliffe Science Library, off Parks Road, Oxford, Oxfordshire, OX1 3QP, United Kingdom
- Organisation
- Oxford
Topics
About this talk
Join us at the Oxford Social Media Observatory (OSMO) for the third in our weekly visiting speaker series! Abstract: Data visualizations are indispensable to journalists, lobbyists, and scientists for communicating information. Growing interest in story-telling with data, as well as received wisdom about these outputs’ power, suggests that visualizations can change what viewers think. Yet there is little large-scale evidence for this, particularly on political issues, that also considers whether specific design features are responsible. I conducted a full-factorial experiment among 3,082 British respondents who viewed a visualization about refugee inflows to the UK between 2001-2020. While the underlying UK Home Office data remained identical, the visualizations varied in terms of chart type, dominant color, editorial framing, and disclosure of the source. Overall, realistic choices about these key dimensions had delimited effects on attitudes and preferences by partisanship, while source transparency did not meaningfully interact with any visual features. This opens further avenues for re-examining visuals as a channel for conveying political information and knowledge. If you have any questions, please contact myself Sophia Knight, Doctoral Researcher at OSMO (sophia.knight@reuben.ox.ac.uk), or Dr Andreu Casas, Director of OSMO (andreu.casas@politics.ox.ac.uk).
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