Visual Rhetoric on Keren Wang

Understanding Advertising through Consumer Psychology and Computational Rhetoric

Mon, 29 Sep 2025 03:44:29 +0000

What Do You See?

Historical "Thickness" of Advertising

Demonstrative and Associative Ads

Advertising & Consumer Psychology

Bandwagon & Anti-Bandwagon Effects

Social Marketing & Exploitation

Computational Rhetoric of Hyper-Personalization

What Do You See?

Let’s begin today’s lesson with a quick glance at these sets of images. What do they remind you of?

Lesson on Data Visualization and its Misuses

Tue, 12 Nov 2024 01:05:28 +0000

Posted by Keren Wang, FA 2024

In this session, we aim to achieve several key learning objectives:

Understand the fundamental principles of framing and visual rhetoric, exploring how they shape the design and interpretation of data visualizations.
Examine the art of designing and manipulating graphic systems of signs that disclose or conceal specific quantitative or qualitative information.
Identify common types of data visualizations, such as bar charts, pie charts, line graphs, and network graphs, along with their appropriate applications.
Recognize the advantages and potential misuses of data visualizations, including manipulative techniques like framing and scaling distortions.
Critically analyze real and hypothetical examples to detect misleading or biased visual representations.
Develop best practices for creating clear, honest, and effective data visualizations, ensuring accuracy and ethical integrity.

Photography and Visual Rhetoric

To truly grasp the fundamental principles and perils of data visualization, we must journey back to the birth of photography and photojournalism. When photography was first employed in news reporting, it carried an inherent demand for credibility. Unlike paintings or sketches, photographs were perceived as unfiltered, unmediated representations of reality. Ironically, as our discussion will reveal, even from its inception, photojournalism was subject to rhetorical manipulation.

Persuasion and Propaganda - Supplementary Reading on Visualizing Propaganda (Emory, FA23)

Thu, 16 Nov 2023 11:36:19 +0000

Key Concepts: Visualizing Propaganda

Jenne, Erin K. “Varieties of Nationalism in the Age of Covid-19.” Nationalities Papers 50, no. 1 (2022)

Antagonistic sovereignty: Antagonistic sovereignty refers to two types of divisive portrayals. The first is an in-out depiction, which alienates and demonizes individuals who are not citizens of the nation (“non-nationals”). The second is an ‘up-down’ depiction, targeting and vilifying the upper echelons of society, including the ’elites’ and the ’establishment’. [1]