Monthly Archives: December 2012

The Need to Study Infographics… Anyone Interested in Collaborating???

8 Replies

I consider myself a researcher of sorts. And as a researcher, I am constantly thinking about my next study. In fact, I have a google doc that lists ideas for dozens of future research projects and/or papers. But recently I began wondering… Why do I keep all of my ideas to myself?  What would happen if I started to blog about them? Could I find colleagues to collaborate on some of them? So here goes…

The need to study infographics!

I love infographics! I am mean… I really love infographics!!! My love for infographics led me to post a few here or there on my blog. Over time, I somehow began being identified as a lover of infographics. I get at least one email a week from someone asking me to post an infographic on my site. As I see more and more infographics, I have begun to wonder,

  • How accurate are infographics?
  • Are people more likely to believe a message that is presented as an infographic vs. text alone?
  • Do people ever fact check infographics?
  • Do infographics ever use more than one source?
  • Are people more likely to remember facts presented as an infographic vs. text alone?
  • How are infographics used to persuade or manipulate people?
  • Are academics creating infographics?
  • Could conference “posters” be created in an infographic form?

Questions like these could be investigated in a number of ways. For instance, infographics could be purposely sampled from a list like “20 Great Infographics of 2012” or randomly sampled from a list like “Cool Infographics Gallery” and analyzed. At the same time, a survey could be developed and adminstered to a group to investigate their perceptions of infographics. Or an experiment could be conducted where one group is presented information as an infographic and another group is presented the same information in another format.

The bottom line is this, more and more infographics are being created each day and somebody should be investigating questions like the one’s I listed above.

Let me know if you are interested in collaborating on a project like this in the spring of 2013!