Toward Rhetorically Infused Methods for Relational Network Modeling: The Visualization of Agency in Seismic Risk Visuals

ABSTRACT

This article presents a pilot study in agentive modeling, a mixed-methods approach for visualizing networked models of agency. The study assesses technical and public seismic risk visuals from the websites of key organizations concerned with seismic activity. Preliminary findings indicate the need for visuals that stage more complex networks in order to create greater opportunities for engagement and danger-reducing action.

KEYWORDS:

• Agency
• data visualization
• network modeling
• risk communication
• earthquakes

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/10572252.2023.2216729.

Notes

1. On April 6, 2009, a 6.3 magnitude earthquake devastated the central Italian city of L’Aquila, killing more than 300 people and generating more than 10 billion euros in damage. In the wake of this disaster, the citizens of L’Aquila brought charges against a group of six scientists and one government official. The L’Aquila Seven, as they have become known, were indicted on charges of manslaughter (for miscommunicating seismic risk). Found guilty in 2012, six of the seven defendants were acquitted by an appeals court in 2014. This sentence was confirmed by the Italian Supreme Court in late 2015.

2. While work such as DeLuca (1999) and Dobrin and Morey (2009) provide well-rounded theories of visual activism, this aspect is not well addressed in the study of technical graphics like seismic hazard maps. Existing work on visual activism often focuses on media such as photography, which has different affordances than technical graphics.

3. For additional discussion of layout strengths and weakness, selecting a layout, and technical aspects of the algorithm, refer to Gephi’s website (2022) and Cherven (2015).

4. One visualization feature that Gephi does not currently support is multiple edges between the same actants. The program retains the data but stacks the edges so that it looks like there is only a single connection. To compensate for this, I used Adobe Illustrator to separate the stacked edges as needed.

5. This refers to a way to group numbers of more-or-less continuous values into a smaller number of what are called “bins.” It is a method for handling the “noisiness” of so many individual data points. This is apparent in Figure 3 where mean/median is provided for a group of data versus indicating all the individual data points.

6. To be sure, the response portrayed is idealized. Some elements of post-earthquake response are masked, like how long it can take to get from emergency response to reconstruction.

7. As L’Aquila (among other cases) shows, some of the impacts of natural hazards, which are brutal for some inhabitants (particularly marginalized ones) are not shared by technocratic organizations like the USGS or the DPC (e.g., power staying cutoff to low-income housing in the heat of summer, or groceries making it to Beverly Hills but not Compton for weeks). Primary concerns of these organizations, like lost real estate and damage to national security and public infrastructures, are important but not the whole story.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Danielle DeVasto

Danielle DeVasto is an assistant professor in the Department of Writing at Grand Valley State University. Her research interests reside at the intersections of visual rhetoric, science communication, and uncertainty. Her work has been published in Communication Design Quarterly, Community Literacy Journal, Present Tense, and Social Epistemology.