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AVOIDING MISLEADING MAPS: ENCODING AND DECODING 2018 MIDTERM ELECTION RESULTS IN GRAPHICS _______________________________________ A Project Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School at the University of Missouri-Columbia _______________________________________________________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts _____________________________________________________ by YANQI XU David Herzog, Project Supervisor MAY 2019 © Copyright by Yanqi Xu 2019 All Rights Reserved Acknowledgements I would like to take this opportunity to express my appreciation to my committee chair, Professor David Herzog, who has given me feedback on my project. He has encouraged me in pursuing more data-driven stories. I have looked up to his rigor in academic research. I would thank veteran D.C. journalists Professor Barbara Cochran and Professor Wally Dean for their readiness to share their wisdom and to embrace changes in the era of online journalism. I would like to thank all of my interviewees who shared their thoughts in the most genuine way. I would also express my appreciation and gratitude to my colleagues at PolitiFact who coached me on reporting and writing. I would like to thank all the professors at the Missouri School of Journalism, my fall 2017 cohort and other Mizzou journalism graduates telling stories with photos, videos, data, audio, and texts, without whose help I will never achieve more than what I have. Their works inspired me, and I hope we are in this together for as long as we could. Lastly, I would have to express my sincere gratifications to my family and non- journalists friends. They remind me every day of the worth of my work in this cause. TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures ...................................................................................................................... i Chapter 1 Introduction ....................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 2 Literature Review ............................................................................................... 3 Chapter 3 Analysis ............................................................................................................ 10 Appendix A Transcripts .................................................................................................... 30 Appendix B Field Notes.................................................................................................. 112 Appendix C Evaluation ................................................................................................... 132 Appendix D Project Proposal.......................................................................................... 136 2 List of Figures Figure 1 House Election Results: Democrats Take Control ............................................... 2 Figure 2 2018 MIDTERM ELECTIONS, House Election Results .................................. 13 Figure 3 Governors’ race in US Midterms 2018 Live Results ......................................... 16 Figure 4. Top chart in Forecasting the races for governor ................................................ 17 Figure 5 Top chart in US Midterms 2018 Live Results .................................................... 21 i Chapter 1 Introduction What do journalists and graphics designers have in common? To me, they are all information architects. This term was coined by architect and graphics designer Richard Saul Wurman, the founder of TED, to refer to those building “information structures that allow others to understand” (Wurman, 1997, p.15). Journalists and graphic designers layer building blocks of information with factual reporting and graphic design to display data patterns. Information architects often need to understand the information first, in order to have an effective conversation with readers to facilitate insights and wisdom. I very much enjoy both processes of learning and communicating what I have learned to the greater audience and aspire to learn the craft of being an information architect. I started out my journalism path in radio at the Communication University of China, and tried my hands with different media at the Missouri School of Journalism, before I started to devote most of my time and effort in data journalism in my second year. I kept learning more about how information is organized in class at school and online, through self-teaching and from the data journalists’ community that I found through the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting. I spent a semester working as a research assistant in the NICAR data library writing code to import, parse and clean data. I felt exhilarated when I was able to solve problems and find patterns with data. On the audience-facing front-end of data journalism, I have designed several static graphics for my convergence reporting class and understood the amount of effort that went into editing, with rounds of iteration of graphics and rewriting of captions time after 1 time. Elections give journalists a myriad of data to work with, and many design graphics to convey election results. I care about how people react to certain election graphics and draw insights from these forms of visualization. My research employs the method of semi-structured interviews to address two research questions: How do journalists represent electoral vote results with maps and other forms of visualization? How do journalists take into account readers’ reception of graphics to inform their design of election results visualizations? Often election graphics need to portray the overall control of power and give readers some ways to find out about a certain district. However, the mismatch between population and area often means that journalists make a compromise between geographical fidelity and the weight of votes, though exceptions exist. Since no graphic checks all the boxes of all the information without conflict, a combination of graphics can help avoid misleading or overwhelming readers. In the future, journalists can tap into user testing to inform their design for election graphics and familiarize readers with newer forms of visualization by exposing them to the audience. More findings are detailed in the analysis section. My digital fellowship through the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute in Washington, D.C. placed me on PolitiFact’s national team. I explored storytelling with data, making graphics for some data stories, and built a newsroom tool to automate fact- checking. I brushed up my writing, and developed a style for fact-checks. The work at PolitiFact also instills in me a sense of accomplishment that I am holding the powerful accountable and maintaining journalism’s role as the fourth estate, the independent voice in an opinionated and polarizing environment. 2 Chapter 2 Literature Review Several different disciplines, including mass communication, cognitive psychology and cartography can help us understand how journalists design maps and how readers use maps. In the context of editorial decision about visualization of election results, three branches of literature are relevant to this study: Maps and cartography, interactive graphics, and elections reporting. Studies of Maps and Cartography Maps have been an integral part of U.S. news reporting for centuries (Monmonier, 1989), and there has been a “rise in the number of maps in the popular media” in recent decades (Churchill, 2006, p.55). Monmonier (1989) regards maps as an effective means of showing geographical relationships. Studies related to cartography are often conducted by traditional cartographers who sometimes overlook the maps in the news as they describe the nature of news maps as “popular cartography” or “graphic cartography” (Green, 2000, p.141), suggesting that such maps mainly serve to attract readers, being “often interesting, innovative, unique and geographically attractive examples of cartography”, and not always “accurate”. The ground-breaking work in journalistic cartography, Maps with the News, was written by a cartographer (Monmoiner, 1989). The cartographic researchers are typically more concerned with the typology of maps (Allen & Queen, 2015). Journalists, on the other hand, have mainly shown how news maps were produced (Herzog, 2003). Despite a trend of map-design toward more readability, it is questionable whether the maps are being read (Britten, 2004). In the study examining how readers read maps in news publications, Britten (2004) categorized maps as “locator” maps, which show 3 geographical locations; and other statistical data maps, which highlight political or demographic boundaries. Britten’s (2004) research studied the audience readings of locator maps only in the news. Essentially, the subjects in Britten’s (2004) study only contain a certain type (locator map) of printed maps, but does not take into consideration other printed data maps, nor interactive maps, which is a more complex form of data map with interactive features. Data maps, the other category of common news maps, are useful for presenting the visual connection between areas and the certain geographic attributes (Bogost, Ferrari & Schweizer, 2012). With the spread of digital devices and the rise of the internet, interactive news maps become more popular in many forms of media (Wallace, 2016). Wallace (2016) conducted interviews with cartographic journalists and concluded that “there are very few examples of stories that absolutely require the implementation of interactivity.” two outstanding