Data visualisation as an ‘emotional repository’

Understanding the role of emotions in engagements with data visualisations (graphs, charts, maps) is important given their increasing circulation in everyday life and their influence on how people make sense of social and political issues. This paper builds on sociological perspectives on emotions and advances existing research on the interplay between data visualisation and emotions by proposing the concept of ‘emotional repository’ to describe data visualisations. I argue that data visualisations do not simply evoke emotional responses but become sites where emotions attach to, accumulate around, and acquire meaning through specific visual, data, and socio-political contexts. To explore this, the paper draws on empirical research, analysing thirty-four semi-structured interviews and thirteen follow-up interviews with diverse social media users who responded to climate data visualisations published on social media by environmental organisations. The paper makes an original contribution to the limited existing research on data visualisation in society by showing how data visualisations are socially and politically structured through their embedding within broader socio-political contexts. Moreover, it argues that data visualisations have the potential to make distressing topics, such as climate disaster, more palatable and aesthetically enjoyable, thereby influencing how social media users emotionally engage with and respond to the information presented in the data visualisation. The findings suggest that approaches to data visualisation should extend beyond clarity and accuracy to consider the social, political, and emotional contexts that shape how people engage with data.