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A year ago, we submitted an IEEE VIS paper entitled "Swaying the Public? Impacts of Election Forecast Visualizations on Emotion, Trust, and Intention in the 2022 U.S. Midterms" [50], which was later bestowed with the honor of a best paper award. Yet, studying such a complex phenomenon required us to explore many more design paths than we could count, and certainly more than we could document in a single paper. This paper, then, is the unwritten prequel-the backstory. It chronicles our journey from a simple idea-to study visualizations for election forecasts-through obstacles such as developing meaningfully different, easy-to-understand forecast visualizations, crafting professional-looking forecasts, and grappling with how to study perceptions of the forecasts before, during, and after the 2022 U.S. midterm elections. This journey yielded a rich set of original knowledge. We formalized a design space for two-party election forecasts, navigating through dimensions like data transformations, visual channels, and types of animated narratives. Through qualitative evaluation of ten representative prototypes with 13 participants, we then identified six core insights into the interpretation of uncertainty visualizations in a U.S. election context. These insights informed our revisions to remove ambiguity in our visual encodings and to prepare a professional-looking forecasting website. As part of this story, we also distilled challenges faced and design lessons learned to inform both designers and practitioners. Ultimately, we hope our methodical approach could inspire others in the community to tackle the hard problems inherent to designing and evaluating visualizations for the general public.

Narrative visualizations combine conventions of communicative and exploratory information visualization to convey an intended story. We demonstrate visualization rhetoric as an analytical framework for understanding how design techniques that prioritize particular interpretations in visualizations that "tell a story" can significantly affect end-user interpretation. We draw a parallel between narrative visualization interpretation and evidence from framing studies in political messaging, decision-making, and literary studies. Devices for understanding the rhetorical nature of narrative information visualizations are presented, informed by the rigorous application of concepts from critical theory, semiotics, journalism, and political theory. We draw attention to how design tactics represent additions or omissions of information at various levels-the data, visual representation, textual annotations, and interactivity-and how visualizations denote and connote phenomena with reference to unstated viewing conventions and codes. Classes of rhetorical techniques identified via a systematic analysis of recent narrative visualizations are presented, and characterized according to their rhetorical contribution to the visualization. We describe how designers and researchers can benefit from the potentially positive aspects of visualization rhetoric in designing engaging, layered narrative visualizations and how our framework can shed light on how a visualization design prioritizes specific interpretations. We identify areas where future inquiry into visualization rhetoric can improve understanding of visualization interpretation., (© 2011 IEEE)