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This study describes the pathways by which prospective users of a website for natural hazard communication experienced agency as user-centered design (UCD) participants. Formative interviews with residents, community managers, and outreach professionals revealed two pathways for agency during the design process—by directly influencing design changes and by indirectly affecting developers' understanding of user needs—and previewed users' potential agency during real-world use. Findings reveal how agential opportunities were constrained by UCD structure and choices of the development team. The authors discuss how supporting user agency during UCD can improve design and support buy-in for humanistic methods in interdisciplinary research teams. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Humanities researchers have expressed concern about the uncritical adoption of information visualization techniques originating in the sciences by digital humanities classrooms. This paper describes an approach to information visualization that encourages students to foreground humanistic concerns by adopting a narrative focus. This approach to visualization development brings interdisciplinary perspectives and techniques to bear on qualitative or quantitative information and constructs stories from those data. To illustrate student experiences, I describe four student projects completed in a graduate course on narrative information visualization. I focus on how this course enabled students to take diverse types of data and construct engaging interactive stories using a range of tools and methods, while continually reflecting critically on their evolving goals and design choices. I conclude by showing how this approach helps students connect humanistic values to information visualization techniques.

This article explores how "flatten the curve" (FTC) visualizations have served as a rhetorical anchor for communicating the risk of viral spread during the COVID-19 pandemic. Beginning from the premise that risk visualizations have eclipsed their original role as supplemental to public risk messaging and now function as an organizer of discourse, the authors highlight three rhetorical tensions (epideictic–deliberative, global–local, conceptual metaphors–data representations) with the goal of considering how the field of technical and professional communication might more strongly support visual risk literacy in future crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interactive sea-level rise viewers (ISLRVs) are digital tools used to communicate about impacts of sea-level rise (SLR) and support decision-making. This study characterizes how ISLRVs communicate about SLR-related risks and provide decision-making support. It identifies key themes about fostering accurate mental models of SLR processes, informing about inundation likelihood, communicating about related social and ecological risks, and providing features users can apply to specific tasks. We present a framework for understanding this type of communication tool that designers can use to develop robust ISLRVs that can support audiences’ understanding and decision-making needs, and contribute to enhancement of coastal resiliency. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]