Data comics: narrativa em quadrinhos para visualização de dados no jornalismo

Abstract

Since the last decades of the 19th century, newspapers have dedicated, daily or weekly, a space of their pages to comic strips. Different formats have appeared in publications all over the world, the most common of which is the comic strip, present in the largest Brazilian newspapers to date. In the 1990s, however, reporters began to use the language of comics, also known as sequential art (EISNER, 1989), to tell the news reports. The forerunner of the “comic journalism” genre is Maltese reporter Joe Sacco, author of reporting books like Palestine (1993) and Notes on Gaza (2010). More recently, researchers have suggested the possibility of using the language of comics also for data visualization, under the name of data comics: a visual way of storytelling, based on sequential images that consist of visual representations guided by data (BACH et al., 2017; ZHAO, 2019). Just as comic journalism has gained new authors and readers and has been the subject of journalistic experiences since it appeared, data comics have already been produced by newspapers like the British newspaper The Guardian, and the research aims to define and propose characteristics for journalistic data comics. To this end, 32 examples of data comics made available on the Data Comic website were analyzed, coming from the curatorship carried out by researchers from the universities of Edinburgh, Harvard, Calgary and also from Microsoft Research. Based on the methodology for studies of communication, mediation and cyberculture (LEMOS, 2020a) and on the literature on data visualization, comics and data journalism, analysis categories were defined for aspects related to “data” (elements of data visualization) and identification elements) and also to the “comic” (graphic elements and structural elements of the comics). From the definition of the categories, criteria were proposed to identify what is a journalistic data comic, which must contain at least one element of data visualization, an element of the language of the comics and two elements of identification, being the authorship and the data source, so that the information contained therein can be verified and audited.