Visual representation of information as communicative practice

Anyone who has clarified a thought or prompted a response during a conversation by drawing a picture has exploited the potential of image making to convey information. Images are increasingly ubiquitous in daily communication due to advances in visually enabled information and communication technologies (ICT), such as information visualization applications, image retrieval systems, and virtual collaborative work tools. Although images are often used in social contexts, information science research concerned with the visual representation of information typically focuses on the image artifact and system building. To learn more about image making as a form of social interaction and as a form of information practice, a qualitative study examined face‐to‐face conversations involving the creation of ad hoc visualizations (i.e., “napkin drawings”). Interactional sociolinguistic concepts of conversational involvement and coordination guided multimodal analysis of video‐recorded interactions that included spontaneous drawing. Findings show patterns in communicative activities associated with the visual representation of information. Furthermore, the activity of mark making contributes to the maintenance of conversational involvement in ways that are not always evident in the drawn artifact. This research has implications for the design and evaluation of visually enabled virtual collaboration environments, visual information extraction and retrieval systems, and data visualization tools.