Pictorial metaphors for information

The iSquare Research Program is an arts-informed, visual study in which people answer the question “What is information?” in the form of a compact line drawing, coined an “iSquare” (Hartel, 2014a). Since 2011, more than 2,000 iSquares have been collected from diverse academic disciplines and from around the world. In this presentation, Dr. Jenna Hartel will provide an overview of the iSquare project and report recent insights into the pictorial metaphors associated with information. Eight common pictorial metaphors for information that appear in the iSquare corpus—earth, web, tree, light bulb, box, cloud, fishing/mining, and eye—will be displayed and explicated imaginatively. The talk will also address the potentials of arts-informed, visual research for social scientific inquiry and will note implications of graphical elicitation techniques for research, education (Hartel, 2014b), and practice in information studies and beyond.