Illustrating qualitative research findings: the reflexive and epistemic potential of experimental visualization

Abstract

Many social processes are characterized by multi-layered spatiotemporal dynamics. These dynamics cannot be visualized in the traditional cartographic way of locating social realities within the Cartesian coordinate system. Drawing on the insights from critical cartography and the debates on diagrammatic reasoning in the arts, this article discusses different ways of visualizing qualitative research. In qualitative research, there has been reluctance to engage in visualization practices. While visualizations provide evidence for research and serve as visual proof, they also reify social relations, naturalize certain perspectives on research objects, and thereby establish and legitimize specific ways of interpreting field data. Despite this important critique, visualizations can also serve as epistemic instruments that help us to think about, illustrate, represent, and assert research findings in different ways. Understanding visualizations as epistemic instruments allows us to shift our focus from visualizing as a technique of representation to visualizing as a research technique and a medium to reflect on and articulate ambiguous and nuanced field experience. Drawing on our auto-ethnographically documented experimental visualization practices, we suggest that visualization should be considered more systematically as a method that bears self-reflexive and epistemic potential within qualitative research processes. Visualizations can inspire and complement qualitative research processes in three ways. First, depicting research results in graphic formats, such as diagrams, forces us to think about qualitative research in more-abstract terms and requires us to formulate arguments in more-straightforward ways. Second, visualization practices challenge us to reflexively question and re-engage with our findings and to revisit pre-formulated interpretations and representations from a visual perspective. Third, by offering a different perspective, visual representations inspire further insights and allow for a multidimensional creative and self-reflexive (re-)engagement with qualitative data.