Visual Risk Literacy in “Flatten the Curve” COVID-19 Visualizations

Abstract

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.