Syncretism in narrativity, visuality and tactility : a case study of information visualization concerning a news media event

This article re-examines the appropriateness of a conceptual framework based on the semiotic scholarship of Greimas and Courtés which Margaret Morse championed as being suitable for analysis of television and new media. That framework is supplemented with the suggestion that narrative, visual and tactile modes of communication involve syncretism. In a case study of information visualization examples produced for Australian news media during a mine collapse tragedy and rescue at the Beaconsfield Gold Mine in Tasmania in 2006 this idea is used to identify communicative qualities potentially inherent in traditional print and television and emergent new media visualization techniques.