A leitura de infográficos da Revista Superinteressante: procedimentos de leitura e compreensão

Abstract

The Infographic is a journalistic genre highly used by the press not only in conventional but also in digital media. The lack of research concerning this text in genre and textual linguistics and consequently its inexpressive presence in Portuguese language didactic books has motivated us to analyze it. Our aim has been not only to verify Superinteressante Magazine infographic regularity and typification in order to conceptualize it as a discourse genre instead of a merely Graphic design device which follows other genres but also to confirm which reading procedures are used by the infographic reader and how these procedures affect the comprehension of the information present in Superinteressante Magazine infographics. A genre analysis methodology based on the sociorhetorical perspective has been applied. A collection of ten infographics from seven editions of the monthly Superinteressante Magazine has been selected so as to be analyzed regarding the infographics production and reading regularity and typification. We were able to ascertain the existence of a category of infographics in the magazine which has been named by us knowledge orientation infographic, which, by the way, is subcategorized in two types: time ordered information infographic, timeline subtype, and simultaneous information infographic. This one might be subcategorized as universal and single. Given this conceptualization, data gathering through two methodologies has been developed. The first methodology consisted of a verbal protocol with five infographics from the analyzed group, each one read by a participant, aiming to analyze the readers procedures towards the reading production. As regards the second data gathering methodology, a questionnaire on the subject of a 11th infographic also from Superinteressante Magazine which assembles characteristics from the types and subtypes of infographics mentioned above has been applied aiming the reading product, which may be understood as the comprehension of the information. The data has been collated and analyzed. It has been concluded that the infographic is a genre, due to its regularity and typification especially its recurrence not only in production but also in reading, integrating information presented in verbal and non-verbal ways simultaneously in its multimodal organization. Moreover, we present other six observations related to the reading procedure and their consequence to the comprehension of the knowledge orientation infographic which reinforces our conclusion. We expect having contributed to future researches related to digital and non-digital infographics, not only to the linguistic field but also to the journalistic field, as well as providing useful data to infographic teaching and production or even to other visual informative texts.