Animated Narratives

Animation can be effective for teaching science (Betrancourt & Tversky, 2000). In addition to its capacity for aesthetic and humorous appeal, the popularity of animations in family-oriented science exhibits is no surprise. That it can simplify and compress large amounts of complex information into short viewing times (Mascelli, 1998) helps designers address many challenges of communicating to a museum audience (Falk & Storksdieck, 2005). But the same devices that make animation pithy, humourous, and entertaining may also be a detriment to learning.

Temporal compression via scene transitions (e..g, cutting, wiping, and cross fading) helps to simplify concepts that may otherwise be overly visually complex. Anthropomorphization supports engaging characters. But these same devices have the potential to misrepresent and omit information, which leaves viewers to fill in the gaps themselves. In this project, we ask what happens when the topic of the animation is one as widely misunderstood as evolution (Bishop & Anderson, 1990).

More specifically:

How do viewers navigate the representational system of an animation – a temporal medium – to make sense of challenging and fundamentally temporal scientific concepts of evolution?

The two animations, Pollen and Seeds and Biogeography, were chosen because of how they addressed the problem of representing evolutionary concepts via a number of interesting design solutions, such as simplification, abstraction, exaggeration, anthropomorphization, and temporal distortion.

We conducted 46 clinical interviews with museum visitors and undergraduate students in order to illuminate the interaction between prior knowledge and elements of the animation in the construction of meaning. Responses were qualitatively coded to identify: (1) The novice or informed claims viewers made about evolution; (2) the elements from the animation that served as grounds for their claims; and (3) the rhetorical functions of the pairing of claims and grounds in viewers’ constructions of arguments. A model is proposed to describe how visual devices used to simplify and compress information function in viewers‘ understanding of core concepts of evolution. This study contributes to research on visual literacy, evolution education, and multimedia design.

Screenshots from the animations Pollen and Seeds and Biogeography, part of the series Evolution Essentials on display in the Field Museum's Evolving Planet exhibit