"Mapping Obama Hope: A Data Visualization Project for Visual Rhetoric” explores what digital visualization techniques can do for the study of visual rhetoric and circulation studies. The author argues that especially as scholars work with circulation to investigate how rhetoric is a process of distributed emergence and ongoing circulation (Edbauer 2006), digital visualization techniques can help map out this complex process. As scholars grow more and more attuned to the networked complexity of visual rhetoric, they will thus benefit from finding ways to deal with large data sets and exploring how digital visualizations can enhance their scholarly practices. To demonstrate the specific affordances of digital visualization techniques, the author demonstrates how digital mapping such as Google Maps, Dynamic Heat Maps, Temporal Bar Graphs, and Actor-Network Maps can be productive for extending data sets, opening up new research paths, substantiating claims, generating new claims and insights, and boosting data literacy. These visualizations rely on metadata generated through the manual coding of 1000 pictures in which Shepard Fairey’s now iconic Obama Hope image has manifested in various media, forms, and genres around the world since 2008.

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