Explore Our Dashboards
How do images shape public debate—and how can we better understand their persuasive power online?
As part of the PolarVis project, we created three interactive dashboards that offer different windows into the visual politics of climate communication on social media. Drawing on research across Europe, the dashboards allow users to explore how images are used to engage, persuade, and polarise in digital spaces.
Whether you’re a researcher, communicator, or simply curious about online debates, these tools invite you to explore patterns of visual messaging, emotional responses, and evolving communication strategies. Developed through a collaborative, co-design process, they are meant to support reflection, comparison, and more informed engagement in a changing media landscape.
Social Media Dashboard – Explore overall patterns in visual climate communication across countries.
Polarisation Dashboard – Compare political dynamics and sharing patterns of visual content.
Workshop Dashboard – Dive into examples and findings from our local co-design workshop.
The PolarVis Social Media Dashboard
The dashboard was developped and designed by Hana Dubovska.
The PolarVis Polarisation Dashboard
This interactive dashboard visualizes how images circulated on social media in the weeks leading up to the 2021 German federal election. Based on a dataset of over 84,000 posts from Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, it offers insights into the emotional and visual dynamics of online climate communication.
At the heart of the dashboard is a network graph showing how identical images were shared across social media accounts. By mapping these image-sharing patterns, the dashboard helps uncover both polarisation—when images circulate only within partisan communities—and cross-cutting reach, where the same visuals are shared across political divides.
Developed by Tobias Raidl in collaboration with the PolarVis team at the University of Vienna, the tool was designed to support exploratory analysis of visual content and its role in shaping online debate.
Users can:
Explore how images connect political communities
Click on nodes to see account-level details
View shared images and emotional reactions
Identify patterns of polarisation and overlap in visual messaging
Together, these features shed light on how climate visuals both bridge and divide online publics. Here are some previous of the dashboard (full version coming soon).
The PolarVis Workshop Dashboard
The Workshop Dashboard was developed as a hands-on tool to support collaboration between researchers and climate communicators. Built on co-design principles, it is used in local workshops with stakeholders working to engage citizens around climate issues.
The goal was to create a space for shared reflection: while communicators often know what works in their own context, it’s harder to compare strategies across different actors. This dashboard makes such comparison possible by highlighting differences in visual messaging, emotional tone, and engagement.
By drawing on workshop participants’ contextual knowledge and feedback, the dashboard evolved into a tool that helps uncover patterns, spark discussion, and support more effective and reflective communication practices.
