Traces of the history of infographic discursive genre in printed journalism in the South and Southeast of Brazil: between conservation and evolution

Abstract

The infographic is a discursive genre that gradually gains space and capillarity in Brazilian print journalism, although its history is little explored. For this reason, the aim of this article is to analyze the permanence and change traits in the history of infographics in daily newspapers in the South and Southeast regions of the country, based on a corpus of 30 texts divided equally between the periods 1990-1995 and 2015-2020. It is a diachronic study and a qualitative research, which uses quantitative methods for specific purposes. We are theoretically anchored in the perspective of Discursive Traditions (DT), also mobilizing the discourse genre theory. As a result, we concluded that, by way of conservation, the DT of journalistic content, of objective language, of title, of infographic body, of detailing elements, of source, of authorship and of photomontage remained without significant changes between periods, while the DT of prominent appraisal, of lead and of finishing complementary and independent, even if maintained, they suffered a lot of changes between the time frames. In an evolutionary character, DT of digital design, complementary content and informal language appeared. Finally, DT of hand-drawn and of protoinfographic disappear from the socio- historical frame analyzed.