1st Edition

Empirical Comics Research Digital, Multimodal, and Cognitive Methods

Edited By Alexander Dunst, Jochen Laubrock, Janina Wildfeuer Copyright 2018
    366 Pages
    by Routledge

    366 Pages 52 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    This edited volume brings together work in the field of empirical comics research. Drawing on computer and cognitive science, psychology and art history, linguistics and literary studies, each chapter presents innovative methods and establishes the practical and theoretical motivations for the quantitative study of comics, manga, and graphic novels. Individual chapters focus on corpus studies, the potential of crowdsourcing for comics research, annotation and narrative analysis, cognitive processing and reception studies. This volume opens up new perspectives for the study of visual narrative, making it a key reference for anyone interested in the scientific study of art and literature as well as the digital humanities.

    List of Tables and Figures Acknowledgement 1 Comics and Empirical Research: An Introduction  (Alexander Dunst, Jochen Laubrock, Janina Wildfeuer) I Digital Approaches to Comics Research 2 Two Per Cent of What? Constructing a Corpus of Typical American Comic Books (Bart Beaty, Nick Sousanis, Benjamin Woo) 3 The Quantitative Analysis of Comics: Towards a Visual Stylometry of Graphic Narrative (Alexander Dunst, Rita Hartel) 4 "The Spider’s Web": An Analysis of Fan Mail from Amazing Spider-Man, 1963-1995 (John Walsh, Shawn Martin, Jennifer St. Germain) 5 Crowdsourcing Comics Annotations (Mihnea Tufis and Jean-Gabriel Ganasci) 6 Computer Vision Applied to Comic Book Images (Christophe Rigaud and Jean-Christophe Burie) II Linguistics and Multimodal Analysis 7 From Empirical Studies to Visual Narrative Organization: Exploring Page Composition (John A. Bateman, Annika Beckmann, Rocio Varela) 8 Character Developments in Comics and Graphic Novels: A Systematic Analytical Scheme (Chiao-I Tseng, Jochen Laubrock, Jana Pflaeging) 9 How Informative are Information Comics in Science Communication? Empirical Results from an Eye Tracking Study and Knowledge Testing (Hans-Jürgen Bucher, Bettina Boy) 10 The Interpretation of an Evolving Line Drawin (Pascal Lefèvre, Gert Meesters) III Cognitive Processing and Comprehension 11 Viewing Static Visual Narratives Through the Lens of the Scene Perception and Event Comprehension Theory (SPECT) (Lester Loschky, John P. Hutson, Maverick E. Smith, Tim J. Smith, Joseph P. Magliano) 12 Attention to Comics: Cognitive Processing during Reading of Graphic Literature (Jochen Laubrock, Sven Hohenstein, Matthias Kümmerer) 13 Reading Words and Images: Factors Influencing Eye Movements in Comic Reading (Clare Kirtley, Christopher Murray, Phillip B. Vaughan, Benjamin W. Tatler) 14 Detecting Differences Between Adapted Narratives: Implication of Order of Modality on Exposure (Joseph P. Magliano, James Clinton, Edward J. O’Brien, David N. Rapp) 15 Visual Language Theory and the Scientific Study of Comics (Neil Cohn) Glossary  List of Contributors Index

    Biography

    Alexander Dunst is Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of Paderborn, Germany



    Jochen Laubrock is Senior Lecturer in Cognitive Psychology at the University of Potsdam, Germany



    Janina Wildfeuer is Researcher in Multimodal Linguistics at Bremen University, Germany