tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-195867192008-05-13T17:14:58.352-04:00Neilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03705933006220475644noreply@blogger.comBlogger260125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19586719.post-18898146470597080192008-05-13T11:08:00.000-04:002008-05-13T11:08:58.991-04:00

I am currently in the refractory period of the semester, enjoying the freedom of summer break starting and the ability to work on all those projects I usually don't get around to doing during the school year. I've now plotted out at least three papers I plan to write, plus a visual language class syllabus to refine. I should have some more substantial blogging to do soon, but in the meantime,

Neilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03705933006220475644noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19586719.post-16597963833308548342008-05-05T13:21:00.001-04:002008-05-05T13:21:00.755-04:00

I've been ridiculously too busy to blog lately, largely due to my upcoming exam/project on biopsychology. Once that's over it's summertime! (i.e. time for me to work on projects otherwise not given enough attention while in classes). In the meantime... Here's an interesting site that attempts to show the relative sizes of things in the universe. I like how its using digital tools to get at

Neilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03705933006220475644noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19586719.post-91947760604411014962008-04-25T15:30:00.001-04:002008-04-26T17:03:47.302-04:00

I've done another podcast with the folks at VizThink, this time debating Yuri Engelhardt and Dave Gray on what constitutes a visual language and the nature of visual language grammar. This new format allows you to skip around to different chapters to jump straight to parts of interest. (Please note, I object to the insinuation in the chapter title that "comics" can equal "visual language"):

Neilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03705933006220475644noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19586719.post-88973803452024113272008-04-23T00:44:00.001-04:002008-04-23T00:48:44.134-04:00

One of the topics I debated closing out my new essay on page layout (pdf) with was its relationship to McCloud's definition of "comics." As most know, McCloud's definition is that "comics" are "juxtaposed sequential images in deliberate sequence." Yet, he never places any constraints on that. He means all sequential images are "comics" — regardless of the characteristics of content. On the

Neilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03705933006220475644noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19586719.post-65612527191210237862008-04-20T14:57:00.007-04:002008-04-20T16:44:01.120-04:00

The Language Evolution blog posts this interesting youtube video showing an elephant painting a picture of an elephant: I've vocalized often that as much as there is a debate about whether animals can or do have language (they don't), we know of no animals that draw. By drawing, I mean that they employ tool use to graphically achieve conceptual expression (that is usually iconic). While it is

Neilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03705933006220475644noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19586719.post-35725269051638238532008-04-16T12:43:00.001-04:002008-04-16T12:44:17.136-04:00

1.5 seconds per panel. That's how long it takes on average for wordless panels to be read. I recently completed a very exciting study that asked people to read four-panel comic strips one panel at a time. In this "Self-Paced Reading" task, they see four boxes on the screen, and with each button press a subsequent panel appears in the sequence. Only one panel is shown on the screen at a time.

Neilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03705933006220475644noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19586719.post-43172540093326942182008-04-14T13:41:00.002-04:002008-04-14T13:46:54.111-04:00

Since various concerns have popped up here and there about my latest essay on page layouts (pdf), I figured I should take the time to reiterate responses to some of them here... First off, the types of navigation I talk about here are absolutely intended to be part of a broader network of how people move through layouts. Certainly, panel locations aren't the only influence on people's movement

Neilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03705933006220475644noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19586719.post-58478764997369384802008-04-10T22:40:00.001-04:002008-04-10T22:36:14.544-04:00

So far I've been very pleased at the response to my latest essay, "Navigating Comics", on how people navigate through page layouts (pdf). As several responses have been rolling in via email and elsewhere, I intend to do a post soon addressing concerns in that feedback. However, I think it'd be informative to first talk about the origins of this paper. Back in 2003 when I was drawing our

Neilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03705933006220475644noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19586719.post-20442379920260357792008-04-07T00:48:00.000-04:002008-04-07T00:42:34.658-04:00

I'm very happy to announce that I have a new essay online: Navigating Comics: Reading Strategies of Page Layouts (pdf). This paper reports the findings of an experiment I conducted looking at how people navigate through comic pages. The big finding: people don't just mimic text going left-to-right and down. The full abstract: The spatial domain is often considered to be non-linear, given the

Neilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03705933006220475644noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19586719.post-3101202633502508312008-04-02T18:48:00.001-04:002008-04-02T18:41:01.205-04:00

On this page I found another great example of a page by Jae Lee that defies the "temporal mapping" idea that successive panels are successive moments: I'm unaware of the full context of the page, but the Human Torch is flying around some big monster of sorts and creates the number "4" (for Fantastic Four no doubt) in his path. Doing so, his path begins by violating a constraint of page layout,

Neilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03705933006220475644noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19586719.post-30859748457639774902008-04-01T21:31:00.000-04:002008-04-01T21:31:13.380-04:00

Steven Seagle has a decent piece up at the First Second blog about visual storytelling. He nicely taps into a simplified version of some of the same things that I've been pushing for my theory of visual grammar. The exercise he uses to rearrange panels is very reminiscent of linguistics methods, and is also a good one that shows how a broader structure exists above and beyond the so-called '

Neilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03705933006220475644noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19586719.post-24880191898774150182008-03-30T23:53:00.001-04:002008-03-30T23:50:13.070-04:00

In my TA class this semester we've just entered talking about Language Evolution, and combined with the recent discovery of this blog the topic has been on my mind a bit lately. Some general thoughts on reframing the overall discussion... Some theories of language evolution postulate that ‘gestural language’ evolved prior to verbal language. While I am in support of the multimodal sentiment,

Neilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03705933006220475644noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19586719.post-45216958304757905352008-03-24T23:03:00.003-04:002008-03-24T11:05:04.681-04:00

When I usually speak about the Art versus Language Perspectives, I usually couch it in a view that there are "different potential ways our society treats graphic images." As I just realized, stating it in this way maybe obscures the true intent of the distinctions. Really, this is a hypothesis about cognition. At the heart of my theory of visual language is the observation that we have three

Neilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03705933006220475644noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19586719.post-47937682258163533952008-03-17T01:37:00.001-04:002008-03-17T01:37:59.641-04:00

Patric continues his defining of "comics" with a discussion of "closure." I've talked before about the problems with the idea of closure, but it strikes me that there are a few underlying issues that people run into when addressing these issues: 1. They assume that time passes between panels, despite there being no evidence that each panel represents a "moment in time." With this assumption in

Neilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03705933006220475644noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19586719.post-91103486546589583392008-03-11T02:09:00.003-04:002008-03-11T02:10:06.242-04:00

I had an interesting realization the other day about the way people judge the quality of realistic versus cartoony drawing styles. It seems to me that the more someone tries to maintain a realistic style, the more harshly criticized they will be when they don't "fully achieve" it. Cartoony styles get no critique like this. As I've done before, perhaps Rob Liefeld will be a good example. Liefeld

Neilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03705933006220475644noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19586719.post-73914320808246810762008-03-05T12:10:00.001-05:002008-03-06T01:03:29.518-05:00

Via the TCJ message board, Nathan has pointed to an article in the Boston Globe that discusses the differences in brain activation between "Eastern and Western" perceptual processing. The study claims that "Westerners tend to focus on central objects more than on their surroundings" while Easterners "tend to focus more on the context as well as the object." From the article: To use a camera

Neilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03705933006220475644noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19586719.post-48181493758024845112008-03-03T18:31:00.000-05:002008-03-03T18:24:15.485-05:00

As much as I stress how the Art and Language perspectives/paradigms of viewing graphic communication are opposed to each other, I do think that they can be reconciled. Just to recap, I believe that a cultural force, what I call the "Art Perspective" suppresses the visual-graphic form of expression, which is closer to a "Language Perspective." Some of the things that differ in these paradigms'

Neilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03705933006220475644noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19586719.post-73786611303469202512008-02-29T11:43:00.000-05:002008-02-29T11:41:06.330-05:00

A friend of mine and I had a really interesting discussion the other day about how difficult it is for a reasonable, mediating, middle-ground type of theory to survive in the scientific landscape. Within linguistics, there are a lot of debates I think a middle ground position serves the most efficient explanation. However, there are several things holding back the success of such views. For one

Neilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03705933006220475644noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19586719.post-75840881819083336042008-02-26T01:26:00.003-05:002008-02-26T12:59:48.162-05:00

The last podcast I did with the VizThink folks was so fun I decided to do another. This one is about the various functional roles that panels play in the visual language used in comics. Among the topics I hit are: • focusing information within panels • navigating page layouts • visual "storytelling" • text-image relationships It's a slightly pared down and also expanded (at the same time!)

Neilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03705933006220475644noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19586719.post-21629395622540174692008-02-20T01:48:00.008-05:002008-02-20T11:15:12.169-05:00

Derik Badman has a new article up over at Comixtalk about the general trend of defining "comics" and "why we should stop bothering." This is similar in nature to an academic article by Aaron Meskin that I've continually not gotten around to reviewing here for the last several months. A few concerns: In general, the task of defining "comics" is like any other quest to understand how categories

Neilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03705933006220475644noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19586719.post-4267368397398388262008-02-16T19:59:00.007-05:002008-02-17T13:38:33.747-05:00

I recently received a French book on comic theory from interlibrary loan that has been decently interesting. While reading it though, I started noticing something very strange. I'd be progressing along, and the graphic examples weren't there — there was only a little tag "Figure X". Quickly, I had the infuriating realization that they were all at the back of the book. Seriously, can anything be

Neilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03705933006220475644noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19586719.post-88985062802128999282008-02-12T12:40:00.000-05:002008-02-12T12:38:06.683-05:00

Bridgeman, Teresa. 2004. Keeping an eye on things: attention, tracking, and coherence-building. Belphégor 4 (1). Bridgeman's article discusses various aspects of coherence-building throughout comics structure — "coherence" being the discourse theory notion of a salience across various units. It thus joins various other works that apply discourse theory to comics, though dabbles in cognitive

Neilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03705933006220475644noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19586719.post-15880596737808288922008-02-08T00:58:00.000-05:002008-02-08T00:56:55.933-05:00

One of the reasons I've been a bit MIA from the blog lately is because I've been traveling a lot. On one flight, I noticed some interesting things in the safety manual. First, let's look at a section that isn't too bad: This part shows a nice step-by-step for what to do in the event of increased cabin pressure: how to put on an oxygen mask. Note the "no smoking" sign to the side — smoking with

Neilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03705933006220475644noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19586719.post-89148011016995593872008-02-04T00:42:00.000-05:002008-02-05T12:54:40.870-05:00

Between school, conferences, and life, my time has become quite precious lately. A few days ago my BioPsychology professor said that we'll be dissecting sheep brains in class. That should be interesting. I've finally gotten a chance to analyze a bunch of the data that has come in from my Peanuts experiment and things are looking very cool. I haven't yet run the actual statistics, but some

Neilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03705933006220475644noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19586719.post-29703704706384273452008-01-29T14:38:00.000-05:002008-01-29T14:47:47.689-05:00

I've spent the last several days out here in San Francisco at the VizThink Conference where I gave a talk about visual language. There have been a lot of interesting presentations, some more amenable to my thinking than others. It's also been a great pleasure to hang out with Scott McCloud here, who seems to be the other "comics" guy. I don't think I've spend this much time with him since I kept

Neilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03705933006220475644noreply@blogger.com