Storycards and visual grammar

My friend Alex sends along this link to a gift pack of "storycards". Basically, you can use these cards in sequences to create lots of different novel stories. The idea is similar to McCloud's Five Card Nancy game.

I'm interested in it for a few theoretical reasons. For example, having a stock set of units that can be combined in different ways is similar to language, where you have a set of words (vocabulary) that are combined in various ways (grammar). As the main thrust of linguistics in the last 50 years has told us, infinite possible sentences can be made with just a small set of vocabulary items, and that's basically the fun of such a card set!

However, even more interesting, its very similar to a study I finished running a few years ago and am still working on getting written up. In it, my participants were given four panels from a Peanuts strip and asked to arrange them in an order that makes sense.

People were very good at getting the original order of the strip (around 90% if I remember correctly), though that's not what I was interested in. I was more interested in the errors that people made, and whether there were patterns to them. And, indeed, there were. Prior to testing, we had coded the panels for numerous narrative properties, and found that certain narrative categories got moved around in particular patterned ways.

What this showed was that people don't just make up sequences one panel at a time as this game suggests, but that elements of that order are conditioned by roles of panels. These roles are determined both by properties of individual panels, and the relations between images.

So, one-by-one reading/drawing, but guided by underlying complexity (grammar) beyond just linear relationships.

Take my Comic Experiment!

Hey everybody, I once again have another comics related experiment online and would be extremely grateful for your help!

This experiment consists of making judgements about various created comic strips, and takes roughly 20 minutes (though at first glance you may think it looks long, trust me, it doesn't take much time). Participation enters you into a drawing for a $50 Gift Certificate to Best Buy (either online or in store).

This project has a deadline of early next week (Midnight on Tues, 4/28), so your help sooner rather than later would be most appreciated.

****UPDATE: This project has been completed. Thanks very much to everyone who participated! Stay tuned for more experiments in the future, or email me to be contacted directly about future experiments.******

The study can be found online HERE.

Thanks very much!

Oh, and by the way, to all who participated in my last online study (thanks again!), a presentation of that overall project will likely be given as my talk at this year's ComicCon...

Help my Science!

If you have roughly 15 minutes to spare, please take my comics related experiment! I am currently working on an a fairly extensive project that I've been able to put one portion of online. Hopefully this will be the first of many that will be accessible from my website, but right now I need your help!

Like I said, it should only take roughly 15-20 minutes, and participation will enter you into a drawing for a $50 gift certificate to Best Buy with a 1 in 50 chance of winning. This experiment will only be online for a limited time, so please help out soon!

--------EDITED 2/21--------

Data collection has now ended for this experiment. Thanks SO much to everyone who participated and/or linked to the experiment. This will be extremely helpful for this project. Stay tuned for more experiment postings on this site, or email me to be updated when more tests are available. Thanks again!

Status report

I have, unfortunately, once again been struck by so much work that blogging has fell by the wayside. Thankfully, this is a good thing in many ways, because I have a whole lot of really cool stuff going on!

For example, I'm busy planning my new class here at Tufts on The Visual Linguistics of Comics, the first time such a class has ever been offered. I've actually posted the syllabus online. If you're in the Boston area and interested in sitting in or taking it, I encourage you to email me.

I've also got a host of projects going. Inspired by the types of thing I discussed in my last post on Action Star Substitution, I'm now running an experiment looking at this phenomena. I'm hoping to have it done by the holiday break, so perhaps I can post some preliminary data if things look interesting.

I'm also pleased to say that a follow up to my comparison of Japanese and American books (mentioned briefly here) has finally begun, despite wanting to do it for years now. An enterprising helper in my lab volunteered to take on the project, so hopefully this will eventually lead to some very interesting results, especially given that I've expanded the scope of the project to a lot more than just comparisons between countries.

Oh, and I've also got a massive paper on visual language grammar being refined, along with another huge visual grammar experiment in the works. Busy busy busy...

Random!... panel sequences that is

As long as we're on the topic of comics that people clip out for me, here's another one that my advisor passed along. For some reason, he's rather partial to Zippy the Pinhead (I think because of the philosophy jokes), and this one caught his eye. Particularly this first panel over to the side.

Zippy it seems comes from the Non-sequitur school of panel transitions (if you're into that sort of thing).

What makes this fun for me is that my next experiment is actually going to use various scrambled strips to help illustrate the differences in processing between those and normal strips (plus some other more complex strip types).

Not much is out there about this sort of research, but one study did show that people's comprehension of sequential "picture stories" (Mercer Mayer stories) correlated with their comprehension for text. Skilled readers showed a drop in recollection for scrambled compared to regular sequences. However, unskilled readers showed no comprehension differences at all.

I'm a bit dubious that fluency in visual language is comparable to general comprehension skills (they used no measure for graphic fluency), but this study at least showed some support for a domain general capacity.

Panel Time!

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.

While they do this, the computer records how long it takes them to move from each panel to the next. By manipulating the strip in various ways, I'm able to tell if certain manipulations have a greater impact on the reading from the original "normal" sequence.

I'm not going to go into the intricacies of the experiment (you can wait for the write up for that), but I thought I'd share some tidbits.

For instance, for "normal" wordless four panel Peanuts strips, it takes a person on average 1.5 seconds per panel. The first panel is usually read relatively slow (1.7), the second panel is fastest (1.3), then third is slightly less fast (1.5), then fourth is back to where the first was (1.7).

An interesting side note about this: since all these panels were the same size, yet were read at different speeds, it might imply a rejection of McCloud's claim that panel sizes affect reading time (which thereby somehow affects narrative time). However, this experiment didn't test that specifically, and no alternations in panel sizes nor layouts were given either. So, I can't say anything conclusive about that.

This was a very exciting project for me to complete, because it marks the first time I've (anyone has?) looked at data like this for how people understand sequential images.