My "Homopholganger"

Huzzah! Today is the sixth year this website has been online! If I remember correctly, I posted everything online while the Lakers were in the playoffs about to go to the championships... and lo and behold the past is repeating! (yes, I'm a Laker fan... which will certainly be interesting living in Boston as they move on to play the Celtics in the Finals)

So, here's a semi-research-related story to commemorate the occasion. The Tufts Psych department (to which I'm a grad student) is hosting a conference this weekend, and one of the featured speakers is a psychologist named...Neal Cohen! (no relation)

Naturally, I thought it would be hilarious and awkward to meet him. The first day of the conference I had turned it into a scavenger hunt, with several faculty and other grad students all on the lookout for him. We came up with a great portmanteau word to describe someone who shares the same name as you: your "homopholganger." By the time I arrived Friday, I was getting asked over and over if I'd met him yet.

I actually did end up talking to him shortly after his own presentation, and hilarity ensued! Even cooler, I started making connections between some of his work on the hippocampus to things I'm finding in visual grammar. Naturally, I proposed a collaboration... He thought the ideas were pretty cool, so, who knows, perhaps in the next few years we'll see the fantastic byline: By Neil Cohn and Neal Cohen.

VizThink 08

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 his girls occupied by teaching them how to make paper airplanes so he could sign books about 8 years ago at ComicCon.

I've been struck in particular about two things about Scott. First, he really knows about the very disparate facets of the comics industry and culture. And second, he's an unbelievably adept spatial thinker who deploys the processes very eloquently. Even in casual conversation he does a great job of organizing ideas and conversation topics into spatial configurations (usually gesturally). It's been fun to see.

There have been a lot of interesting ideas floating around here, and one in particular that I've been thinking about doing some video podcasts of my theories to further balance out the papers on my site. Anybody have thoughts on that?

Biblio clean up

Just some housecleaning to report... I've updated the Reference Bibliography with some long-overdue entries that have been building up for quite awhile. I've also added a whole page listing all the papers I've reviewed here on the blog (also accessible in full through the Bibliography tag).

Hopefully this will make it easier for people to find things they might be interested in.

All new look, same great taste!

Today marks five full years that emaki.net has been online. That's quite a span for me, covering four states, three bodies of water (2 oceans, 1 lake), and three universities. So, I figured it marks a good enough occasion as any to give a massive remodeling to the site (it had it coming).

I'm hoping this new and improved version should make the site all the more navigable and pretty. Beyond the spiffy new look with color codings for each major section, the changes include...

New "comics" for each major explanatory section of the pages for:
• The Home Page
• What is Visual Language?, and...
• What are Emaki?

I've also removed a few of the less popular downloadable essays to give more focus to the others, while adding a downloadable pdf of the edited compilation of the The Visual Language Manifesto — my writings railing on the comic industry's faults and how I think it can overcome them.

And, you'll still find the same resources for research like my ever growing Reference Bibliography, with new entries being added frequently.

I'm very happy with the new look, and hope you enjoy it too. Please let me know if you face any errors, typos, problems, etc. with it. Thanks to everyone that has supported me and my work, and I hope to see you around for another five years and beyond!

Various concerns

Yesterday I had arthoscopic surgery to remove a tear in the cartilidge of my hip, so I'm currently spending most of my time laid up on the couch (with the occassional field trip on crutches around the house. Recovery seems to be going well). I'm using this time as my "vacation" before summer school starts, so hopefully I can catch up on a bunch of the non-school work I have that's built up.

I'm soon planning to launch a remodelled version of this website, which will include the removal of a few of the videos and essays I currently have up. So, if you've been putting off checking out certain papers, now might be the time to check them out (not many are coming off, but I figured I should give forewarning).

This summer I'll be giving a few talks come July/August. As usual, I'll be speaking at the Comic Arts Conference at Comic-Con International. As it stands, I'm planning to unveil a new theory about page-layout, and I'll also be on a panel about "comics and education." More on this to come...

I'll also be giving one of the invited lectures for the first annual Visual and Iconic Languages Conference at the University of New Mexico. I'm very flattered they thought to ask me, and expectedly, that one will be on visual language grammar.

Finally, my friend Alexander Danner will be having a release party for his new book Character Design for Graphic Novels. For those in the Boston area, the party will be on June 30th, 7pm at Porter Square Books.

Reviews coming soon (hopefully)

I recently got Endnote for my computer, a program that manages citations and automatically generates bibliographies (a dream program for someone like me who writes a gazillion essays). I had previously been writing little reviews for books and papers into a text file, but now I can put them in Endnote nicely organized. As I'm now going through and entering in all these references, I'm sure to be writing lots more reviews. So, be on the lookout for lots more summaries of research papers, coming soon!

Well, to be honest, not too soon... I'm currently in the midst of massive projects, presentations, and exams for the end of the school semester. Hopefully I can do more blog stuff and personal writing in a few weeks once things die down a bit (well, relatively speaking at least... after that I have hip surgery, summer school, and even more research...).

Housecleaning

What with my winter break coming to a close, I've been tending to some general housecleaning issues. I've recently updated my selection of "notable" blog posts as well as the ever useful Reference Bibliography. You'll also find (or perhaps have already found?) that I've filled in the tags for all my blog entries, which should help people find postings they're most interested in. Also, I'm debating pulling down some of my essays from the downloadable readings in anticipation of some upcoming publications, as well as general thoughts on the change and current status of my thinking. I'm not making any changes just yet, but if anything happens I'll make an annoucement here first probably.

Over break, I also discovered that amazon finally has a page selling my book Early Writings on Visual Language. If you buy from the seller with the name remarkably similar to mine, you'll essentially be going one extra middleman than buying from my site. However, if you already own the book, I encourage you to leave a review — negative, positive, or indifferent.

Finally, now that I'm back in Boston, regular updates of my current Meditations comic "Life is where Love is" is now back on schedule every Tues. and Thurs. ... at least until it ends. Then I'll see how i feel about future postings given my workload and energy this semester.

Speaking of which, it looks to be a good courseload coming up. I'm hoping to become more competant and comfortable with stats, am taking "Psychology of Language" and am my advisor's TA for "Syntax." Plus, I'll finally start getting to run my brainwave experiment! I'll also be speaking at a few conferences coming up. Definitely one in Boston, and maybe one in Connecticutt (still deciding on that). All in all, it looks to be a good semester...