At any given time I have between two and twelve ideas for projects being devised on visual language research. More realistically, I'm usually engaged in a few at a time. I have three primary areas of research:

1. I have been actively developing theories on what types of knowledge our minds need to use to make sense of drawings and visual language.
2. This work is supplemented by analyzing the properties of panels in a corpus of comics, in particular cross-cultural analysis.
3. I am analyzing the actual comprehension of sequential images through psychology experiments examining both behavior (reaction times, eyetracking, etc.) and directly measuring the processing in the brain.

If you are working on similarly related research, or would like to collaborate on work of this nature, I encourage you to contact me. These are among my primary current projects...

Visual Language Grammar

My main project in visual langauge research has always been exploring how sequences of images create meaning in the mind. I am primarily interested in developing a model for how such competance is structured, the nature of its comprehension, and how that system relates to other cognitive domains like verbal discourse and narrative, event structure, and even musical cognition.

For example, does this sequence feel "good" or "bad" to you? ...or both??

Previous research on this topic:

Early Writings on Visual Language (book)

"(Pea)nuts and bolts of visual narrative" (click for pdf)

Visual Language Typology

This project involves coding and analyzing the properties of various "comics" from around the world to distinguish the diverse range of potential structures found in graphic expression. For example, are there universals across cultures' visual languages? Are there significant differences? Are there consistent types of panels used in visual languages? What are the conventional signs and symbols used in differing cultures' comics, and how can they be categorized? Etc...

A Different Kind of Cultural Frame (click for pdf)