New Paper: You’re a good structure, Charlie Brown
Wow, big week for new papers! I’ve got another one officially out now in the latest issue of Cognitive Science, “You’re a Good Structure, Charlie Brown: The Distribution of Narrative Categories in Comic Strips” (pdf). This one actually reports on the first studies I did on comics during grad school, way back in 2007! (Sometimes science takes awhile to get out…).
This study examines whether the narrative categories I’ve proposed for sequential images use patterned roles in sequences. There are four experiments we used:
Experiment 1: People took 4 unordered panels and ordered them into a sequence
Experiment 2: We measured how long people viewed panels in sequences where two panels were reversed in order
Experiment 3: People took 4 unordered panels, ordered 3 into a sequence and deleted 1
Experiment 4: People viewed 3 panel sequences where one panel had been deleted, and guessed where it was deleted from
Across all tasks, we found complementary results for how different types of panels behaved, showing that there are certain “distributional trends” for the roles that panels play in a sequence. For example, panels that were freely chosen to be deleted were not recognized when they were missing, but panels that were not often deleted were noticed when gone.
Plus, some panels can play multiple roles in a sequence, but not all panels have this ability. This confirms that some types of panels are flexible in the role they play in a sequence, but not all panels can go in any location in a sequence. This goes against the idea that “any panel can go in any position” in a sequence and still be meaningful.
Here’s the full abstract:
Cohn’s (2013) theory of “Visual Narrative Grammar” argues that sequential images take on categorical roles in a narrative structure, which organizes them into hierarchic constituents analogous to the organization of syntactic categories in sentences. This theory proposes that narrative categories, like syntactic categories, can be identified through diagnostic tests that reveal tendencies for their distribution throughout a sequence. This paper describes four experiments testing these diagnostics to provide support for the validity of these narrative categories. In Experiment 1, participants reconstructed unordered panels of a comic strip into an order that makes sense. Experiment 2 measured viewing times to panels in sequences where the order of panels was reversed. In Experiment 3, participants again reconstructed strips but also deleted a panel from the sequence. Finally, in Experiment 4 participants identified where a panel had been deleted from a comic strip and rated that strip’s coherence. Overall, categories had consistent distributional tendencies within experiments and complementary tendencies across experiments. These results point toward an interaction between categorical roles and a global narrative structure.
Full Reference:
Cohn, Neil. (2014). You’re a good structure, Charlie Brown: The distribution of narrative categories in comic strips. Cognitive Science, 38(7), 1317-1359. doi: 10.1111/cogs.12116
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