Blog

  • The Chinese Room

    A few months back I got a request from my friend and colleague from Tufts, the philosopher Dan Dennett. Dan is the co-director of the Tufts Center for Cognitive Studies along with my mentor, Ray Jackendoff, so I got to benefit from his wisdom and humor throughout graduate school. He asked me to recreate a…

  • Complete site relaunch!

    So… you may have noticed that things look a little different around here! I have officially relaunched my website with a whole new design and new url. The address for the new website is: https://www.visuallanguagelab.com …while the new url for the blog is… http://www.thevisuallinguist.com The old blog RSS feed should still be working as normal.…

  • Comic-Con 2013

    If you’re going to Comic-Con, be sure to come by my talk on Friday July 19th at 2pm, room 26AB. I’ll be talking about some of my experiments on “Comics and the Brain.” Here’s the full listing: Comics Arts Conference Session #8: Comics Theory Scott Daniel Boras (Winona State University) examines the sensory experience of reading…

  • ComicCon and websites

    I’ve unfortunately been very busy lately, so blogging has taken a hit unfortunately. However, a few notes about upcoming things… First, after two years away, I’ll be back speaking at Comic-Con International this year! My talk will be about “Comics and the Brain” and what neuroscience can tell us about how what goes on in…

  • Two for No: theory in practice

    I’m happy to be able to announce that my friends Alexander Danner and Tym Godek have a new weekly comic series called “Two for No.” What makes it even more exciting for me is that the comics are all based around ideas from my theories! Several years back, I wrote a paper about “visual language…

  • 11 years and pretty cover

    I always seem to miss these things when they happen, but as of May 31st, my website has now been online for 11 years! The amusing thing is that as another year goes by with my website, I am currently working hard to completely redesign and relaunch the site with the new url, www.visuallanguagelab.com. As…

  • Updates and such

    Things have been a bit busy lately, so I’ve had less time to devote to blogging (suggested topics always welcomed, FYI). I’ve been hard at work on several revisions of papers for journals, as well as prepping several more papers for submissions. I’m also gearing up to start running a new brainwave study here at…

  • CFP: Interdisciplinary approaches to visual narrative

    For those that might be interested, one of my projects is trying to organize a book summarizing important research on visual narrative. This book will be a companion volume to my book out later this year, The Visual Language of Comics. If you may be interested in contributing, here’s a Call For Papers for it……

  • Comics, games, and bad science

    I’m often very excited when I find new research on comics, especially when it’s experimental. There is so little done that it’s a treat to find something I didn’t know about. Unfortunately, sometimes my excitement at new data turns sour when I see what was actually done… I recently found this study (pdf) by Kinzer…

  • New paper: Navigating Comics

    I am happy to announce I have a new paper published in the journal Frontiers in Cognitive Science that outlines a theory of how people navigate page layouts. A previous version of this paper was posted here several years ago, though this is now the final version. You can download a pdf of the paper…