Blog

  • New article: Framing attention in Japanese and American comics

    I’m pleased to say that I now have a new article out about the cross-cultural differences between American comics—both Mainstream and Indy comics—and Japanese manga: “Framing attention in Japanese and American comics: Cross-cultural differences in attentional structure.” I’m particularly excited about this paper, because my co-authors are two former undergraduates at Tufts University—Amaro Taylor-Weiner and…

  • Prehistoric animation?

    One of my research assistants from Tufts, Patrick Bender, sent along this link to an article that claims prehistoric cave paintings from 30,000 years ago actually featured animated figures. The recently published research discusses two types of “animation” found in cave paintings. First, they claim that the presence of multiple limbs, heads, etc. in cave…

  • Website down…

    You’ve probably noticed the frequency of my posts increasing. Now that I’ve finished grad school, driven across America, and flown back from Japan, I’m settling into my postdoctoral fellowship at UCSD’s Center for Research in Language, where I will continue my work looking at the cognition of sequential image comprehension. For the blog, I’m hoping to keep…

  • Lecture on comics and psychology

    Here’s a lecture by psychologist Barbara Tversky about the understanding of events, spatial cognition, and comics. It’s a bit long (an hour) but worth watching. (The parts explicitly about comics start around 25:20. Here’s an alternate link where you can jump direct to certain slides) I’ve known Barbara and her student John Bresman for many…

  • Eye-movements for comic panels vs. photos

    In the recent article, “Inferring Artistic Intention in Comic Art through Viewer Gaze,” the authors examined whether people’s eyes are more directed to parts of comic panels than they are when looking at other types of visual phenomena (particularly photos). The aim of the study was to investigate the claim among comic artists “that the artist is…

  • Manga research meeting

    I had a great time yesterday meeting with several manga researchers in Japan at Chiba University. I got to present my work to them, and then discussed several projects by other people. For example, my host, Jun Nakazawa from Chiba University, presented a new study he did in collaboration with an American researcher. In this…

  • Back to the land of manga

    It’s been 9 years since I was last here, but I just arrived in Japan for a few weeks. I’m currently in Sapporo, on the island of Hokkaido, where I’m attending the conference of the Cognitive Science Society. I’ll be speaking on three separate panels about the cognitive implications of differences between American comics and…

  • 10 years!

    It seems I’m always late with these notices, but as of May 31st, emaki.net has been on the Internet for 10 years! I have greatly enjoyed having this outlet to connect my work with everyone, as well as have the interaction with people over the Internet. I look forward to great things to come over…

  • Review: Emotion in manga through loss of hands

    This paper continues Charles Forceville‘s research paradigm of looking at the metaphorical underpinnings of meaning in comics. Here, he and Michael Abbott look at a particular phenomenon in some manga where a character’s hands turn into stumps, as a visual metaphor for “loss of control” with regard to the body or emotions, which occurs repeatedly in…

  • New article: Comics, linguistics, and visual language

    I recently had a new paper published in an exciting book collection, Linguistics and the Study of Comics, edited by Frank Bramlett. The collection looks at various facets of comics under the lens of linguistics, ranging from the structural and cognitive to the socio-cultural.My own chapter reviews the diverse previous research that looks at sequential…