Blog

  • New essay: The limits of time and transitions

    On the *NEW* publication front: The first issue of the new journal Studies in Comics went online today, and I have a brand spankin’ new article in it. The first issue is available to read for free online. Here’s an abstract of my paper: The limits of time and transitions: challenges to theories of sequential…

  • New blog address!… roughly same as the old…

    Hey, my blog has now just slightly moved addresses over to: http://blog.emaki.net/. This was one of the previous address, but now it’s the main address along with http://www.thevisuallinguist.com. You will be automatically redirected in 30 seconds, or you may click here For feed subscribers, please update your feed subscriptions to: feed://feeds.feedburner.com/TheVisualLinguist

  • Metaphors go boom!

    Derek Kirk Kim uses a fun and common conceptual metaphor in today’s installment of his ongoing series “Praxis & Allies” (which you should be reading). Here, the character’s head explodes on discovering his crush actually likes him. “Conceptual metaphor” is a notion that’s been prevalent in some circles of linguistics for the last 30 years,…

  • Defense!

    I’m very excited to say that, after working on this project for 2.5 years, I’ll finally be defending my Master’s project — “Balancing Grammar and Semantics in ‘Comics’: Global Structure in Sequential Image Processing” this coming Monday April 12th here at Tufts. The presentation will describe two experiments that together show converging evidence that the…

  • Updates

    So, I unfortunately haven’t had much an opportunity to blog lately. My apologies to the usual readers! Some updates… I have been working hard at finishing my latest projects, which I had the fun opportunity to present as a poster at the CUNY sentence processing conference out here in New York City. To any readers…

  • Action Stars and Smoke-veiled fights

    I’ve posted every now and again about a convention in comics that I’ve called “action stars”, where a whole panel is replaced by a star shaped “flash” that essentially represents “event happens here!” but doesn’t show that event. I’ve likened this to being like a pronoun in the visual grammar, since it can replace the…

  • “Defining Comics” video

    Patric Lewandowski offers this video lecture of his attempt to define comics, based on his earlier column from Comixtalk. He covers a lot of ground, meshing numerous memes of comics theory. Ultimately, I do disagree with most of his points, for reasons I’ve described elsewhere**, but it’s at least interesting to see him present it…

  • 5 Card Nancy and Panel Transitions

    One of Scott McCloud’s more wacky inventions is the game Five Card Nancy which is based on the old comic strip Nancy. The basic premise of the game is that you can create lots of different (and fun) novel strips by combining random panels together. Scott recently posted an old collage he did that led…

  • Storycards and visual grammar

    My friend Alex sends along this link to a gift pack of “storycards”. Basically, you can use these cards in sequences to create lots of different novel stories. The idea is similar to McCloud’s Five Card Nancy game. I’m interested in it for a few theoretical reasons. For example, having a stock set of units…

  • Almost back…

    Okay, one more status update then we’re back to some real posts… My brainwave study has nicely concluded and I’ve now moved on to analyzing the results. Things look fantastic, so I’m very excited about working to get these written up and submitted to a journal in the coming months. This whole project has been…