Blog

  • CogSci Comics

    I am currently in the refractory period of the semester, enjoying the freedom of summer break starting and the ability to work on all those projects I usually don’t get around to doing during the school year. I’ve now plotted out at least three papers I plan to write, plus a visual language class syllabus…

  • Universcale

    I’ve been ridiculously too busy to blog lately, largely due to my upcoming exam/project on biopsychology. Once that’s over it’s summertime! (i.e. time for me to work on projects otherwise not given enough attention while in classes). In the meantime… Here’s an interesting site that attempts to show the relative sizes of things in the…

  • Podcast: “Grammar” in visual language

    I’ve done another podcast with the folks at VizThink, this time debating Yuri Engelhardt and Dave Gray on what constitutes a visual language and the nature of visual language grammar. This new format allows you to skip around to different chapters to jump straight to parts of interest. (Please note, I object to the insinuation…

  • Navigating page layouts = defining “comics”?

    One of the topics I debated closing out my new essay on page layout (pdf) with was its relationship to McCloud’s definition of “comics.” As most know, McCloud’s definition is that “comics” are “juxtaposed sequential images in deliberate sequence.” Yet, he never places any constraints on that. He means all sequential images are “comics” —…

  • Clever Dumbo?

    The Language Evolution blog posts this interesting youtube video showing an elephant painting a picture of an elephant: I’ve vocalized often that as much as there is a debate about whether animals can or do have language (they don’t), we know of no animals that draw. By drawing, I mean that they employ tool use…

  • Panel Time!

    1.5 seconds per panel. That’s how long it takes on average for wordless panels to be read. I recently completed a very exciting study that asked people to read four-panel comic strips one panel at a time. In this “Self-Paced Reading” task, they see four boxes on the screen, and with each button press a…

  • Navigating Comics Plus

    Since various concerns have popped up here and there about my latest essay on page layouts (pdf), I figured I should take the time to reiterate responses to some of them here… First off, the types of navigation I talk about here are absolutely intended to be part of a broader network of how people…

  • Essay origins

    So far I’ve been very pleased at the response to my latest essay, “Navigating Comics”, on how people navigate through page layouts (pdf). As several responses have been rolling in via email and elsewhere, I intend to do a post soon addressing concerns in that feedback. However, I think it’d be informative to first talk…

  • New Essay: Navigating Comics

    I’m very happy to announce that I have a new essay online: Navigating Comics: Reading Strategies of Page Layouts (pdf). This paper reports the findings of an experiment I conducted looking at how people navigate through comic pages. The big finding: people don’t just mimic text going left-to-right and down. The full abstract: The spatial…

  • Time and The Torch

    On this page I found another great example of a page by Jae Lee that defies the “temporal mapping” idea that successive panels are successive moments: I’m unaware of the full context of the page, but the Human Torch is flying around some big monster of sorts and creates the number “4” (for Fantastic Four…