Blog

  • See Figure WTF!?

    I recently received a French book on comic theory from interlibrary loan that has been decently interesting. While reading it though, I started noticing something very strange. I’d be progressing along, and the graphic examples weren’t there — there was only a little tag “Figure X”. Quickly, I had the infuriating realization that they were…

  • Coherence-building in comics

    Bridgeman, Teresa. 2004. Keeping an eye on things: attention, tracking, and coherence-building. Belphégor 4 (1). Bridgeman’s article discusses various aspects of coherence-building throughout comics structure — “coherence” being the discourse theory notion of a salience across various units. It thus joins various other works that apply discourse theory to comics, though dabbles in cognitive science…

  • Graphic safety for airplane crashes

    One of the reasons I’ve been a bit MIA from the blog lately is because I’ve been traveling a lot. On one flight, I noticed some interesting things in the safety manual. First, let’s look at a section that isn’t too bad: This part shows a nice step-by-step for what to do in the event…

  • Odds and Ends

    Between school, conferences, and life, my time has become quite precious lately. A few days ago my BioPsychology professor said that we’ll be dissecting sheep brains in class. That should be interesting. I’ve finally gotten a chance to analyze a bunch of the data that has come in from my Peanuts experiment and things are…

  • VizThink 08

    I’ve spent the last several days out here in San Francisco at the VizThink Conference where I gave a talk about visual language. There have been a lot of interesting presentations, some more amenable to my thinking than others. It’s also been a great pleasure to hang out with Scott McCloud here, who seems to…

  • Connectedness in comics

    Weber, Heinz J. 1989. Elements of Text-Based and Image-Based Connectedness in Comic Stories, and Some Analogies to Cinema and Written Text. Paper read at Text and Connectedness: Proceedings of the Conference on Connexity and Coherence, July 16-21 1984, at Urbino, Italy. Weber attempts to create a textual model of comic communication drawing on cinema studies…

  • Podcast on Visual Language

    Later this month I’ll be giving a talk at the VizThink Conference in San Francisco, so to promote it I did a podcast yesterday. Here’s the original post, though they were nice enough to give me the feed here as well. Mainly I discuss the Big Ideas behind my visual language theories. What is “visual…

  • New Year, Old Projects

    Usually when I’m on break, I end up blogging quite a bit. I’m surprised I haven’t been as active online lately. I have, however, been working on several projects… I’m very very close to having my paper about how people navigate through page layouts done, and I’m getting really excited about how the theory in…

  • Event segmentation in panels

    I’ve been reading up lately on research related to how people segment events and their boundaries, particularly the brain areas associated with their processing through fMRI. In one study, they first showed people videos of events, then on subsequent trials asked them to identify fine-grained and coarse-grained event boundaries. In all trials, they found brain…

  • Some Peanuts patterns

    It’s the end of the semester, and as usual things are crazy. I’ve finally got my Peanuts experiment up and running, which means people are coming in to participate. A lot of people. The experiment lasts an hour, and between last week and this week, I’ll run 24 subjects, which means I’ll have lots of…