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  • Iconic Bias, Part 2

    As I discussed in my previous post, there is an Art Perspective belief that people should learn to draw from “real life” and not from copying others. In that post, I tried to tease out some of the underlying assumptions of this belief. Here, I’d like to point out how it leads to derision of…

  • A Terrifying Message from Al Gore

  • Iconic Bias, Part 1.5

    Here’s another subtle example of this Iconic Bias that I discussed in my earlier post. From a recent new interview with Scott McCloud, the interviewer asked: “What’s hard for you to draw?” Can you see the subtle bias here? Give it some thought… It assumes that the capacity for drawing is about “drawing things in…

  • Linguistic mythbusting

    Here’s an article about some of the most pervasive myths about language and questioning why linguistics is not a more prevalently studied or respected field. I personally have an answer to this: since everyone speaks language, people all feel like experts, and they think that they understand most all there is to know about it…

  • Comics Generation Thesis

    Jason Alderman has completed his (downloadable) Masters Thesis on “Generating Comics Narrative to Summarize Wearable Computer Data.” Here’s the abstract: As people record their entire lives to disk, they need ways of summarizing and making sense of all of this data. Comics (and visual language) are a largely untapped medium for summarization, as they are…

  • Are you ready to Folk Rock!?

    I don’t often write about my non-theory tastes on this blog, like music, though I keep meaning to. So, here’s a good place to start. Today, I got my copy of the new Counting Crows live album “New Amsterdam,” and its just fantastic. Not only have they been my favorite band since their debut, but…

  • Iconic Bias, Part 1

    I’ve tried to point out in some of my writings that there is an “Art” perspective that dominates the usage of graphic creation in our culture. Its primary emphasis is for innovation and individuality in styles in contrast to a “Language” perspective that seems communality and shared signs. Regarding learning, the “Art” view has two…

  • San Diego, coming soon!!

    Thanks go to Scott McCloud for kindly linking to my latest Comixpedia article on “visual rhyming.” He suggests “Eye Rhymes” as another good term, and I agree, it does sound pretty cool. He also notes that he’ll be speaking at the San Diego ComicCon on Friday from 12-1pm. I know I’ll be there, and so…

  • Re-un-defining “Comics”

    Every now and then it’s good to revisit the fundamentals. I had articulated the whole division between “comics” and “visual language” fairly well in a listserve discussion awhile back, so I thought it might be worth reposting it here for any (hopefully?) new readers that might have popped up since I started the blog… The…

  • Looking Ahead to the Past

    Akin to the spirit of my last post, in the latest issue of Cognitive Science is an article about Aymara Andean metaphors for time. The authors claim that Andeans have a conception of the future as something behind the speaker and the past as in front. This is the opposite of English where most of…