I have, unfortunately, once again been struck by so much work that blogging has fell by the wayside. Thankfully, this is a good thing in many ways, because I have a whole lot of really cool stuff going on! For example, I'm busy planning my new class here at Tufts on The Visual Linguistics of Comics, the first time such a class has ever been offered. I've actually posted the syllabus online. If

In discussing this post of mine with Derik, I realized that I should post on the technique I used of substituting a whole panel for an "action star," like this: This usage is somewhat similar to what I talk about in this older article on metonymy, and the same phenomena creeps up overtly in McCloud's famous "Closure" example from Understanding Comics: In both cases, we never see the action,

Derik posts a quote from this article on Narration in Comics that discusses cognitive schema and comics. I'd read the article awhile ago, but seized on this part of the quote : "An extrinsic norm crucial to comics is the interpretation of a figure reappearing in several panels as one and the same figure shown at different moments in time (usually in chronological order)… Usually it is assumed

This related to both sequential images and linguistics, so how could I not post it? Via LanguageLog:

I've been working very hard lately on a few projects and papers that have been occupying a lot of my time and energy. One of them is a write-up of my model of visual language grammar that I've been developing over the past several years. This one is particularly important to me because it will frame a lot of the issues for future studies, especially for all the psychological experiments I'm now

Kraft, Robert N. 1987. The influence of camera angle on comprehension and retention of pictorial events. Memory and Cognition 15 (4):291-307. Kraft explores the semantic associations made to different camera angles (high, eye-level, low) in a four frame photo story. Subjects were asked to rate the story along a 7-point scale, use a recall test for remembering the order, and then a recognition

Before I started reading Drawing Words and Writing Pictures, Matt Madden warned me that it was a book for praxis, not theory. As amusing as I find it that such a disclaimer needs to be given to me, the book draws upon aspects of theory throughout in an informed and well-measured way, and I am led to thinking further about the relationship between theory and praxis.

I am ecstatic to say that I've just learned my course for teaching a "Visual Linguistics of 'Comics'" course next Spring semester '09 has been approved! This will be the first course of it's kind to cover my own visual language research and related studies in a complete package. I'm beyond excited about it, so... if you're in the Boston area and might want to head over to Tufts for some spring

I stumbled across this article recently about how current theories of perception are similar to what magicians have been exploiting for years. Essentially, the idea is that we can only "see" what our attention is focused on at a given time. They liken it to a "spotlight" which roams around and only let's you take in certain things under its view. Though in the case of vision all the things out of the "spotlight" are still within your visual field. You just don't "see" them.

Click here for full article.

The best thing about the new translated work The System of Comics by Thierry Groensteen is that it hopefully reflects an increase of English translations of international works on comic theory. There are numerous offerings by European, Japanese, and South American authors that rarely make their way into American scholarship, and more exchange of ideas can only be fruitful to the field.