Research Review

Rationale

This semester, we’re engaging in original, computationally enhanced and humanities-driven research on Charles Schulz’s Peanuts. But it’s a poor researcher who isn’t aware of work that has come before on their topic.

While I’m not aware of anyone who has done what we are, there have been scholars who have considered the comic from a humanities perspective. Likewise, other researchers have considered what it would mean to examine comics from digital or multimodal perspectives. Our own work will be improved as we learn what others have said about these topics. And we’ll get acquainted with this scholarship faster if we share the burden.

Nitty Gritty

For this assignment, you will read two scholarly articles and give a 10-minute presentation about them during class. The presentation will take place on 15 March.

Pick Your Articles

One of your articles will be about about Peanuts—from The Comics of Charles Schulz: The Good Grief of Modern Life, edited by Jared Gardner and Ian Gordon—and the other will be about comics research—from Empirical Comics Research: Digital, Multimodal, and Cognitive Methods, edited by Alexander Dunst, Jochen Laubrock, and Janina Wildfeuer. The chapters in the book’s are listed below. Please email me to let me know which chapters you would like to claim. Since only one person can present on each chapter, please send me a first and second choice for each of the books.

The Comics of Charles Schulz
  1. Peppermint Patty’s Desire: Charles Schulz and the Queer Comics of Failure (Allie)
  2. “There Has to Be Something Deeply Symbolic in That”: Peanuts and the Sublime
  3. Saying, Showing, and Schulz: The Typography and Notation of Peanuts (Jenni)
  4. Consuming Childhood: Peanuts and Children’s Consumer Culture in the Postwar Era
  5. “How Can We Lose When We’re So Sincere?”: Varieties of Sincerity in Peanuts (Ashlin)
  6. “I Thought I Was Winning in the Game of Life…But There Was a Flag on the Play”: Sport in Charles Schulz’s Peanuts
  7. Football and Ottim Liffs: Charlie Brown in Coconino
  8. Schulz and the Late Sixties: Snoopy’s Signs of the Times (Sarah)
  9. Franklin and the Early 1970s
  10. Making A World for All of God’s Children: A Charlie Brown Christmas and the Aesthetics of Doubt and Faith (Maria)
  11. Charles Schulz, Comic Art, and Personal Value
  12. Charlie Brown Cafés and the Marketing of Peanuts in Asia (Jane)
  13. Chips Off the Ol’ Blockhead: Evidence of Influence in Peanuts Parodies
Empirical Comics Research
  1. Introduction
  2. Two Per Cent of What? Constructing a Corpus of Typical American Comic Books
  3. The Quantitative Analysis of Comics: Towards a Visual Stylometry of Graphic Narrative
  4. “The Sider’s Web”: An Analysis of Fan Mail from Amazing Spider-Man, 1963-1995 (Allie)
  5. Crowdsourcing Comics Annotations
  6. Computer Vision Applied to Comic Book Images (Jane)
  7. From Empirical Studies to Visual Narrative Organization: Exploring Page Composition
  8. Character Development in Comics and Graphic Novels: A Systematic Analytical Scheme
  9. How Informative are Information Comics in Science Communication? Empirical Results from an Eye-Tracking Study and Knowledge Testing
  10. The Interpretation of an Evolving Line Drawing (Maria)
  11. Viewing Static Visual Narratives through the Lens of the Scene Perception and Event Comprehension Theory (SPECT)
  12. Attention to Comics: Cognitive Processing During the Reading of Graphic Literature
  13. Reading Words and Images: Factors Influencing Eye Movement in Comic Reading (Jenni)
  14. Detecting Differences between Adapted Narratives: Implication of Order of Modality on Exposure
  15. Visual Language Theory and the Scientific Study of Comics

Read Your Articles

Once you’ve picked your articles, I will email you PDFs of them. Read each of your articles, with an eye to presenting them (see below).

Present Your Articles

You will give a 10-minute presentation on your articles in class. Realistically, you should think about this being two five-minute presentations. For each of the articles, you should discuss the following:

  1. What is the problem that the authors have identified or the question that they want to answer? In a science project, this would be called the “research problem” or “research question.”
  2. Do the authors have a hypothesis? In a science project, this would be called the “hypothesis”; weird, huh?
  3. How do the authors go about resolving this problem or answering this question? In a science project, this would be called “method” or “procedure.”
  4. What evidence do they present or gather? In a science project, this would be the “observations” or “results”. If possible, you should discuss and present comic strips and/or data that
  5. What is the solution to their problem or what answers do they get? In a science project, this would be the “conclusion.”

As is the case with all presentations, you should prepare what you’re going to say. Depending on what you prefer, this could mean a series of bullet points, an outline, or even a fully written talk.

While you are not required to have slides for this presentation, I strongly suspect that having them will be an effective way for you to organize your thoughts and to ensure that you cover everything that you need to about your article.

Grading

This assignment is worth 75 points. Your presentations will be graded based on how well you discuss the five points of each article, as well as your clarity, organization, and how well you adhere to the time limit. I will be using this rubric.

Credits

This is a new assignment that I created for Winter 2022, but it has its roots in annotated bibliography assignments that I have created in the past. Like all of my assignments, it carries a CC BY 4.0 license.