HCID Research Seminar: The Question Concerning Comics as Technology: Gestell and Grid. Implications for HCID

~ Ernesto Priego
A. (2015). When the Last Story is Told. Malmo: C’est Bon Kultur. © 2015.
A page from Allan Haverholm’s When the Last Story is Told. Haverholm, A. (2015). When the Last Story is Told. Malmo: C’est Bon Kultur. © 2015.

 

Today I will give a talk as part of the Centre for Human Computer Interaction Design‘s HCID Research Seminar series.

Talk Title: The Question Concerning Comics as Technology: Gestell and Grid. Implications for HCID

Time: 13:00, Friday 23 November 2018
Room: AG11

Abstract:

In this presentation I will discuss recent research (Priego and Wilkins 2018) where we propose that the goal of the comics grid is to manage, dynamically, what we call “a potentially overwhelming sublime space” through a process of “enframing”. I will argue that this enframing continues to take place well beyond the printed page, and that therefore traditional comic scholarship approaches will need to continue adapting their focus to what new technologies reveal about comics. I will provide examples of how the notion of the  ‘page’ is getting continuously redefined by screen-based media and by comics reading applications.

 In this context, I will argue that fields concerned with screen-based media interactions, such as Human-Computer Interaction Design, should be expected to continue making important contributions to our understanding of comics, for instance, through methods of visual analysis where technology (such as eye-tracking) are used for evaluating how people interact with media. Understanding comics as a type of information architecture, with the grid as a particular type of interface design, can potentially provide different types of explanations of its effectiveness as a means to display and manage otherwise overwhelming volumes and types of information (see for example Kammerer and Gerjets 2010; Bach et al 2018; Tabassum et al 2018).

References

Priego, E. and Wilkins, P., 2018. The Question Concerning Comics as Technology: Gestell and Grid. The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship, 8, p.16. DOI: http://doi.org/10.16995/cg.133

Kammerer, Y and Gerjets, P. 2010. How the interface design influences users’ spontaneous trustworthiness evaluations of web search results: comparing a list and a grid interface. In: Proceedings of the 2010 Symposium on Eye-Tracking Research & Applications (ETRA ‘10), 299–306. ACM, New York, NY, USA. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/1743666.1743736

Bach, B, Wang, Z, Farinella, M, Murray-Rust, D and Riche, NH. 2018. Design Patterns for Data Comics. In: Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ‘18), 12. ACM, New York, NY, USA, Paper 38. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3173612

Tabassum, M, Alqhatani, A, Aldossari, M and Richter Lipford, H. 2018. Increasing User Attention with a Comic-based Policy. In: Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ‘18), 6. ACM, New York, NY, USA, Paper 200. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3173774

Published by Ernesto Priego

My passion is creating opportunities for discovery, creativity and innovation. I am an advocate for enhanced access to information as a public good. I enjoy fostering engagement and openness, facilitating collaboration and mentoring. My main focus is multi-disciplinary and involves practically and theoretically connecting the dots between varied, closely-related fields and topics: comics studies; human-computer interaction design, library and information science, digital humanities, scholarly communications, publishing studies, digital innovation and material culture, intellectual rights and open science, access, data and educational resources. I love writing and spreading the word about the things I believe in. I love higher education and the Internet and I define myself as a digital scholarship advocate. I love working collaboratively and on my own. You can still follow me and/or contact me via Twitter @ernestopriego.