Digital scholarship blog

This is a guest post by Linda Berube, an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Partnership student based at the British Library and City, University of London. If you would like to know more about Linda's research, please email her at [email protected].

In my last blog post, I spoke of my PhD research into UK digital comics creation to consumption practices. I have interviewed comics creators about the creative process and the extent to which digital technology has informed it, as well as with publishers who discussed the impact of digital technology on workflows producing both print and digital.  

I also talked about a UK comics mapping exercise that revealed “the visibility of digital comics across sectors including health, economics, education [for example Figure 1 on legal deposit], literacy, and even the hard sciences”, as well as autobiography (see Figure 2), superheroes, horror, and science fiction.

Figure 1: Panel from 'The Legal Deposit and You', by Olivia Hicks (British Library, 2018). Reproduced with permission from the British Library.

In publisher and creator interviews for this research, it has to be admitted that print comics loomed large in discussions. This attachment to print even extended to some webcomics creators who, while firmly grounded in the digital environment, harboured aspirations of print versions somewhere down the line.

Still, one webcomic creator interviewed presented a rather balanced view:

“There are things digital can do that print can't do…Hyper linking I think is interesting. There's different things that you can do with page layouts and the way that information is presented on the page. Where it's something that goes in a new direction or different direction from print, I think that's interesting, there's strong potential there”.

 

Figure 2: Archive capture of 'Our Super Adventure' by Sarah Graley. Retrieved from https://www.webarchive.org.uk/wayback/archive/20170828084711/http://www.oursuperadventure.com/

Readers Reading Digital Comics

What kind of impact do different page layouts and hypertext have on readers reading digital comics? To understand whether these “new directions” are truly unique affordances that only digital comics can provide requires extending the research to the another major participant in the creation to consumption process: the consumer or digital comics reader.

For the third phase of data collection, UK-based digital comics readers will be consulted through semi-structured interviews, reading observations and think aloud sessions. Emphasis will be placed on determining not just how readers find and consume comics, but what their response is, how it can be defined, from passive to transactional to performative.  Aims and objectives include:

• To understand the reader role in the publishing and communication process of UK digital comics, their response to digital comics, and how that response contributes to digital comics narratives.
• To learn about how readers discover new comics and share their reading preferences and experiences with others.
• To understand how comics portals, devices etc. contribute to the reader’s experience of and response to the text.
• To use HCI/HII methods and understand the value of these approaches in collecting data about readers of digital comics.

It is important to note that the research is not about assessing the useability of digital comics platforms (although readers will not be discouraged from talking about them), but how readers read digital comics, which can include the devices they use, the platforms they use to read from, and their transactional behaviour with the texts themselves.

Calling All UK-Based Digital Comics Readers

Of course, in order to achieve these aims, I need readers to talk to me about their reading. If you are a UK-based digital comics reader, I’d like to speak to you whether you read comics via apps or web platforms on your phone, laptop, tablet etc., or even through PDF downloads. I would also like to hear about how you learn about new comics and share the comics you love with others.

Right now, I am looking for expressions of interest. If you would like to participate in this research, please contact me at [email protected].

First of five training events will kick off with an in-person session at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh on Tuesday 31 January.

The British Library’s Repository Training Programme for cultural heritage professionals is funded as part of AHRC’s iDAH programme to support cultural heritage organisations in establishing or expanding open scholarship activities and sharing their outputs through research repositories. You can read more about the development of this training programme in this blog post.

What will you learn?

This one-day training session is designed as a starting point to a broader set of knowledge that will help you to:

• Understand research landscape in cultural heritage organizations, benefits of openness for heritage research, basic concepts of open principles and influencing decision makers.
• Lay foundation for repository services including stakeholder engagement, policy development, technical overview and project planning.
• Adopt common principles and frameworks, technical standards and requirements in establishing repository services in a cultural heritage organisation.
• Explore basics of scholarly communications ecosystem in the context of cultural heritage practices.

Who is this training for?

This programme is intended for those who are working in GLAMs (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums), specifically a cultural heritage institution or a collection-holding organisation in roles where they are involved in managing digital collections, supporting research lifecycle from funding to dissemination, providing research infrastructure and developing policies. However, anyone interested in the given topics are welcome to attend.

Prerequisites

No previous knowledge of topics is required. However, an understanding of open access will maximise the benefit of the taught content for attendees. We will provide pre-readings for the basics prior to the event.

Training outline

Trainers will cover topics of following four modules through a mixture of regular presentations, recorded/online content, engaging activities, breakout sessions and self-directed learning materials.

Module 1 Opening up heritage research
This module covers the topics of understanding research landscape in GLAM organizations, benefits of openness for heritage research, basic concepts of open principles and influencing decision makers.

Module 2 Getting started with heritage GLAM repositories
This module covers the topics of stakeholder engagement, policy development, project planning and technical overview of research repositories

Module 3: Realising and expanding the benefits
This module covers the topics of adopting common principles and frameworks, compliance with publisher policies, types of research objects and outputs in cultural heritage, rights management, technical requirements, and engagement with researchers, usage and reporting.

Module 4: Exploring the scholarly communications system
This module provides an overview on the topics of scholarly publishing, research data management, persistent identifiers, rights management and copyright, responsible research, and digital preservation accompanied with a breakout activity to discuss challenges and prioritize topics for an online follow up session.

Duration and programme

This is a one-day programme takes place from 10:30 to 15:30 GMT with a lunch break for an hour. A detailed programme will be provided to the attendees prior to the event.

10:30 – 12:30 Module 1 and 2 with 10 min. break

12:30 – 13:30 Lunch break

13:30 – 15:30 Module 3 and 4 with 10 min. break

Members of Research Infrastructure Services Team at the British Library will be delivering the training programme. The team has over ten years of broad experience and extensive knowledge in supporting open scholarship across the sector and with international partners. They also provide a Shared Research Repository Service for the cultural heritage organisations.    

Book your place

In-person sessions are planned for a maximum of 35 people per event and registrants from cultural heritage institutions will be prioritised. Registration for the event is free. Please fill this form to book your place by 25 January. Confirmation and event details will be sent to the registered email address.

Further face-to-face sessions will be held before July 2023 in York and Wales. We will be providing more information about upcoming events in the coming months. 

Please contact [email protected] if you have any question or comments about this training programme.

Do you think the repository landscape is mature enough in the heritage sector? Are the policies, infrastructure and skills in place to open up heritage research through digital repositories? Our brief analysis shows that research activity in GLAMs needs better acknowledgement, established digital repositories for dissemination of outputs and empowered staff to make use of repository services. At the British Library, we published a report called Scoping Skills and Developing Training Programme for Managing Repository Services in Cultural Heritage Organisations. We looked at the roles and people involved in the research workflow in GLAMs, and their skills needs to share heritage research openly through digital repositories in order to develop a training program for cultural heritage professionals.

Making heritage research openly available

Making research openly available to everyone increases the reach and impact of the work, driving increased value for money in research investment, and helps to make research reusable for everyone. ‘Open’ in this context is not only about making research freely accessible but also about ensuring the research is shared with rich metadata, licensed for reuse, including persistent identifiers, and is discoverable. Communicating research in GLAM contexts goes beyond journal articles. Digital scholarship, practice-based and computational research approaches generate a wide range of complex objects that need to be shared, reused to inform practice, policy and future research, and cannot necessarily be assessed with common metrics and rankings of academia.

The array of research activity in GLAMs needs to be addressed in the context of research repositories. If you look at OpenDOAR and Re3data, the global directories of open repositories, the number of repositories in the cultural heritage sector is still small compared to academic institutions. There is an increasing need to establish repositories for heritage research and to empower cultural heritage professionals to make use of repository services. Staff who are involved in supporting research activities, managing digital collections, and providing research infrastructure in GLAM organisations must be supported with capacity development programmes to establish open scholarship activities and share their research outputs through research repositories.

Who is involved in the research activities and repository services?

This question is important considering that staff may not be explicitly research-active, yet research is regularly conducted in addition to day-to-day jobs in GLAMs. In addition, organisations are not primarily driven by a research agenda in the heritage sector. The study we undertook as part of an AHRC funded repository infrastructure project showed us that cultural heritage professionals are challenged by the invisibility of forms of research conducted in their day-to-day jobs as well as lack of dedicated time and staff to work around open scholarship.

In order to bring clarity to the personas involved in research activities and link them to competencies and training needs later on for the purpose of this work, we defined five profiles that carry out and contribute to research in cultural heritage organisations. These five profiles illustrate the researcher as a core player, alongside four other profiles involved in making research happen, and ensuring it can be published, shared, communicated and preserved.

Figure 1. Profiles identified in the cultural heritage institutions to conduct, facilitate, and support research workflow.

Consultation on training needs for repository services

We explored the skill gaps and training needs of GLAM professionals from curation to rights management, and open scholarship to management of repository services. In addition to scanning the training landscape for competency frameworks, existing programmes and resources, we conducted interviews to explore training requirements relevant to repository services. Finally, we validated initial findings in a consultative workshop with cultural heritage professionals, to hear their experience and get input to a competency framework and training curriculum.

Interviews highlighted that there is a lack of knowledge and support in cultural heritage organisations, where institutional support and training is not guaranteed for research communication or open scholarship. In terms of types of research activities, the workshop brought interesting discussions about what constitutes ‘research’ in the cultural heritage context and what makes it different to research in a university context. The event underlined the fact that cultural heritage staff profiles for producing, supporting, and communicating the research are different to the higher education landscape at many levels.

Figure 2: Discussion board from the Skills and Training Breakout Session in virtual Consultative Workshop held on 28/04/2022.

The interviews and the consultative workshop highlighted that the ways of research conducted and communicated in the cultural heritage sector (as opposed to academia) should be taken into account in identifying skills needed and developing training programmes in the areas of open scholarship.

Competency framework and curriculum for repository training programme

There is a wealth of information, valuable project outputs, and a number of good analytical works available to identify gaps and gain new skills, particularly in the areas of open science, scholarly communications and research data management. However, adjusting and adopting these works to the context of cultural heritage organisations and relevant professionals will increase their relevance and uptake. Derived from our desk research and workshop analysis, we developed a competency framework that sets out the knowledge and skills required to support open scholarship for the personas present in GLAM organisations. Topic clusters used in the framework are as follows:

1. Repository Service management
2. Curation & data stewardship
3. Metadata management
4. Preservation
5. Scholarly publishing
6. Assessment and impact
7. Advocacy and communication
8. Capacity development

The proposed curriculum was designed by considering the pathways to develop, accelerate and manage a repository service. It contains only the areas that we identify as a priority to deliver the most value to cultural heritage organisations. Five teaching modules are considered in this preliminary work: 

1. Opening up heritage research
2. Getting started with GLAM repositories
3. Realising and expanding the benefits
4. Exploring the scholarly communications ecosystem
5. Topics for future development

A complete version of the competency framework and the curriculum can be found in the report and is also available as a Google spreadsheet. They will drive increased uptake and use of repositories across AHRC’s investments, increasing value for money from both research funding and infrastructure funding.

What is next?

From January to July2023, we, at the British Library, will prepare a core set of materials based on this curriculum and deliver training events in a combination of online and in-person workshops. Training events are being planned to take place in Scotland, North England, Wales in person in addition to several online sessions. Both the framework and the training curriculum will be refined as we receive feedback and input from the participants of these events throughout next year. Event details will be announced in collaboration with host institutions in this blog as well as on our social media channels. Watch this space for more information.

If you have any feedback or questions, please contact us at [email protected]

In August 2022 I started work on a project to investigate the legacies of curatorial voice in the descriptions of incunabula collections at the British Library and their future reuse. My research is funded by the collaborative AHRC-RLUK Professional Practice Fellowship Scheme for academic and research libraries which launched in 2021. As part of the first cohort of ten Fellows I embraced this opportunity to engage in practitioner research that benefits my institution and the wider sector, and to promote the role of library professionals as important research partners.

The overall aim of my Fellowship is to demonstrate new ways of working with digitised catalogues that would also improve the discoverability and usability of the collections they describe. The focus of my research is the Catalogue of books printed in the 15th century now at the British Museum (or BMC) published between 1908 and 2007 which describes over 12,700 volumes from the British Library incunabula collection. By using computational approaches and tools with the data derived from the catalogue I will gain new insights into and interpretations of this valuable resource and enable its reuse in contemporary online resources. 

BMC volume 2 titlepage

This research idea was inspired by a recent collaboration with Dr James Baker, who is also my mentor for this Fellowship, and was further developed in conversations with Dr Karen Limper-Herz, Lead Curator for Incunabula, Adrian Edwards, Head of Printed Heritage Collections, and Alan Danskin, Collections Metadata Standards Manager, who support my research at the Library.

My Fellowship runs until July 2023 with Fridays being my main research days. I began by studying the history of the catalogue, its arrangement and the structure of the item descriptions and their relationship with different online resources. Overall, the main focus of this first phase has been on generating the text data required for the computational analysis and investigations into curatorial and cataloguing practice. This work involved new digitisation of the catalogue and a lot of experimentation using the Transkribus AI-empowered platform that proved best-suited for improving the layout and text recognition for the digitised images. During the last two months I have hugely benefited from the expertise of my colleague Tom Derrick, as we worked together on creating the training data and building structure models for the incunabula catalogue images.

Layout recognition output for pages with only two columns, including text baselines, viewed on Transkribus Lite

Text recognition output after applying the model trained with annotations for 2 columns on the page, viewed on Transkribus Lite

Layout recognition output for pages with mixed layout of single text block and text in columns, viewed on Transkribus Lite

Whilst the data preparation phase has taken longer than I had planned due to the varied layout of the catalogue, this has been an important part of the process as the project outcomes are dependent on using the best quality text data for the incunabula descriptions. The next phase of the research will involve the segmentation of the records and extraction of relevant information to use with a range of computational tools. I will report on the progress with this work and the next steps early next year. Watch this space and do get in touch if you would like to learn more about my research.

This blogpost is by Dr Rossitza Atanassova, Digital Curator for Digitisation, British Library. She is on Twitter @RossiAtanassova  and Mastodon @[email protected]

Digital Curator, and Living with Machines Co-Investigator Dr Mia Ridge writes…

The Living with Machines research project is a collaboration between the British Library, The Alan Turing Institute and various partner universities. Our free exhibition at Leeds City Museum, Living with Machines: Human stories from the industrial age, opened at the end of July. Read on for information about adult events around the exhibition…

Museum Late: Living with Machines, Thursday 24 November, 2022

6 - 10pm • Leeds City Museum • £5, booking essential https://my.leedstickethub.co.uk/19101

The first ever Museum Late at Leeds City Museum! Come along to experience the museum after hours with music, pub quiz, weaving, informal workshops, chats with curators, and a quiz. Local food and drinks in the main hall.

Full programme: https://museumsandgalleries.leeds.gov.uk/events/leeds-city-museum/museum-late-living-with-machines/

Tickets: https://my.leedstickethub.co.uk/19101

Study Day: Living with Machines, Friday December 2, 2022

10:00 am - 4:00 pm • Online • Free but booking essential: https://my.leedstickethub.co.uk/18775

A unique opportunity to hear experts in the field illuminate key themes from the exhibition and learn how exhibition co-curators found stories and objects to represent research work in AI and digital history. This study day is online via Zoom so that you can attend from anywhere.

Full programme: https://museumsandgalleries.leeds.gov.uk/events/leeds-city-museum/living-with-machines-study-day/

Tickets: https://my.leedstickethub.co.uk/18775

Living with Machines Wikithon, Saturday January 7, 2023

1 – 4:30pm • Leeds City Museum • Free but booking essential: https://my.leedstickethub.co.uk/19104

Ever wanted to try editing Wikipedia, but haven't known where to start? Join us for a session with our brilliant Wikipedian-in-residence to help improve Wikipedia’s coverage of local lives and topics at an editathon themed around our exhibition. 

Everyone is welcome. You won’t require any previous Wiki experience but please bring your own laptop for this event. Find out more, including how you can prepare, in my blog post on the Living with Machines site, Help fill gaps in Wikipedia: our Leeds editathon.

The exhibition closes the next day, so it really is your last chance to see it!

Full programme: https://museumsandgalleries.leeds.gov.uk/events/leeds-city-museum/living-with-machines-wikithon-exploring-the-margins/

Tickets: https://my.leedstickethub.co.uk/19104

If you just want to try out something more hands on with textiles inspired by the exhibition, there's also a Peg Loom Weaving Workshop, and not one but two Christmas Wreath Workshops.

You can find out more about our exhibition on the Living with Machines website.

As part of International Open Access Week, the British Library is delighted to host its annual Open and Engaged event online on 24 October, Monday from 13:00 to 16:30 BST.

Since 2018 the British Library has organised the Open and Engaged Conference to coincide with International Open Access Week.

In line with this year’s #OAWeek theme: Open for Climate Justice; Open and Engaged will address intersections between cultural heritage and climate research through use of collections, digital infrastructures and skills.

A range of speakers from cultural heritage and higher education institutions will answer these questions to shed a light on the theme:

• What is the role of library collections, historical datasets to understand the impact of climate change?
• How to use digital infrastructure for more equitable knowledge sharing?
• What roles and skills are needed to make research from heritage organisations openly available?

We invite everyone interested in the topic to join us on the day by registering via this online form. Please see the programme below and note that it is subject to minor updates up until the event date.  

Programme – 24 October, Monday - British Summer Time (UTC+1)

DOIs now available for each talk

13:00 – 13:10  Opening notes

13:10 – 13:15  Welcome remarks by Rachael Kotarski, the British Library

13:15 – 14:05  Climate research in cultural heritage - moderated by Maja Maricevic, the British Library

13:15 – 13:40 Climate change approach at the British Library. Maja Maricevic, the British Library

13:40 – 14:05 Climate justice at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. Lorna Mitchel, Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh

14:05 – 14:30 Break

14:30 – 15:45  Opening up heritage research: Infrastructure and skills – moderated by Susan Miles, the British Library

14.30 – 14:55  “Forever or 5 years”: Sustainability planning for Digital Research Infrastructure for Arts and Humanities. Anna Maria Sichani, Digital Humanities Research Hub, School of Advanced Study, University of London

14:55 -15:20  Shared Research Repository Service and competency framework for cultural heritage professionals. Jenny Basford and Ilkay Holt, the British Library

15:20 – 15:45 Valuing the breadth and depth of skills in the research library. Claire Knowles, University of Leeds

15:45 – 16:00 Closing remarks from Rachael Kotarski, The British Library

We encourage you to participate in discussion with other attendees and speakers by using the Twitter hashtag #OpenEngaged. If you have any questions, please contact us at [email protected].  

Digital Curator, and Living with Machines Co-Investigator Dr Mia Ridge writes…

The Living with Machines research project is a collaboration between the British Library, The Alan Turing Institute and various partner universities. Our free exhibition at Leeds City Museum, Living with Machines: Human stories from the industrial age, opened at the end of July. Read on for information about adult events around the exhibition…

AI evening panels and workshop, September 2022

We’ve put together some great panels with expert speakers guaranteed to get you thinking about the impact of AI with their thought-provoking examples and questions. You'll have a chance to ask your own questions in the Q&A, and to mingle with other attendees over drinks.

We’ve also collaborated with AI Tech North to offer an exclusive workshop looking at the practical aspects of ethics in AI. If you’re using or considering AI-based services or tools, this might be for you. Our events are also part of the jam-packed programme of the Leeds Digital Festival #LeedsDigi22, where we’re in great company.

The role of AI in Creative and Cultural Industries

Thu, Sep 22, 17:30 – 19:45 BST

Leeds City Museum • Free but booking required

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-role-of-ai-in-creative-and-cultural-industries-tickets-395003043737

How will AI change what we wear, the TV and films we watch, what we read? 

Join our fabulous Chair Zillah Watson (independent consultant, ex-BBC) and panellists Rebecca O’Higgins (Founder KI-AH-NA), Laura Ellis (Head of Technology Forecasting, BBC) and Maja Maricevic, (Head of Higher Education and Science, British Library) for an evening that'll help you understand the future of these industries for audiences and professionals alike. 

Maja's written a blog post on The role of AI in creative and cultural industries with more background on this event.

Workshop: Developing ethical and fair AI for society and business

Thu, Sep 29, 13:30 - 17:00 BST

Leeds City Museum • Free but booking required

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/workshop-developing-ethical-and-fair-ai-for-society-and-business-tickets-400345623537

Panel: Developing ethical and fair AI for society and business

Thu, Sep 29, 17:30 – 19:45 BST

Leeds City Museum • Free but booking required

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/panel-developing-ethical-and-fair-ai-for-society-and-business-tickets-395020706567

AI is coming, so how do we live and work with it? What can we all do to develop ethical approaches to AI to help ensure a more equal and just society? 

Our expert Chair, Timandra Harkness, and panellists Sherin Mathew (Founder & CEO of AI Tech UK), Robbie Stamp (author and CEO at Bioss International), Keely Crockett (Professor in Computational Intelligence, Manchester Metropolitan University) and Andrew Dyson (Global Co-Chair of DLA Piper’s Data Protection, Privacy and Security Group) will present a range of perspectives on this important topic.

If you missed our autumn events, we also have a study day and Wikipedia editathon this winter. You can find out more about our exhibition on the Living with Machines website.

This is a guest post by Linda Berube, an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Partnership student based at the British Library and City, University of London. If you would like to know more about Linda's research, please do email her at [email protected].

When I last wrote a post for the Digital Scholarship blog in 2020 (Berube, 2020), I was a fairly new PhD student, fresh out of the starting blocks, taking on the challenge of UK digital comics research.  My research involves an analysis of the systems and processes of UK digital comics publishing as a means of understanding how digital technology has affected, maybe transformed them. For this work, I have the considerable support of supervisors Ian Cooke and Stella Wisdom (British Library) and Ernesto Priego and Stephann Makri (Human-Computer Interaction Design Centre, City, University of London).

Little did I, or the rest world for that matter, know the transformations to daily life brought on by pandemic that were to come. There was no less of an impact felt in the publishing sector, and certainly in comics publishing. Still, despite all the obstacles to meetings, people from traditional^[2] large and small press publishers, media and video game companies publishing comics, as well as creators and self-publishers gave generously of their time to discuss comics with me. I am currently speaking with comics readers and observing their reading practices, again all via remote meetings. To all these people, this PhD student owes a debt of gratitude for their enthusiastic participation.

British Comics Publishing: It’s where we’re at

Digital technology has had a significant impact on British comics publishing, but not as pervasively as expected from initial prognostications by scholars and the comics press. Back in 2020, I observed:

  This particular point in time offers an excellent opportunity to consider the digital comics, and specifically UK, landscape. We seem to be past the initial enthusiasm for digital technologies when babies and bathwater were ejected with abandon (see McCloud 2000, for example), and probably still in the middle of a retrenchment, so to speak, of that enthusiasm (see Priego 2011 pp278-280, for example). (Berube, 2020).

But ‘retrenchment’ might be a strong word. According to my research findings to date, and in keeping with those of the broader publishing sector (Thompson, 2010; 2021), the comics publishing process has most definitely been ‘revolutionized’ by digital technology. All comics begin life as digital files until they are published in print. Even those creators who still draw by hand must convert their work to digital versions that can be sent to a publisher or uploaded to a website or publishing platform. And, while print comics have by no means been completely supplanted by digital comics (in fact a significant number of those interviewed voiced a preference for print), reading on digital devices-laptops, tablets, smartphones-has become popular enough for publishers to provide access through ebook and app technology. Even those publishers I interviewed who were most resistant to digital felt compelled ‘to dabble in digital comics’ (according to one small press publisher) by at least providing pdf versions on Gumroad or some other storefront. The restrictions on print distribution and sales through bookstores resulting from Covid lockdown compelled some of the publishers not only to provide more access to digital versions, but some went as far to sell digital-exclusive versions, in other words comics only offered digitally.

Everywhere you look, a comic

The visibility of digital comics across sectors including health, economics, education, literacy and even the hard sciences was immediately obvious from a mapping exercise of UK comics publishers, producers and platforms as well as through interviews. What this means is that comics-the creation and reading of them-are used to teach and to learn about multiple topics, including archiving (specifically UK Legal Deposit) (Figure 1) and Anthropology (specifically Smartphones and Smart Ageing) (Figure 2):

Figure 1: Panel from 'The Legal Deposit and You', by Olivia Hicks (British Library, 2018). Reproduced with permission from the British Library.

Figure 2: Haapio-Kirk, L., Murariu, G., and Hahn, A. (artist) (2022) 'Beyond Anthropomorphism Palestine', Anthropology of Smartphones and Smart Ageing (ASSA) Blog. Based on Maya de Vries and Laila Abed Rabho’s research in Al-Quds (East Jerusalem). Available at: https://wwwdepts-live.ucl.ac.uk/anthropology/assa/discoveries/beyond-anthropomorphism/ . Reproduced with permission.

Moreover, comics in their incarnation as graphic novels have grabbed literary prizes, for example Jimmy Corrigan: the smartest kid on earth (Jonathan Cape, 2001) by Chris Ware won the Guardian First Book Award in 2001, and Sabrina (Granta, 2018) by Nick Drnaso was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2018 (somewhat controversially, see Nally, 2018).

Just Like Reading a Book, But Not…

But by extending the definition of digital comics^[3] to include graphic novels mostly produced as ebooks, the ‘same-ness” of reading in print became evident over the course of interviews with publishers and creators. Publishing a comic in pdf format, whether that be on a website, on a publishing platform, or as a book is just the easiest, most cost-effective way to do it:

  We’re print first in our digital workflow—Outside of graphic novels, with other types of books we occasionally have the opportunity to work with the digital version as a consideration at the outset, in which case the tagging/classes are a factored in at the beginning stages (a good example would be a recent straight -to-digital reflowable ebook). This is the exception though, and also does not apply to graphic novels, which are all print-led. (Interview with publisher, December 2020)

Traditional book publishers have not been the only ones taking up comics - gaming and media companies have acquired the rights to comics, comics brands previously published in print. For more and different sectors, comics increasingly have become an attractive option especially for their multimedia appeal. However, what they do with the comics is a mixture of the same, for instance being print-led as described in the above comment, and different, for example through conversion to digital interactive versions as well as providing apps with more functionality than the ebook format.

It's How You Read Them

Comics formatted especially for reading on apps, such as 2000 AD, ComiXology, and Marvel Unlimited, can be variable in the types of reading experiences they offer to readers. While some have retained the ‘multi-panel display’ experience of reading a print comic book, others have gone beyond the ‘reads like a book’ experience. ComiXology, a digital distribution platform for comics owned by Amazon, pioneered the “guided view” technology now used by the likes of Marvel and DC, where readers view one panel at a time. Some of the comics readers I have interviewed refer to this reading experience as ‘the cinematic experience’. Readers page through the comic one panel or scene at a time, yes, as if watching it on film or TV.

These reading technologies do tend to work better on a tablet than on a smartphone. The act of scrolling required to read webcomics on the WEBTOON app (and others, such as Tapas), designed to be read on smartphones, produces that same kind of ‘cinematic’ effect: readers of comics on both the ComiXology and Web Toon apps I have interviewed describe the exact same experience: the build-up of “anticipation”, “tension”,  “on the edge of my seat” as they page or scroll down to the next scene/panel. WEBTOON creators employ certain techniques in order to create that tension in the vertical format, for example the use of white space between panels: the more space, the more scrolling, the more “edge of the seat” experience. Major comics publishers have started creating ‘vertical’ (scrolling on phones) comics: Marvel launched its Infinity Comics to appeal to the smartphone webcomics reader.

So, it would seem that good old-fashioned comics pacing combined with publishing through apps designed for digital devices provide a different, but same reading experience:  a uniquely digital reading experience.

Same But Different: I’m still here

So, here I am, still a PhD student currently conducting research with comics readers, as part of my research and as part of a secondment with the BL supported by AHRC Additional Student Development funding. This additional funding has afforded me the opportunity to employ UX (user behaviour/experience) techniques with readers, primarily through conducting reading observation sessions and activities. I will be following up this blog with an update on this research as well as a call for participation into more reader research.

References 

Berube, L. (2020) ‘Not Just for Kids: UK Digital Comics, from creation to consumption’, British Library Digital Scholarship Blog”, 24 August 2020. Available at: https://blogs.bl.uk/digital-scholarship/2020/08/not-just-for-kids-uk-digital-comics-from-creation-to-consumption.html

Drnaso, N. (2018) Sabrina. London, England: Granta Books.

McCloud, Scott (2000) Reinventing Comics: How Imagination and Technology Are Revolutionizing an Art Form.  New York, N.Y: Paradox Press. 

Nally, C. (2018) ‘Graphic Novels Are Novels: Why the Booker Prize Judges Were Right to Choose One for Its Longlist’, The Conversation, 26 July. Available at: https://theconversation.com/graphic-novels-are-novels-why-the-booker-prize-judges-were-right-to-choose-one-for-its-longlist-100562.

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Notes

[1] “More of the same but different”, a phrase used by a comics creator I interviewed in reference to what comics readers want to read.↩︎

[2] By ‘traditional’, I am referring to publishers who contract with comics creators to undertake the producing, publishing, distribution, selling of a comic, retaining rights for a certain period of time and paying the creator royalties. In my research, publishers who transacted business in this way included multinational and small press publishers. Self-publishing is where the creator owns all the rights and royalties, but also performs the production, publishing, distribution work, or pays for a third-party to do so. ↩︎

[3] For this research, digital comics include a diverse selection of what is produced electronically or online: webcomics, manga, applied comics, experimental comics, as well as graphic novels [ebooks].  I have omitted animation. ↩︎