The Graphic Gregor Samsa: Can Kafka\u27s Creature Be Brought to Life?

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College

Assessing interpretability of visual symbols of varied colors across demographic profiles

Visual symbols are often ambiguous. An icon is meant to convey a particular meaning, but viewers may interpret the image differently. This thesis shows how a viewer`s demographic background and icon color can affect their interpretation of a symbol. A website survey, featuring a library of icons, asked users of varied demographic profiles to interpret each figure presented randomly in one of five colors: black, blue, red, green, and orange. The qualitative text data from the participants` interpretations were compared to the quantitative data from icon and demographic information by means of multinomial logit analysis. The experiment found numerous noteworthy correlations, showing that the color of an icon and person`s background can have a significant and oftentimes predictable influence on interpretation. Icon designers can use this approach to see which icon would be best used to serve certain purposes

Can integrated titles improve the viewing experience? Investigating the impact of subtitling on the reception and enjoyment of film using eye tracking and questionnaire data

Historically a dubbing country, Germany is not well-known for subtitled productions. But while dubbing is predominant in Germany, more and more German viewers prefer original and subtitled versions of their favourite shows and films. Conventional subtitling, however, can be seen as a strong intrusion into the original image that can not only disrupt but also destroy the director’s intended shot composition and focus points. Long eye movements between focus points and subtitles decrease the viewer’s information intake, and especially German audiences, who are often not used to subtitles, seem to prefer to wait for the next subtitle instead of looking back up again. Furthermore, not only the placement, but also the overall design of conventional subtitles can disturb the image composition – for instance titles with a weak contrast, inappropriate typeface or irritating colour system. So should it not, despite the translation process, be possible to preserve both image and sound as far as possible? Especially given today’s numerous artistic and technical possibilities and the huge amount of work that goes into the visual aspects of a film, taking into account not only special effects, but also typefaces, opening credits and text-image compositions. A further development of existing subtitling guidelines would not only express respect towards the original film version but also the translator’s work.   The presented study shows how integrated titles can increase information intake while maintaining the intended image composition and focus points as well as the aesthetics of the shot compositions. During a three-stage experiment, the specifically for this purpose created integrated titles in the documentary “Joining the Dots” by director Pablo Romero-Fresco were analysed with the help of eye movement data from more than 45 participants. Titles were placed based on the gaze behaviour of English native speakers and then rated by German viewers dependant on a German translation. The results show that a reduction of the distance between intended focus points and titles allow the viewers more time to explore the image and connect the titles to the plot. The integrated titles were rated as more aesthetically pleasing and reading durations were shorter than with conventional subtitles. Based on the analysis of graphic design and filmmaking rules as well as conventional subtitling standards, a first workflow and set of placement strategies for integrated titles were created in order to allow a more respectful handling of film material as well as the preservation of the original image composition and typographic film identity

Ultrakinetic features of anime texts: revisioning composition theory and exploring visual rhetoric pedagogy.

Our contemporary culture is laden with a glut of visual stimuli: advertising, packaging, television, film, the internet, digital-camera-wireless-web-access-mobile-phones. In a world filled with visually rhetorical media, it is imperative that the field of Composition continue to embrace the theorizing and use of visual rhetoric an apt (if not vital) pursuit. It seems a responsible choice to select visual texts and/or visually rich writing assignments in order to address the current fabric of public/private communication. Furthermore, such texts can potentially set the student reader (viewer/writer/designer/composer) at ease in the sometimes daunting task of becoming a college writer and subsequently a professional able to communicate in the contemporary world. Visual texts that reflect the social climate students encounter each day may help break down some of the initial barriers to reading and composing. Students react differently to film, comics and other media than to a more traditional school text. This dissertation submits that the genre of Japanese animated film, known as anime, is particularly ripe for study and use in composition. Anime offers visually rhetoric texts that are accessible yet challenging for students in the area of analysis. Anime also encompasses a wide range of themes and styles. A specific form of anime, termed in this dissertation ultrakinetic , describes visually rhetorical texts that highlight the presentation of movement in ranges from stillness to slowed to hyper-fast. Ultrakinetic texts reflect a 21 st century sensibility and are effective models for students who must learn to read and compose in a rapidly changing multimodal environment

REDRAWING TIME: TEMPORALITY IN GERMAN-LANGUAGE GRAPHIC NARRATIVES

This dissertation investigates the form of time in German-language graphic narratives, exploring the role of layout, text/image, and the body in creating temporality. It argues that, what makes temporality in graphic narratives most powerful is sometimes overlooked in the search for a historical, generic, or formal center that typifies the medium. Instead, Redrawing Time places value on flexibility, exploring how a variety of temporalities that exist outside of or are interspersed throughout a primary narrative, expand and augment the temporal range and expressiveness of comics works. It approaches this question with a focus on formal features of graphic narratives that are used to establish temporality, showing how in many cases, German graphic narratives use these features to suspend, oppose, or augment progressive depictions of time. The first feature discussed is the use of paneling, the rectangular frames that divide the page and mark the passage of time. The second is the text-image relationship of graphic narrative, which can indicate sequence and duration through the use of dialog and narration. The third is the body, which often suggests movement, anticipation, and change. Redrawing Time shows how in a variety of settings, German graphic narratives leverage these features to provide a model for temporal reframing, offering alternative ways of connecting an outlook on time with values, beliefs, and avenues for action. In part, the dissertation addresses a critical neglect of German comics and graphic narratives rooted in canonical comics theory, which often focuses on strategies for developing clear, forward-moving narratives. Explanations of graphic narratives that are rooted in formal progression correspond to a historical account of the medium, which, analogous to film, is seen as a way of bringing movement to image that emerges in 19th and 20th centuries. In addition to expanding such formal and historical accounts to make space for a discussion of German works, Redrawing Time paves the way for a broader discussion of the resistance of graphic narratives to the cultures of teleological thinking and accelerated lifestyle from which they are often suggested to emerge. However, rather than tracing a reactive trend in German graphic narratives that attempts to reinstate earlier philosophical and academic expectations for visual art, Redrawing Time shows how German graphic narratives challenge temporal traditions, utilizing the mechanics of the medium produce new experiences of temporality that help readers expand the horizons of their aesthetic and political agency.Doctor of Philosoph

Can integrated titles improve the viewing experience?

Historically a dubbing country, Germany is not well-known for subtitled productions. But while dubbing is predominant in Germany, more and more German viewers prefer original and subtitled versions of their favourite shows and films. Conventional subtitling, however, can be seen as a strong intrusion into the original image that can not only disrupt but also destroy the director’s intended shot composition and focus points. Long eye movements between focus points and subtitles decrease the viewer’s information intake, and especially German audiences, who are often not used to subtitles, seem to prefer to wait for the next subtitle instead of looking back up again. Furthermore, not only the placement, but also the overall design of conventional subtitles can disturb the image composition – for instance titles with a weak contrast, inappropriate typeface or irritating colour system. So should it not, despite the translation process, be possible to preserve both image and sound as far as possible? Especially given today’s numerous artistic and technical possibilities and the huge amount of work that goes into the visual aspects of a film, taking into account not only special effects, but also typefaces, opening credits and text-image compositions. A further development of existing subtitling guidelines would not only express respect towards the original film version but also the translator’s work

Educational hypercomics: learners, institutions, and comics in e-learning interface design

Current literacy education research suggests that formal affordances of the comics medium lend themselves to critical pedagogies of new media literacy (see, e.g., Schwarz, 2006; Jacobs, 2007; Schwartz & Rubinstein-Ávila, 2006; Duffy, 2010). This research connects comics and new media because both are visually dominant, juxtapositional compositional forms that make meaning through multiple modes of communicative design. However, this research generally construes comics as a narrative form that bridges the traditions of print-based literacy with the wide array of multiliteracies required by new media. The evolution of comics as a form of digital communication within new media pedagogical texts has received far less attention. The present study addresses this lacuna in the literature through analysis of social semiotics of comics in the contexts of online learning. This is a study of multimodal pedagogical discourse in online educational comics, specifically educational hypercomics. Hypercomics can be loosely defined as comics on the World Wide Web which incorporate semiotic affordances of digital delivery such as interactivity, multiplicity of reading paths, hypertextuality, audio, video, and animation. This study is a comparative social semiotic analysis of three educational hypercomics, focused on the ways in which the comics form interacts with digital affordances in educational institutional contexts in order to construe readers as learners. The goal of this research is to explicate ways in which digital comics' formal characteristics can function not only as a vehicle for narrative expression in pedagogy, but also as a strategy for e-learning information organization and interface design

Multimodal discourse on online newspaper home pages: A social-semiotic perspective

In a short space of time, online newspapers have emerged to play an important role in the institutional construction of ‘news’ and the mass mediation of information. The home pages of online newspapers feature short verbal texts, and communicate using language, image, layout, colour, and other semiotic resources: they communicate multimodally. This thesis examines the multimodal discourse of three English-language online newspapers: the Bangkok Post (Thailand), the English-language edition (translated from Chinese) of the People’s Daily (China), and the Sydney Morning Herald (Australia). Between February, 2002 and April, 2006, three data collections were made (February-April, 2002; September-November, 2005; January-April, 2006) using a five-day ‘constructed week’ method. The main corpus was 15 home pages from each newspaper (five per collection per newspaper), but the total corpus (including other pages from each newspaper) was 603 web pages. Two senior editors (one each from the Bangkok Post and the Sydney Morning Herald) were interviewed. The multimodal discourse of the home pages was analysed using tools from Systemic Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis (SF-MDA), and a ‘visual grammar’ of home pages building on the work of Kress & van Leeuwen (1996) was developed. In addition, a rank scale for online newspapers was proposed, and limitations of applying the tool of rank scale to this corpus were identified. An emerging genre - the headline-plus-lead-plus-hyperlink newsbite - was identified, and the design of newsbites on the home page of the Sydney Morning Herald and the evolution of their design over time was analysed. The use of images on the home pages in the corpus was analysed, and the increasing use of thumbnail images in the Sydney Morning Herald - particularly close-up thumbnails of faces - was investigated in further depth. The visual design of online newspaper home pages and the news texts appearing on them are an evolution of print news genres and their design practices. Newsbites and headline-only newsbits are verbally short, so the authors of newspaper home pages are forced to rely increasingly on visual communication in order to position stories and readers, and to communicate the values of the news institution on the home page as mediated by the screen. Thumbnail images are evolving as a new form of punctuation on some home pages, and this may be a short-lived, or an emerging historical trend in the development of punctuation, at least in online environments. Overall, online newspaper home pages are tending towards shorter texts, which communicate in novel ways. These short texts cannot communicate the values and ideology of news institutions in the way that extended verbal texts have done for centuries, yet this function of news texts remains important to the construction and maintenance of a readership, and therefore crucial to the home page of a newspaper. As a result, news institutions express values visually in their design of newspaper home pages. As readers become familiar with the meanings of online news design, they become adept at reading and understanding short stories within these multimodally-construed frames of reference. Ideology is increasingly fragmented on shorter timescales, but expressed over longer timescales in a hypermedia environment that affords and extends many of the pre-existing multimodal features of print newspaper discourse

Multimodal discourse on online newspaper home pages: A social-semiotic perspective

In a short space of time, online newspapers have emerged to play an important role in the institutional construction of ‘news’ and the mass mediation of information. The home pages of online newspapers feature short verbal texts, and communicate using language, image, layout, colour, and other semiotic resources: they communicate multimodally. This thesis examines the multimodal discourse of three English-language online newspapers: the Bangkok Post (Thailand), the English-language edition (translated from Chinese) of the People’s Daily (China), and the Sydney Morning Herald (Australia). Between February, 2002 and April, 2006, three data collections were made (February-April, 2002; September-November, 2005; January-April, 2006) using a five-day ‘constructed week’ method. The main corpus was 15 home pages from each newspaper (five per collection per newspaper), but the total corpus (including other pages from each newspaper) was 603 web pages. Two senior editors (one each from the Bangkok Post and the Sydney Morning Herald) were interviewed. The multimodal discourse of the home pages was analysed using tools from Systemic Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis (SF-MDA), and a ‘visual grammar’ of home pages building on the work of Kress & van Leeuwen (1996) was developed. In addition, a rank scale for online newspapers was proposed, and limitations of applying the tool of rank scale to this corpus were identified. An emerging genre - the headline-plus-lead-plus-hyperlink newsbite - was identified, and the design of newsbites on the home page of the Sydney Morning Herald and the evolution of their design over time was analysed. The use of images on the home pages in the corpus was analysed, and the increasing use of thumbnail images in the Sydney Morning Herald - particularly close-up thumbnails of faces - was investigated in further depth. The visual design of online newspaper home pages and the news texts appearing on them are an evolution of print news genres and their design practices. Newsbites and headline-only newsbits are verbally short, so the authors of newspaper home pages are forced to rely increasingly on visual communication in order to position stories and readers, and to communicate the values of the news institution on the home page as mediated by the screen. Thumbnail images are evolving as a new form of punctuation on some home pages, and this may be a short-lived, or an emerging historical trend in the development of punctuation, at least in online environments. Overall, online newspaper home pages are tending towards shorter texts, which communicate in novel ways. These short texts cannot communicate the values and ideology of news institutions in the way that extended verbal texts have done for centuries, yet this function of news texts remains important to the construction and maintenance of a readership, and therefore crucial to the home page of a newspaper. As a result, news institutions express values visually in their design of newspaper home pages. As readers become familiar with the meanings of online news design, they become adept at reading and understanding short stories within these multimodally-construed frames of reference. Ideology is increasingly fragmented on shorter timescales, but expressed over longer timescales in a hypermedia environment that affords and extends many of the pre-existing multimodal features of print newspaper discourse

Comics carnet : the graphic novelist as global nomad

An interdisciplinary approach is used to identify a new graphic novel genre, 'comics camet', and its key features. The study situates comics camet in a historical context and shows it to be the result of a cross-pollination between the American and French comics traditions. Comics camet incorporates features from other literary genres: journalism, autobiography, ethnography and travel writing. Its creators, primarily European rriales, document their experiences visiting countries that Europe has traditionally defined as belonging to the 'East'. A visual and narrative analysis, using theoretical perspectives derived from cultural and postcolonial studies, examines how comics camet represents the non-European other and identifies the genre's ideological assumptions. Four representative texts are examined: Joe Sacco's Palestine (2001), Craig Thompson's, Camet de Voyage (2004), Guy Delisle's Pyongyang (2005) and Mrujane Satrpi's Persespolis 2 (2004). The study concludes that the comics camet genre simultaneously reinforces and challenges stereotypical assumptions about non-European people and places