{"id":597,"date":"2013-11-05T07:58:53","date_gmt":"2013-11-05T06:58:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/exponentialdecay.co.uk\/blog\/?p=597"},"modified":"2025-01-10T18:56:44","modified_gmt":"2025-01-10T18:56:44","slug":"looking-back-mmv-ma-digital-culture-and-technology-digitisation-of-the-comic-book","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/exponentialdecay.co.uk\/blog\/looking-back-mmv-ma-digital-culture-and-technology-digitisation-of-the-comic-book\/","title":{"rendered":"Looking Back, MMV: MA Digital Culture and Technology: Digitisation of the Comic Book"},"content":{"rendered":"

2005 saw the completion of my Master of Arts in Digital Culture and Technology. My specialization within the School of Digital Humanities<\/a> at Kings College London was Material Culture and Technology, writing about what we could learn from comic books, how we could preserve them and at the same time remain faithful to the material culture surrounding them.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Dissertation proposal<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

The proposal began by citing existing literary sources, on the subject of comic books and graphic novels, to help distinguish the medium from any other form of literature or visual art; placing words and pictures in a ‘symbiotic’ relationship with one another. <\/span><\/p>\n

It used Spielgelman’s Maus and a 1974 Star Trek comic to highlight features of the comic book that might be of interest to researchers and why they are worthy of further study. Symbolic features of the Maus narrative more orthodox to those studying literature perhaps. The para-textual features of the Star Trek comic less familiar, but equally revealing; providing us a clue<\/i> to a<\/i> readership or to help us understand a comic or publisher’s potential to influence a reader based on what it carried or chose to carry; in this case advertisements selling paraphernalia associated with peace, among other bits and pieces, during the time of the Vietnam War – entirely outside of the narrative content of the comic.<\/span><\/p>\n

They offer the possibility of a way to understand the mind of the great majority of non-literate people, past and present who remain otherwise inaccessible except through impersonal records and the distorting view of a contemporary literary elite. – Prown (1982) Material Culture, Objects are more representative<\/a>…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Paraphrasing Prown<\/a> (1982) to allow me to highlight the importance of preserving and studying comic books and the dangers of not doing so; I proposed that the study of the comic book can reveal<\/i> an insight into <\/i>the culture of<\/i> a readership that might otherwise remain undocumented, either in written \u2013 or material form<\/i>. To document that culture the digitization of the comic book needs to take into account the comic’s artistic and written value, as well as its para-textual characteristics,<\/i> and materiality<\/i> for all that they might reveal.<\/span><\/p>\n

The proposal identifies eleven attributes of comic books that might contribute to a cultural insight and therefore might be important for preservation and study:<\/span><\/p>\n