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Running through the Who, Where, and When: A Cross-cultural Analysis of Situational Changes in Comics
Klomberg,Bien Hacımusaoğlu,Irmak Cohn,Neil
Klomberg,Bien
Hacımusaoğlu,Irmak
Cohn,Neil
Abstract
Understanding visual narratives requires readers to track dimensions of time, spatial location, and characters across a sequence. Previous work has found situational changes across adjacent panels differ cross-culturally, but few works have examined such situational dimensions across extended sequences. We therefore investigated situational "runs" - uninterrupted sequences of the situational dimensions (time, space, characters) - in a corpus of 300+ annotated comics from the United States, Europe, and Asia. We compared runs' proportion and average lengths and found that across books, semantic information changed frequently and run length correlated with proportion. Yet, cross-cultural patterns arose, with American and European comics using more continuous runs than Asian comics. American and European comics also used more and longer temporal and character continuity, while Asian comics used more spatial continuity. These findings raise questions about comprehenders' processing strategies of visual narratives across cultures and how general frameworks of visual narrative comprehension account for variations in situational (dis)continuity.
Description
Funding Information: This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement no. 850975). Publisher Copyright: © 2022 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
Date
2022-10-21
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Publisher
Research Projects
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Keywords
EVENT PERCEPTION, LANGUAGE, FILM, MODELS, ROLES
Citation
Klomberg, B, Hacımusaoğlu, I & Cohn, N 2022, 'Running through the Who, Where, and When : A Cross-cultural Analysis of Situational Changes in Comics', Discourse Processes, vol. 59, no. 9, pp. 669-684. https://doi.org/10.1080/0163853X.2022.2106402
License
info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess