I started this week’s assignment with the hope of somehow starting a dialogue about the potential crossovers between Digital Humanities and comics, however, to my own surprise, I found many, many current crossover projects already in existence! I ended up doing three smaller engagements with various websites and projects.
First, I went to the Comics at Columbia Facebook page, which is a well followed page (2,029 likes) on the large graphic novel collection and comics archive at Columbia, which is maintained by Karen Green, a librarian who works at Butler Library, where the collection is held. Over the weekend, I posted a link on the page for Comic Book Markup Language (a processes created by John Walsh, who works on a lot of DH projects centered on comics at Indiana University) and asked for any DH projects/ articles/ information on comics. Unfortunately, my post was a bit more hidden on their page, which hasn’t yielded many comments since only the moderators of the page have seen it. I decided that maybe Twitter would be a better route for starting a discussion about other comic/DH projects.
Comics at Columbia doesn’t have a Twitter account unfortunately, so I wasn’t sure where to go from there. I turned to Twitter with a vague idea about searching for other similar comics archive and DH projects online. I randomly stumbled upon an amazing open access, open peer review journal call The Comics Grid: A Journal of Comics S
cholarship, which is currently maintained by Dr. Ernesto Priego, who has his PhD in information sciences and now works on many DH projects on comics. I created an account on their website, where I can submit articles online and contribute to their blog. I was hoping to submit something as part of this assignment, but the requirements for a blog post were more extensive than I had time to put together. Although, I have say this website is amazing because it’s focused on comics scholarship, but also has smaller articles from the blog about the comics world by contributors. It’s a super easy site to navigate and also very visually appealing. I commented on one article, “Oh My Goddess: Anthropological Thoughts on the Representation of Marvel’s Storm and the Legacy of Black Women in Comics” by Lucas Delbeto and Ana Oliveira.
Lastly, I still wanted to engage in some discussion about comics and DH project like my initial idea with posting on the Comics at Columbia Facebook page, and noticed that the Comics Grid have a section on their homepage for Twitter discussions, so I went to their Twitter (and actually revived my Twitter account, which I haven’t used in years) and tweeted at them asking about other DH resources. I additionally found and followed other comic studies Twitter accounts from their following list. Along with the Comics Grid twitter, I tweeted at three different comic studies Twitter accounts: The Journal of Graphic Novel and Comics, Graphic Brighton (comic studies at University of Brighton), and BCCS (a UK comics scholar account).
After this rabbit hole exploration, I’m waiting for replies, so hopefully someone will get back to me with some additional projects and resources, as I am hoping to incorporate this into my final project for the class because I would like to create some sort of database that features online comic project in various forms: webcomics, open access journals, comic archives (which I found a ton of!), etc.
