Words and pictures: understanding how people gather information conveyed jointly through text and image in comics
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Aberdeen
Department Name: Psychology
Abstract
Word and image are used together to convey a wide range of information that we need to complete our behavioural goals, including information vital to our safety (safety signage), our understanding and interaction with the world (instruction manuals, maps, directional signage), the choices we make (advertising) and entertainment (cartoons, comics). Not only are words and images combined in these situations, but it is often only through understanding the combination of word and image - the information that they jointly convey - that we understand what is being communicated to us. Despite the pervasive nature of word-image combinations in the world around us and our reliance on understanding the information that they convey, little is understood about how we view and understand this class of stimulus.
Most of our knowledge is limited to how we view and understand words and passages of text or images alone. From these previous approaches, detailed understanding has been developed, and in many ways the manner in which we inspect images and words is very different: with different factors influencing what we look at, and perhaps even different underlying processing styles and cognitive processes when we are reading compared to when we are viewing images. These very different accounts of viewing and processing words and images raise questions about how we gather and understand stimuli that contain both word and image. The proposed work aims to provide key insights into this currently under-developed field of research.
Three key questions must be addressed to better understand how we inspect and understand stimuli that combine word and image: (1) What strategies do we use to gather information from word-image combinations and do these change depending on the relationship between the words and image? That is, do we vary how we view these stimuli when the relative amount of information conveyed by the words compared to the image changes? (2) How do we understand and respond to space in word-image combinations? Space between words conveys very different information than space between objects in an image. (3) How much information do we process before looking directly at a word-image combination? We process some aspects of words and images in peripheral vision, but the level to which we do so is controversial.
Comics offer an ideal medium for addressing these three questions because they use word-image combinations to convey a story to the reader, over several panels and pages, which must be understood together for the reader to understand the conveyed information. Critically, it is the combination of word and image in comics that conveys the story to the reader, with neither word nor image alone conveying the entire story in a typical comic, and there exist a range of ways in which the information is distributed between words and image.
Not only do comics offer an ideal medium for exploring these research questions, but in doing so we are able to use our findings to provide new insights into comics theory. There is a growing research field associated with understanding how we read and understand comics and theories are emerging that relate the manner in which images and words are used when creating comics to the reader's experience in terms of how they view and understand comics. Moreover, these ideas often drawn upon psychological phenomena and theory, yet have not been explored in within Psychological research or with the scientific method that underlies Experimental Psychology. At present comics theories lack empirical testing. Our work will be a first test of the assumptions that underpin comics theory and will therefore offer crucial new insights for this field and help shape the direction that this emerging field takes in the future and in particular will create a psychologically rigorous domain of research for this field.
Most of our knowledge is limited to how we view and understand words and passages of text or images alone. From these previous approaches, detailed understanding has been developed, and in many ways the manner in which we inspect images and words is very different: with different factors influencing what we look at, and perhaps even different underlying processing styles and cognitive processes when we are reading compared to when we are viewing images. These very different accounts of viewing and processing words and images raise questions about how we gather and understand stimuli that contain both word and image. The proposed work aims to provide key insights into this currently under-developed field of research.
Three key questions must be addressed to better understand how we inspect and understand stimuli that combine word and image: (1) What strategies do we use to gather information from word-image combinations and do these change depending on the relationship between the words and image? That is, do we vary how we view these stimuli when the relative amount of information conveyed by the words compared to the image changes? (2) How do we understand and respond to space in word-image combinations? Space between words conveys very different information than space between objects in an image. (3) How much information do we process before looking directly at a word-image combination? We process some aspects of words and images in peripheral vision, but the level to which we do so is controversial.
Comics offer an ideal medium for addressing these three questions because they use word-image combinations to convey a story to the reader, over several panels and pages, which must be understood together for the reader to understand the conveyed information. Critically, it is the combination of word and image in comics that conveys the story to the reader, with neither word nor image alone conveying the entire story in a typical comic, and there exist a range of ways in which the information is distributed between words and image.
Not only do comics offer an ideal medium for exploring these research questions, but in doing so we are able to use our findings to provide new insights into comics theory. There is a growing research field associated with understanding how we read and understand comics and theories are emerging that relate the manner in which images and words are used when creating comics to the reader's experience in terms of how they view and understand comics. Moreover, these ideas often drawn upon psychological phenomena and theory, yet have not been explored in within Psychological research or with the scientific method that underlies Experimental Psychology. At present comics theories lack empirical testing. Our work will be a first test of the assumptions that underpin comics theory and will therefore offer crucial new insights for this field and help shape the direction that this emerging field takes in the future and in particular will create a psychologically rigorous domain of research for this field.
Planned Impact
The primary non-academic impacts of the work are in terms of public engagement with science and psychology and for practice and understanding within the comics industry.We identify 4 groups for primary impact:
1 Public
Most people have at some time read and enjoyed a comic book or comic strip. However, most will not reflect upon the psychological machinery that underpins our ability to understand and enjoy such comics. Comics offer an engaging and relevant medium for explaining the psychology of vision and cognitive psychology to the public. We will use our work to illustrate how the eyes work, how we gather information from our surroundings, how strategic our brains are when prioritising information in the world, and how we can use scientific approaches to understand creative, artistic decisions. The bridge between art and science in the proposed work also allows us to demonstrate how these disciplines can work together for mutual benefit and provide new insights into real world human behaviour.
2 Schools
Comics are particularly relevant to and approachable for school pupils and so offer an important medium for engaging children with science by using them to explain how we read and understand comics. Thus a particular focus of the public engagement impact of the proposed work will be to target school pupils. There is a continued need to promote science and higher education in schools and this work provides an engaging medium for doing so and for demonstrating how science and arts can work together to provide important insights into human behaviour and everyday life.
3 Comic writers/artists
Understanding how the interplay between word and image shapes the reader's experience will provide empirical evaluation of current practice in comic creation. Issues of page layout -between-panel guttering, and challenging panel transitions - will provide key evidence for understanding the consequences of design and composition choices upon reader experience. By linking objective measures of viewing behaviour to subjective measures of memory, understanding and engagement with the stories, our work will provide deeper understanding of how comic creators can shape the reader's experience. Understanding the extent to which panels are processed even before they are looked at will provide new understanding of comic reading and offer new opportunities for utilising this in comic construction. Our work will provide creators with an understanding of how the reader's behaviour can be measured objectively: how psychological methods can be used to measure the consequences of their design decisions. This will allow writers and artists to incorporate these ideas into the planning and pre-production of their work.
4 Comic publishers
An immediate impact for publishers is to understand how between-page layout influences reader behaviour and subjective engagement with comics. Decisions about where to place adverts and how to arrange pages across a comic may have important and unintended consequences for reader experience and the proposed work will offer an empirical basis for making such decisions. Better understanding the relationship between comic design and reader experience will help publishers support and direct comic creators and provide an evidence-based point of dialogue to facilitate understanding between the creators and publishers of work. The proposed work will provide the first set of objective measures of comic reader experience. This offers a potentially important toolkit for the comics industry to measure reader behaviour when viewing comics. The comics industry is undergoing a period of considerable transition, making a move from print to digital comics. There is very little data that publishers can draw on when considering these issues. This project will produce a baseline of knowledge that will be useful to publishers in shaping the technology and modes of delivery of comics.
1 Public
Most people have at some time read and enjoyed a comic book or comic strip. However, most will not reflect upon the psychological machinery that underpins our ability to understand and enjoy such comics. Comics offer an engaging and relevant medium for explaining the psychology of vision and cognitive psychology to the public. We will use our work to illustrate how the eyes work, how we gather information from our surroundings, how strategic our brains are when prioritising information in the world, and how we can use scientific approaches to understand creative, artistic decisions. The bridge between art and science in the proposed work also allows us to demonstrate how these disciplines can work together for mutual benefit and provide new insights into real world human behaviour.
2 Schools
Comics are particularly relevant to and approachable for school pupils and so offer an important medium for engaging children with science by using them to explain how we read and understand comics. Thus a particular focus of the public engagement impact of the proposed work will be to target school pupils. There is a continued need to promote science and higher education in schools and this work provides an engaging medium for doing so and for demonstrating how science and arts can work together to provide important insights into human behaviour and everyday life.
3 Comic writers/artists
Understanding how the interplay between word and image shapes the reader's experience will provide empirical evaluation of current practice in comic creation. Issues of page layout -between-panel guttering, and challenging panel transitions - will provide key evidence for understanding the consequences of design and composition choices upon reader experience. By linking objective measures of viewing behaviour to subjective measures of memory, understanding and engagement with the stories, our work will provide deeper understanding of how comic creators can shape the reader's experience. Understanding the extent to which panels are processed even before they are looked at will provide new understanding of comic reading and offer new opportunities for utilising this in comic construction. Our work will provide creators with an understanding of how the reader's behaviour can be measured objectively: how psychological methods can be used to measure the consequences of their design decisions. This will allow writers and artists to incorporate these ideas into the planning and pre-production of their work.
4 Comic publishers
An immediate impact for publishers is to understand how between-page layout influences reader behaviour and subjective engagement with comics. Decisions about where to place adverts and how to arrange pages across a comic may have important and unintended consequences for reader experience and the proposed work will offer an empirical basis for making such decisions. Better understanding the relationship between comic design and reader experience will help publishers support and direct comic creators and provide an evidence-based point of dialogue to facilitate understanding between the creators and publishers of work. The proposed work will provide the first set of objective measures of comic reader experience. This offers a potentially important toolkit for the comics industry to measure reader behaviour when viewing comics. The comics industry is undergoing a period of considerable transition, making a move from print to digital comics. There is very little data that publishers can draw on when considering these issues. This project will produce a baseline of knowledge that will be useful to publishers in shaping the technology and modes of delivery of comics.
Organisations
Publications
Kirtley C
(2016)
Eye-Movements and Image-Text Integration
Kirtley C
(2022)
Navigating the narrative: An eye-tracking study of readers' strategies when Reading comic page layouts
in Applied Cognitive Psychology
Kirtley C
(2018)
Empirical Comics Research
Kirtley C
(2017)
Within and Between the Panel: Word-image combinations in comics
Kirtley C
(2016)
How Images Draw the Eye: An Eye-tracking Study of Composition
| Description | 1. Text plays a more dominant role in guiding attention images in multimedia stimuli. When stimuli convey information through both words and images simultaneously, as in comics, it is the text that has a greater influence on reading behaviour and attention allocation. Text areas are looked at more frequently and for longer than image areas in comics panels, when viewed at in isolation (Experiment 1), and when viewed as part of a series of panels in a story (Experiment 2), it is usually the text regions that are inspected first, before the image content of each panel. Panels that don't contain text are often skipped (Experiment 2), and when the layout of the page is hard to follow, text regions can help participants find the right reading order (Experiment 5). 2. Spacing between panels and disrupting the flow of panels across pages influences reading experience but not inspection behaviour. The spacing between panels in comics is used by artists to convey information about the passage of time between events in a story. Artificially changing this spacing by removing the spaces or doubling the artist's intended spacing between panels reduced readers' enjoyment of the story, but had little impact on their eye movement behaviour during reading (Experiment 3). Reveals after page turns are used to dramatic effect by artists and writers at critical points of a story. When this flow is interrupted by introducing full page adverts within stories (as can be the case when stories are re-published after their original release), readers spent less time looking at the critical page that would have been revealed by a page turn in the original story, and they enjoyed the story less (Experiment 4). 3. Information is gathered in peripheral vision from the panel we are about to read. Selectively masking (hiding) upcoming panels in a page of comic panels showed that information is gathered from the panel that is about to be read, but not from later panels in the story (Experiment 6). In particular, this seems to serve to identify where text regions are in the upcoming panel and to then plan an eye movement to any identified text region. By manipulating the pictorial content of the upcoming panel (Experiment 7), we found that reading behaviour was disrupted by altering the morphological information (by blurring the image) or semantic information (by changing the identity of a pictured character), suggesting that the next panel is processed to a high level before it is looked at. 4. Reading expertise helps participants navigate difficult page layouts. Prior experience in comic reading made it easier for participants to decide how to navigate through challenging page layouts (Experiment 5), but had surprisingly little influence on other aspects of reading behaviour: It did not influence the dominance of text over image in viewing behaviour (Experiments 1-2), how spacing between panels (Experiment 3) and pages (Experiment 4) influenced attention allocation, or how information was processed in panels before they were looked at directly (Experiments 6-7). |
| Exploitation Route | Academic: This work is a key first step to understanding how images and text are processed when they jointly and simultaneously convey information to the viewer. This is an important early step in the emerging research domain of the psychology of comic reading (indeed we have contributed to the first edited work on this new research domain). With little current understanding of the simultaneous processing of text and image in multimedia stimuli, our work will provide the basis for future work aimed at extending current psychological understanding in this domain. In particular, our finding that text dominates over image content is both novel and unexpected: with prior work (and comics theory) assuming that the opposite is more likely the case. Wider future impact: Public and Schools: We have successfully engaged with a range of age groups through our work with comics. In addition to continuing to have a presence at local and international comics meetings, we will continue to engage with the public and children through our ongoing involvement and collaboration with the Dundee Comics Creative Space. Comics writers/artists and publishers: We met with comics writers, artists and publishers at several workshops and meetings over the course of the project in order to discuss our findings. As a result, we are now working closely with several artists to catalogue how reading behaviour changes with different artistic styles for the same story, with repeated reading of a story, and how particular layouts and content influence reading behaviour. We have produced several case studies or reading behaviour for artists who want to better understand how their artistic choices influence the reader's behaviour. We will continue to foster and develop these links and collaborations. These collaborations are being used by artists to consider the impact of their work on the reader and how they can better understand and utilise the link between design and reader inspection behaviour. |
| Sectors | Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software) Education Leisure Activities including Sports Recreation and Tourism Culture Heritage Museums and Collections Retail Other |
| Description | A key component and outcome of this project is the impact activities associated with this work. As detailed in the Impact Plan we aimed to use the work to engage adult and child audiences and have been involved in a variety of public engagement activities in order to achieve this aim. These activities include exhibiting and providing interactive demonstrations at international comic conventions (including New York Comic Con in the US), two science festivals and a literary festival. Dr Kirtley has also given public talks on our work in this project. Of the public engagement events, four have been aimed specifically at children (Aberdeen Science Centre - running a day-long event on perception, Aberdeen Cultural MayFest, Superheroes vs. Monsters, and the launch of after school comic clubs at the Dundee Comics Space). We were part of the two-day workshop and discussion group events that marked the launch of the Dundee Comics Space, which is run by the two co-applicants on this project award (Murray and Vaughan). Murray and Vaughan have been heavily involved in public engagement through running the Dundee Comics Space and this has been an avenue for engaging the public with our project and with surrounding issues about the interplay between science and art in comics. Our aim to use our work on comics to engage the public with the link between science and art, detailed in our Impact Plan, is evident from the range of public engagement contexts that we have been involved in: including both science and literary events. We have met with comics creators to discuss the aims of our project and potential of our research approach for application to comics. As a result, we are developing several contacts with local and international creators. Recently, we have been creating commentary tracks: videos of artists work being eye tracked, along with audio or written commentary by the artist or writer, about their planning behind the page, and their expectations regarding how their stories would be read. These videos and commentaries are being made available on our project website, as a way of introducing visitors to a sample of eye tracking, and demonstrating how such measures are useful to creators. These links are useful not only for producing these materials for public engagement but also for generating materials and questions for further research. In addition to information about the project on the Active Vision Lab website, we have created and are using a dedicated project website at: https://comicsconventionsproject.wordpress.com as specified in the Impact Plan. This website will grow in content as we progress through the project and will be an important means of widely disseminating the findings of our work. We have also set up a project Twitter account @eye_read_comics which we are using to further disseminate our work and as a forum for discussing the psychology of comic reading. |
| First Year Of Impact | 2015 |
| Impact Types | Cultural Societal |
| Description | Comics vs. COVID: informing and evaluating the design of public health information comics |
| Amount | £45,949 (GBP) |
| Organisation | Economic and Social Research Council |
| Sector | Public |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Start | 09/2022 |
| End | 09/2026 |
| Description | Exhibition and demonstration at DeeCon (2015, 2016) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | At this large comics festival, we provided an interactive exhibition and demonstration of our eye tracking with comics project, offering people the chance not only to talk about the work but also to try the eye tracker on and read a comic while wearing it. The purpose of this event was to engage members of the public and comic creators with the utility of eye tracking as a tool for understanding how people read comics and to introduce them to the psychology of vision and the reality of how our eyes sample the world and how we see. We collected names for a mailing list and were asked for further information or the chance to participate in our experimental studies by several attendees. We also used this event to publicise our research project on Twitter. We participated in this convention in both 2015 and 2016. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015,2016 |
| Description | Exhibition and demonstration at Dundee Comics Expo |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | We provided an interactive exhibition and demonstration of our eye tracking with comics project, offering people the chance not only to talk about the work but also to try the eye tracker on and read a comic while wearing it. The purpose of this event was to engage members of the public and comic creators with the utility of eye tracking as a tool for understanding how people read comics and to introduce them to the psychology of vision and the reality of how our eyes sample the world and how we see. We collected names for a mailing list and were asked for further information or the chance to participate in our experimental studies by several attendees. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| Description | Exhibition and demonstration at GeekMania |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Undergraduate students |
| Results and Impact | We provided an interactive exhibition and demonstration of our eye tracking with words and images project, offering people the chance not only to talk about the work but also to try the eye tracker on and read a comic while wearing it. The purpose of this event was to engage members of the public and comic creators with the utility of eye tracking as a tool for understanding how people read comics and to introduce them to the psychology of vision and the reality of how our eyes sample the world and how we see. We collected names for a mailing list and were asked for further information or the chance to participate in our experimental studies by several attendees. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| Description | Exhibition and demonstration at Glasgow Comic Con 2016 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | At this large comics festival, we provided an interactive exhibition and demonstration of our eye tracking with comics project, offering people the chance not only to talk about the work but also to try the eye tracker on and read a comic while wearing it. The purpose of this event was to engage members of the public and comic creators with the utility of eye tracking as a tool for understanding how people read comics and to introduce them to the psychology of vision and the reality of how our eyes sample the world and how we see. We collected names for a mailing list and were asked for further information or the chance to participate in our experimental studies by several attendees. We also used this event to publicise our research project on Twitter. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
| Description | Exhibition and demonstration at Granite City Comic Con 2016 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | At this large comics festival, we provided an interactive exhibition and demonstration of our eye tracking with comics project, offering people the chance not only to talk about the work but also to try the eye tracker on and read a comic while wearing it. The purpose of this event was to engage members of the public and comic creators with the utility of eye tracking as a tool for understanding how people read comics and to introduce them to the psychology of vision and the reality of how our eyes sample the world and how we see. We collected names for a mailing list and were asked for further information or the chance to participate in our experimental studies by several attendees. We also used this event to publicise our research project on Twitter. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
| Description | Exhibition and demonstration at Granite City Comic Con 2017 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | At this large comics festival, we provided an interactive exhibition and demonstration of our eye tracking with comics project, offering people the chance not only to talk about the work but also to try the eye tracker on and read a comic while wearing it. The purpose of this event was to engage members of the public and comic creators with the utility of eye tracking as a tool for understanding how people read comics and to introduce them to the psychology of vision and the reality of how our eyes sample the world and how we see. We collected names for a mailing list and were asked for further information or the chance to participate in our experimental studies by several attendees. We also used this event to publicise our research project on Twitter. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
| Description | Exhibition and demonstration at New York Comic Con 2016 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | At this major international comics festival, we provided an interactive exhibition and demonstration of our eye tracking with comics project, offering people the chance not only to talk about the work but also to try the eye tracker on and read a comic while wearing it. The purpose of this event was to engage members of the public and comic creators with the utility of eye tracking as a tool for understanding how people read comics and to introduce them to the psychology of vision and the reality of how our eyes sample the world and how we see. We collected names for a mailing list and were asked for further information or the chance to participate in our experimental studies by several attendees. We also used this event to publicise our research project on Twitter. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
| Description | Exhibition and demonstration at Superheroes vs. Monsters public event |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Schools |
| Results and Impact | We took part in this event at the Dundee Science Centre as part of National Science Week. The event was aimed primarily at younger children (up to the age of around 8). We provided an interactive exhibition and demonstration of our eye tracking work, and gave children (and adults) the chance to wear the eye tracker while reading comics. This was an excellent opportunity to get children to think about how their eyes work, how they read and how they see the world. We used supplementary demonstrations and discussion to engage children with the psychology of vision and to think about the application of science in their everyday lives. Informally, kids and parents found this interesting and enlightening and got them to think about seeing in ways that they had not before. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| Description | Exhibition and demonstration at ThoughtBubble (2015, 2016) |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | At this major international comics convention held in Leeds, we provided an interactive exhibition and demonstration of our eye tracking with words and images project, offering people the chance not only to talk about the work but also to try the eye tracker on and read a comic while wearing it. The purpose of our contribution to this event was to engage members of the public and comic creators with the utility of eye tracking as a tool for understanding how people read comics and to introduce them to the psychology of vision and the reality of how our eyes sample the world and how we see. We collected names for a mailing list and were asked for further information or the chance to participate in our experimental studies by several attendees. We participated in this convention in both 2015 and 2016. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015,2016 |
| Description | Exhibition and demonstration at the Dundee Literary Festival |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Schools |
| Results and Impact | We were paired up with a talk by comics artist Dave Gibbons (The Watchmen) and provided an interactive exhibition and demonstration of our eye tracking with words and images project at a public workshop event held shortly before his public talk. This workshop event was primality aimed at school age children, who were given the opportunity to create and talk about comics with Dave Gibbons and other comics creators. Our demonstration followed the workshop and offered people the chance not only to talk about the work but also to try the eye tracker on and read a comic while wearing it. The purpose of this event was to engage children and other members of the public and comic creators with the utility of eye tracking as a tool for understanding how people read comics and to introduce them to the psychology of vision and the reality of how our eyes sample the world and how we see. We collected names for a mailing list and were asked for further information or the chance to participate in our experimental studies by several attendees. We also recorded Dave Gibbons as he read his own comic The Watchment. We used this to publicise the event and our project on the web (Twitter and website). |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| URL | https://comicsconventionsproject.wordpress.com/about/previous-public-engagements/dave-gibbons-at-the... |
| Description | Exhibition and demonstration at the opening of the Dundee Comics Space |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | Alongside a panel discussion involving five well known and successful comics artists and writers, we provided an interactive exhibition and demonstration of our eye tracking with words and images project, offering people the chance not only to talk about the work but also to try the eye tracker on and read a comic while wearing it. The purpose of our contribution to this event was to engage members of the public and comic creators with the utility of eye tracking as a tool for understanding how people read comics and to introduce them to the psychology of vision and the reality of how our eyes sample the world and how we see. We collected names for a mailing list and were asked for further information or the chance to participate in our experimental studies by several attendees. We had useful discussions with the comics creators on the discussion panel and are now working with two of these to develop new lines of research that will fed into and support the main activities of our ESRC project. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| Description | Interactive demonstration and activities for children at Aberdeen Cultural MayFest 2016 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Schools |
| Results and Impact | At this large annual festival run by the University of Aberdeen, we ran an interactive stall aimed at children, introducing them to some of the ideas behind comic construction. We also gave demonstrations of the eye tracker and eye tracking process, again aimed at children. Children were involved in creating comics pages with comics artists, were introduced to the importance of good page layout by being given individual panels to arrange into a story and were introduced to ideas about how the eyes work and allow us to understand how people read and understand comics. An important outcome of this event was to help us identify activities for engaging children with the work in future engagement and impact activities related to this project. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
| Description | PechaKucha talk |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | Clare Kirtley (postdoc on ESRC word and image grant) gave a PechaKucha format talk at the Belmont Filmhouse, Aberdeen, as part of Exploration 2015 public engagement event. The talk was an introduction of the project and our goals for the general public, introducing it to the local area. The talk covered the importance and utility of using eye movements to understand how we see, the psychology of vision and how this can be applied to and studied using comics and similar word-image combinations. There was an opportunity for informal discussions after the talk and Clare received considerable interest in our work. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| Description | Podcast interview at ThoughtBubble |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A press release, press conference or response to a media enquiry/interview |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Media (as a channel to the public) |
| Results and Impact | While at ThoughtBubble, a major international comics convention held in Leeds, Clare Kirtley (postdoc on ESRC words and images project) was interviewed for the Podcast "On the road to..." The interview was about our ESRC project and Clare gave an overview of the aims of the project and the nature of the work we are conducting. This podcast is currently being edited and should be available soon. Thus we list below as no impact yet. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| Description | Presentation and discussion at Dundee Comics Expo |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | Clare Kirtley (postdoc on research grant) gave a presentation of the background to our project, including how the eyes move, how we can use eye movements to test comics theory and how we can reveal insights about how people read and the impact of comic creation choices (about layout, panel format etc) on reading behaviour. This was a formal presentation followed by discussion. There was considerable interest and discussion sparked by this talk and several comic creators met informally with us afterwards to discuss these points and have become involved in aspects of our work (e.g. supplying materials for us to test in our studies). |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| Description | Project Twitter feed |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Engagement focused website, blog or social media channel |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | We have created a dedicated project Twitter feed (@eye_read_comics) for our ESRC project on words and images. We are using this to engage with those interested in comics and psychology in order to disseminate our work and wider information about the link between comics, art and psychology. We have so far published 71 tweets including a series of tweets about how the eyes gather information and how this psychology of vision relates to comic reading. The Twitter feed is in its early days but should provide an important means of widely disseminating our work. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016,2017 |
| URL | https://twitter.com/eye_read_comics |
| Description | Project website |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Engagement focused website, blog or social media channel |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | We have created a dedicated project website for our ESRC project on words and images. The website will be used for engagement with and dissemination of the work to wide audiences. We will publicise public activities on the site. We will also upload stimulus materials and data when appropriate. The website is still under construction and we will soon be registering a domain name for this website. As this website is in its early stages there is no measurable impact yet. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |
| URL | https://comicsconventionsproject.wordpress.com |
| Description | Talk at GeekMania |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Undergraduate students |
| Results and Impact | As a part of this public event, Clare Kirtley (postdoc on ESRC project) gave a talk about our ESRC project and how she had turned her own interests into a career in Psychology and eye tracking. The theme of the evening lectures for GeekMania was how people can turn their passions into careers and Clare was able to speak effectively about how she has done this through our ESRC project on words and images. As a comic creator herself she was able to use our work on comics and eye tracking to good effect in this talk. The lectures were attended mainly by undergraduate students thinking about career options. There was considerable interest in Clare's talk after the event. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2015 |