The Calvin and Hobbes comic strip ended 25 years ago, so let’s celebrate a New Years treat by analyzing it! Awhile back I had a students annotate structures in every C&H strip, so we have data on the whole thing. As Calvin says: let’s go exploring! 1/ https://t.co/GAm45Ni1m5

An interesting feature of this strip is that Watterson took a few sabbaticals during its run, and came back with more artistic freedom. So, I’ll focus here on how a few aspects of the strip change over time. Here’s what every panel per strip looks like (all 14,712 panels!) 2/
Let’s start with storytelling. Overall, the strip shifts to becoming more visual and multimodality balanced in meaning over time. In this graph, higher numbers mean more meaning carried by pictures than words (0=balanced) 3/
You can also see this in the overall increase of wordless panels across strips. Interestingly, you see the same trends for both daily and Sunday strips, suggesting broader shifts in Watterson’s storytelling inclinations 4/
The amount of words also changed. The strip steadily got more wordy in the first half of its run, but then started decreasing again as it shifted to visual meanings 5/
Let’s also talk about layout! Watterson pushed to have more freedom in his layouts after his sabbatical, where he was allowed to occupy a whole canvas space rather than be forced like other strips to have a flexible grid that could be rearranged on a comics page 6/
You see this directly in the numbers: Overall, his gridded Sunday layouts plummet after his sabbatical! You also see increases in all non-gridded types of layouts, like columns, insets (panels in panels), and blockage (stacked panels) 7/
The panel shapes also change, shifting from the gridded squares to more flexible rectangles and borderless panels (other panel shapes increased too, but were too low to show up in a graph) 8/
Finally, how often does Hobbes appear in the strip? Hobbes is in about 40% of strips, but only about 2% where he’s a stuffed animal—mostly he’s “real”! 9/
I’ll conclude by saying that all this data will be made open likely later this year, along with annotation of +36K comic panels from 300+ comics from around the world in our Visual Language Research Corpus. More info in the link 10/ https://t.co/2B9DA0PmGD
I analyzed some of the VLRC dataset in my recent book, Who Understands Comics? (plug!), but there’s several more analyses to come from our lab, and then we’ll post it online. I’m up for sharing it before then if people are interested 11/ https://t.co/5tXGJ8QfTh
And, my current research, along with @cogirmak and others, aims to analyze the structures of +1500 comics from around the world, also for an open dataset. If you’re interested in contributing, please get in touch! end/ https://t.co/69VMRPWl7x

More from Culture

One of the authors of the Policy Exchange report on academic free speech thinks it is "ridiculous" to expect him to accurately portray an incident at Cardiff University in his study, both in the reporting and in a question put to a student sample.


Here is the incident Kaufmann incorporated into his study, as told by a Cardiff professor who was there. As you can see, the incident involved the university intervening to *uphold* free speech principles:


Here is the first mention of the Greer at Cardiff incident in Kaufmann's report. It refers to the "concrete case" of the "no-platforming of Germaine Greer". Any reasonable reader would assume that refers to an incident of no-platforming instead of its opposite.


Here is the next mention of Greer in the report. The text asks whether the University "should have overruled protestors" and "stepped in...and guaranteed Greer the right to speak". Again the strong implication is that this did not happen and Greer was "no platformed".


The authors could easily have added a footnote at this point explaining what actually happened in Cardiff. They did not.
Great article from @AsheSchow. I lived thru the 'Satanic Panic' of the 1980's/early 1990's asking myself "Has eveyrbody lost their GODDAMN MINDS?!"


The 3 big things that made the 1980's/early 1990's surreal for me.

1) Satanic Panic - satanism in the day cares ahhhh!

2) "Repressed memory" syndrome

3) Facilitated Communication [FC]

All 3 led to massive abuse.

"Therapists" -and I use the term to describe these quacks loosely - would hypnotize people & convince they they were 'reliving' past memories of Mom & Dad killing babies in Satanic rituals in the basement while they were growing up.

Other 'therapists' would badger kids until they invented stories about watching alligators eat babies dropped into a lake from a hot air balloon. Kids would deny anything happened for hours until the therapist 'broke through' and 'found' the 'truth'.

FC was a movement that started with the claim severely handicapped individuals were able to 'type' legible sentences & communicate if a 'helper' guided their hands over a keyboard.

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