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.

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This is NONSENSE. The people who take photos with their books on instagram are known to be voracious readers who graciously take time to review books and recommend them to their followers. Part of their medium is to take elaborate, beautiful photos of books. Die mad, Guardian.


THEY DO READ THEM, YOU JUDGY, RACOON-PICKED TRASH BIN


If you come for Bookstagram, i will fight you.

In appreciation, here are some of my favourite bookstagrams of my books: (photos by lit_nerd37, mybookacademy, bookswrotemystory, and scorpio_books)
Department List of UCAS-China PROFESSORs for ANSO, CSC and UCAS (fully or partial) Scholarship Acceptance
1) UCAS School of physical sciences Professor
https://t.co/9X8OheIvRw
2) UCAS School of mathematical sciences Professor

3) UCAS School of nuclear sciences and technology
https://t.co/nQH8JnewcJ
4) UCAS School of astronomy and space sciences
https://t.co/7Ikc6CuKHZ
5) UCAS School of engineering

6) Geotechnical Engineering Teaching and Research Office
https://t.co/jBCJW7UKlQ
7) Multi-scale Mechanics Teaching and Research Section
https://t.co/eqfQnX1LEQ
😎 Microgravity Science Teaching and Research

9) High temperature gas dynamics teaching and research section
https://t.co/tVIdKgTPl3
10) Department of Biomechanics and Medical Engineering
https://t.co/ubW4xhZY2R
11) Ocean Engineering Teaching and Research

12) Department of Dynamics and Advanced Manufacturing
https://t.co/42BKXEugGv
13) Refrigeration and Cryogenic Engineering Teaching and Research Office
https://t.co/pZdUXFTvw3
14) Power Machinery and Engineering Teaching and Research
"I lied about my basic beliefs in order to keep a prestigious job. Now that it will be zero-cost to me, I have a few things to say."


We know that elite institutions like the one Flier was in (partial) charge of rely on irrelevant status markers like private school education, whiteness, legacy, and ability to charm an old white guy at an interview.

Harvard's discriminatory policies are becoming increasingly well known, across the political spectrum (see, e.g., the recent lawsuit on discrimination against East Asian applications.)

It's refreshing to hear a senior administrator admits to personally opposing policies that attempt to remedy these basic flaws. These are flaws that harm his institution's ability to do cutting-edge research and to serve the public.

Harvard is being eclipsed by institutions that have different ideas about how to run a 21st Century institution. Stanford, for one; the UC system; the "public Ivys".