Status Updates From The Visual Language of Comi...

I find myself quibbling a lot with the findings about how much information is contained in a panel because he's combining all of japanese manga together and I seriously doubt that manga targeting different age and sex groups use macros and Micros to the same extent.

"In Japan, manga are far more popular than comics in any other culture. They are read by people of all ages, cover innumerable genres, and ubiquitously appear throughout the country. Indeed, manga constitute nearly one-third of all printed material."

Ha.

Just got theoretical backing for an activity I do in my English classes. Apparently reconstruction tasks of texts is a good measure of comprehension as well as logical/sequential reasoning.

Take that any imaginary person who didn't like my activity. :D

So, I knew that human memory is built around narrative structure, but this is the first time I've learned where we learned that from.

apparently a bunch of studies by Mandler, Deforest, Johnson, and Nezworski, conducted in the 70s and 80s.

"...to support that expert readers do not explore all options before moving from one panel to the next. Moreover, while alterations in panel layouts affect eye movements, they do not appear to significantly impact reading comprehension."

"How do people know how to navigate through page layouts? Navigational strategies cannot wholly rely on content, since once a panel is reached, it would require readers to fully engage all possible choices of panels before choosing which one is next. This would place too much burden on the readinf process, not to mention working memory. The smooth motions found in eye-tracking studies of comic pages seems....

When I started this book, I didn't think it would be discussing literary theory and helping me to understand narratives better....but it is.

Of course, if he agreed with that statement then his whole argument that visual language has a syntax and a grammar would also lose coherency, so I can imagine why he wouldn't.

...try to post hoc categorize a structure that explains why they cohere.

I think the success of large language models made this unequivocal. Each word is literally predicted by the word that came before it. This means it cannot depend on an overarching structure that takes into account the whole, because the whole doesn't exist, only the words which came before exist and function as the limiters of probable outcome

"For instance, contrary to notions that nouns are 'people, places, things, and ideas', words become nouns because of their behavior within a sentence."

This is true, and this is also why I think syntax doesn't really exist. Words connect together into phrases which connect together into sentences, it is not that there is an underlying structure of grammar that causes words to cohere, it's that words cohere and we...

actually a note on page 89
"Some authors of Japanese manga subtly use larger gaps between panels at places I would identify as breaks between Arcs. Authors sometiems have their own "punctuation" as well. For example, in her manga Ranma 1/2, Rumiko Takahashi often ends an episode with a panel (usually a Release) that has slightly wider margins than the other panels on that page."

"While "storytelling" is certainly a prototypical case, "narrative structures" here are simply a method of packaging and presenting concepts, and as such, they should be applicable beyond "stories" (which may be an "entertaining context of narrative broadly). In this context, "stories" are only a prototypical instance of narrative structure, and "good stories" are only a case of rhetorical skill."

Oh, bravo.