Webtoons: Form and Meaning in Digital Comics

How much do digital platforms shape reading? If forms do “effect meaning” (McKenzie 1999), how are comics changed by being written and published within digital, especially mobile platforms?
This presentation will discuss the findings of the Innovations in Digital Comics book, its analysis of the webtoon as the first natively digital, mobile optimised comics format, and its effects on the comics communications circuit. The presentation will focus on the need to move from large-scale quantitative analysis to a more qualitative, “thick” data approach.

About the speaker:

Francesca Benatti is Senior Research Fellow at The Open University, where her research interests range from book history to comics to hypertext to nineteenth-century Irish literature and periodicals. She uses digital approaches to study the Humanities and investigate digital cultures, texts and hypertexts through Humanities perspectives. She is the author of Innovations in Digital Comics (Cambridge Elements, 2024).