“Engrossed in this World I’ve Built around Me”: The Digitality of Digital Comics

HCI has much to contribute to the study of digital comics, for example the use of such methods as Interactive Think-Aloud (ITA) and rapid ethnography. These methods, this HCI approach contributes to “a digital sociology of comics”, a holistic and user-centred analysis. In turn, a digital sociology of comics contributes to HCI studies not only by providing a new evidence base for participatory design and application of methods but also an understanding of users who ‘design’ their own environments/interactivity through personalized user ecosystems. These ecosystems are not just content based (although the creative aspect is a strong focus for the research) but communication based. In this presentation, I will review the above findings from my doctoral research, ‘Digital Comics Ecosystems: Investigating creation, publishing, consumption, and communication practices’ where digital comics are the gateway to the lived experience of interactive platforms that make up the digital ecosystem.

About the speaker:

Linda Berube, Visiting Lecturer in Computer Science at City St. George’s, was an AHRC Collaborative Partnership doctoral researcher investigating user interaction with devices, platforms, and digital publications through UK digital comics creation, production, and consumption processes, supported by the British Library and the Human-Computer Interaction Department (HCID) at City St. George’s, University of London. She has published on user interaction with web archives and nonprint legal deposit collections and is the author of Do You Web 2.0? Public Libraries and Social Networking (Elsevier, 2011).