Digitale und kognitive Methoden zur Erforschung grafischer Literatur
In the definition used for corpus collection, graphic narratives refer to book-length comics that exceed 64 pages in length, tell one continuous or closely related stories, are aimed primarily at an adult readership, and form one single volume or a limited series (such as a trilogy). Included are fictional and non-fictional texts, such as graphic novels and memoirs, graphic journalism, and what we refer to as graphic fantasy, including comic books that belong to the superhero and science fiction genre. Historically, the GNC stretches from the mid-1970s, when the graphic novel started coming into its own in English, to 2017. For several reasons to do with the pop-cultural status of graphic narrative, it's currently almost impossible to know how many graphic narratives were published in this time period. Therefore, the project team drew on a wide range of sources in constructing the GNC. These are: international comics prizes (Eisner, Ignatz, Harvey, and the British Comics Award), academic databases (JSTOR and MLA), Amazon.com bestseller lists, online bibliographies (Grand Comics Database, Comicsvine) and library collections (Library of Congress, the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library at Ohio State University), literary histories and international comics experts, as well as newspaper articles (Guardian, Time, etc.). By casting our net widely, we aimed to balance popularity and prestige and to offset the biases of individual sources. More information on sources can be found in the corpus metadata.
In addition, this homepage offers selected graphs that aggregate and visualize some of the metadata. The Books and Authors sections allow you to explore the corpus based on individual titles and authors and includes basic biographical and bibliographical information. The Graphs section presents interactive maps, charts, and historical overviews of the publication format of graphic narrative. You can look at the geographical spread of this form, explore differences by gender, or see which subgenres dominate the corpus. Further information about the sampling process for the corpus, some of the computational methods of text and image analysis developed for the project, and results that offer a new theoretical understanding and historical periodization of graphic narrative can be found in a monograph authored by Alexander Dunst, titled The Rise of the Graphic Novel: Computational Criticism and the Evolution of Literary Value (Cambridge UP, 2023). The project page also includes a publication list that covers several aspects of the work done by the research group, across cognitive science, computer science, the digital humanities, and literary studies.