3rd International Workshop on coMics ANalysis, Processing and Understanding (MANPU 2019)

Comics is a medium constituted of images combined with text and other visual information in order to narrate a story. Nowadays, comic books are a widespread cultural expression all over the world. The market of comics continues to grow, for example, the market in Japan is about 4.25 billion USD in 2015. Moreover, from the research point of view, comics images are attractive targets because the structure of a comics page includes various elements (such as panels, speech balloons, captions, leading characters, and so on), the drawing of which depends on the style of the author and presents a large variability. Therefore, comics image analysis is not a trivial problem and is still immature compared with other kinds of image analysis.

The scope of this workshop includes, but is not limited to:

  1. – Comics Image Processing
  2. – Comics Analysis and Understanding
  3. – Comics Recognition
  4. – Comics Retrieval and Spotting
  5. – Comics Enrichment
  6. – Born digital Comics
  7. – Reading Behavior Analysis of Comics
  8. – Comics Generation
  9. – Copy Protection – Fraud Detection
  10. – Physical/Digital Comics Interfaces
  11. – Cognitive Processing and Comprehension of Comics
  12. Linguistics Analysis of Comics

Workshop Paper submission deadline: August 27, 2018

Camera ready papers due: October 12, 2018

Author Registration: October 12, 2018

All accepted papers will be published in the conference proceedings, as part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series by Springer. Authors of selected papers of MMM 2019 will be invited to publish extended versions in a journal special issue.

To evaluate the proposed works, participants will be able to use the following datasets that are publicly available. Researchers can request to download them at each website.

  • eBDtheque consists of 100 images with ground truth for panels, speech balloons, tails, text lines, leading characters.
  • Manga109 consists of over 20 thousand images of 109 volumes (21,142 images).

Workshop organizers:

  • – Jean-Christophe Burie (University of La Rochelle, France), General Co-Chair
  • – Motoi Iwata (Osaka Prefecture University, Japan), General Co-Chair
  • – Yusuke Matsui (National Institute of Informatics, Japan), General Co-Chair
  • – Alexander Dunst (Paderborn University, Germany), Program Co-Chair
  • – Miki Ueno (Toyohashi University of Technology, Japan), Program Co-Chair
  • – Tien-Tsin Wong (The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong), Program Co-Chair

Workshop on Comics Annotation: Designing Common Frameworks for Empirical Research (18-19 June 2018, Potsdam)

We still have a few spaces left, so please get in touch if you’re interested in joining us!

This workshop will bring together scholars in the field of empirical comics research to define common standards and ensure interoperability between disciplines. Researchers interested in comics are increasingly discovering annotation as a necessary and highly beneficial way of digitally enriching their object of study and moving towards data-driven scholarship. For this purpose, a number of tools and data formats have been adopted in areas as diverse as literary and media studies, art history and linguistics, cognitive and computer science. While this diversity represents the outcome of different requirements and backgrounds, a lack of coordination may also make it difficult or even impossible to share data and compare results. The workshop aims to establish common frameworks for future research and answer the following questions:

• What standards do we need to define to ensure interoperability between different researchers and approaches?
• How can annotation schemes be developed and adapted for the visual aspects of artefacts such as comics?
• How can integration be achieved between text-oriented standards, such as TEI and CBML, and further non-text-oriented schemes?
• Where, and to what extent, do we need to move beyond, or in parallel to, XML to support empirical studies more broadly, taking in data on eyetracking, EEG, reading order, physiological responses, etc.?

Participants: John Bateman, Neil Cohn, Jeremy Douglass, Alexander Dunst, Jochen Laubrock, Frederik Schlupkothen, John Walsh…

Contact: Dr. Alexander Dunst (alexander.dunst@gmail.com)

Two Abstracts Accepted for DH 2018 in Mexico City

We’re  happy to announce that both of our abstracts for the DH 2018 conference in Mexico City have been accepted as long papers. This will be the third consecutive year, after Cracow in 2016 and Montréal last year, that we’ll be presenting at what’s always a fascinating overview of new developments in digital humanities around the world, and a great way to meet up with colleagues and friends.

Alexander Dunst & Rita Hartel will be talking about “Automated Genre and Author Distinction in Comics”. Jochen Laubrock & David Dubray ‘s paper is titled “Computational Analysis and Visual Stylometry of Comics using Convolutional Neural Networks”. Computer vision and neural networks were already a huge topic at the DHd 2018 conference in Cologne in early March, so we expect more on these approaches in Mexico. Hope to see you there!

Abstracts for DHd Conference 2018 Accepted

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We’re happy to report that both of our abstracts for the German-speaking Association of Digital Humanities (DHd) Conference have been accepted. Jochen Laubrock will speak about “Computationale Beschreibung visuellen Materials” (The Computational Description of Visual Documents) and Alexander Dunst & Rita Hartel’s paper will be titled, “Auf dem Weg zur Visuellen Stilometrie: Automatische Genre- und Autorunterscheidung in graphischen Narrativen” (Towards a Visual Stylometry: Automatic Genre and Authorship Distinction in Graphic Narratives). We’re looking forward to being in Cologne from 26 February to 2 March.

DH Lecture Series in Paderborn

DH Lecture Series in Paderborn

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Alexander Dunst is helping to organize a DH lecture series in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of Paderborn and will also be presenting an overview of our latest research on 19 December 2017. All welcome!

Join Us at DH 2017 in Montréal

The annual DH conference, organized by ADHO (the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations), is coming up in two weeks. We’re looking forward to a great program and meeting up with colleagues and friends in Montréal from 8-11 August. If you want to hear about some of the work we’ve been doing lately, please join us on Wednesday, 9 August, for Jochen’s poster presentation titled “Design of a Corpus and Interactive Annotation Tool for Graphic Literature”. On Thursday, 10 August, at 1.30 pm, Alex will talk about “Corpora and Complex Networks as Cultural Critique: Investigating Race and Gender Bias in Graphic Narratives” (venue: Art 260). Hope to see you there!

Poster TeaP 2017

We presented a poster at the 59th Conference of Experimental Psychologists (TeaP 2017).

We showed that the “gutter” has a significant impact on the perception of time and visual attention. Subjective measures and eye movements were collected.

Download PDF

The Abstract has been published in the conference proceedings:

Hohenstein, S., & Laubrock, J. (2017). Eye movements and processing of temporal information in comics. In T. Goschke, A. Bolte, & C. Kirschbaum (Eds.), Abstracts of the 59th Conference of Experimental Psychologists (p. 220). Lengerich: Pabst.