ABSTRACT
Compared to dominant hermeneutic paradigms, empirical research that engages with culture and the arts plays a minor, sometimes even neglected, role. Computational methods represent a relatively recent addition to comics research, and it's fair to say that their potential is not yet recognized by the majority of scholars. Nonetheless, digital approaches to comics already demonstrate a remarkable range across disciplines. Digitization, modeling, annotation, and automatic recognition constitute four points of intersection between comics and computation. Linguistic interest in comics developed in the 1960s and '70s in order to examine combinations of verbal and pictorial material as components of meaning-making. However, multimodal analysis has only recently been recognized as relevant to the field of comics research. Much of the work on comics in multimodality so far has chosen a theoretical and methodological perspective on its units and structural qualities. Hans-Jurgen Bucher and Bettina Boy presents a eye-tracking study from a multimodal and discourse analytical perspective.
