Paper Reading #1

Reference
Title: Sequential Art for Science and CHI
Author: Duncan Rowland (and 14 others)

Summary
This paper was about using sequential art (comics) as a serious medium for information transfer. The authors argue that using this medium allows information to be more quickly disseminated to a wide audience. To this end, the paper itself (following the abstract) is written as a comic strip. There are two main sections of the paper. The first example is a photostory for the documentation of a practical science session. The second is also a photostory, by for the study on the biological nature of thrill. Both sections are narrated by a comic strip in a sort of third person.

Discussion
This paper is possibly legitimately the most interesting research paper I have ever read, simply for the shock factor of the paper being a comic book from start to finish. Having read the paper, I would tend to agree that the comic strip medium does have advantages, as the paper was quite possibly one of the easiest to read of all the numerous research articles I've read while at A&M. To a degree this article reminded me of a different reading in this class from the book "The Design of Everyday Things", and I think the authors of this article encapsulate much of what the author of that book was trying to convey.

While this format is certainly easier to read, there is of course a counter balance. To truly maximize the amount of information conveyed the author needs to pick their images very carefully, because each one provides vital information to the read that corresponds with the speech bubbles they are reading. This is most likely not a trivial task, and while I cannot speculate whether the creation of this research article would have taken more or less time to write if written in plain text, I think it is safe to say that it definitely required more expertise to write.

As an additional point, I feel that while this model has potential to be highly innovative in several areas of information transfer, research articles are not one of them. This is because research articles, as scientific documents, need to be extremely precise and clear on the meaning of statements. When information is displayed in this manner it becomes slightly more subjective to the viewer's perspective, as images hold a less concrete definition. Obviously it is still possible to convey concepts this way, but when an author is making a precise argument that needs to be defended, it only makes sense to use the least ambiguous medium.