September 4-8, 2023
Biblioteca Hertziana, Rome.
Comics have always been hypertextual. From their origins in newspapers to their present as pillars of multi-billion media franchises, comics have always existed within networks of texts, images, and other media. Hypertext could be seen as the last in a series of transformations of the comics medium and has the potential of being the most profound, promoting for example new models of interactions between authors, readers and publishers (Antonini, Brooker and Benatti, 2020). At the same time, considering hypertext in relation to webcomics is akin to going back to the roots of hypertext Ted Nelson in 1974 coined the term “hyper-comics” in “No More Teacher’s Dirty Looks.” Computer Decisions (1970). Nelson described it as “the simplest and most straightforward hyper-medium” and gave it a prominent place in his proposed media revolution. This workshop interrogates whether Nelson’s vision for comics has been realised in the twenty-first century from multiple perspectives, including systems, cognition, archiving and creativity.
The Web/Comics 2023 workshop seeks to bring together interdisciplinary perspectives from the humanities and technological communities to share work and discuss the latest research on webcomics from the perspectives of both communities. It wants to act as a bridge to increase collaboration between the comics and hypertext research communities. It has the goal of becoming a focal point for the community of scholars interested in conceptualising and analysing hypertext through a webcomics lens. It targets scholars from various fields in the humanities and in computing, including hypertext studies, comic studies, electronic literature, that explore the interconnections between media and technology.
Accepted participants will be invited to submit revised papers, incorporating feedback and insights following the workshop, in a special collection of The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship.
Links https://ht.acm.org/ht2023/webcomics/
Important dates
- *Papers submission:** June 28, 2023 (AoE)
- Notification of acceptance: July 24, 2023
- Camera-ready paper due: August 6, 2023
- Workshop: September 4-5, 2023 (half day, exact date tbc)
Submissions of original, previously unpublished papers are invited in the
following, not exhaustive, topic areas:
- Hypertext systems for webcomics publishing
- Cognitive processing, hypertext and webcomics
- Emergent webcomics formats
- Webcomics and transmedia
- User interface in webcomics
- Reading webcomics as hypertexts
- Authoring webcomics
- Issues in interdisciplinary webcomics research