Gabriele von Glasenapp, Felix Giesa, and Andre Kagelmann just announced the following Summer School (which, incidentaly, takes place at the same time as Patrick Noonan’s and Stephan Packard’s Cologne Summer School „Constructing Space, Building Place: Topographies of Comics and Visual Narration“ from August 27 to September 7)

Cologne Summer School: “Virtual Children’s Media in a Global Perspective | Globale virtuelle Kindermedienwelten” September 3.-16 2018, University of Cologne

The application for participation is open until March 31, 2018 (details below)

Research Perspective:

“As literary channels of communication are increasingly digitalised and virtualised, the study of children’s and young adult literatue should be recalibrated towards a more encompassing concept of children’s and young adult culture and media studies. So far, however, this has been limited to isolated endeavours often limited in scope, lacking a more systematic approach. Further complications arise from the fact that many relevant products on the German market are translated from other languages.

While this ›transnational flow‹ has well been recognised, its processual logics have yet to be charted in detail. Both aspects – a transnational flow and a transmedia expansion of narrative worlds – fundamentally alter the experiential worlds of children and young adults, including new practices of appropriation and consumption such as booktubes, online collections of solutions for computer games, or the integration of narrative computer games and social media. Existing academic work based on comparative transmedia and/or transnational paradigms provides first steps towards a more fundamental shift of perspective, paving the way for children’s and young adult culture and media studies.

These approaches form the bedrock of our summer school. Tracing the transdimensional quality of changing mediascapes, we propose a research design which combines perspectives from traditional philology, studies in children’s and young adult fiction and transmedia narratology as well as transnational and visual culture studies. The summer school thus aims to foster a deeper understanding of globalised virtual media worlds as targeted at children and young adults, and simultaneously, to sharpen the theoretical profile of studies in children’s and young adult literature research in an age of transnational media convergence. In this vein, it will bring together accomplished experts, excellent junior researchers and students.
Weiterlesen: Details zur Teilnahme

From November 9-11 2016, a co-operation of two commissions of the German Society for Media Studies (GfM) brought us a symposium on the aesthetics of artificiality in animation and comics, at Herrenhausen near Hannover: “On the Aesthetics of the Made in Animation and Comic”. The program was put together by Hans-Joachim Backe (Kopenhagen), Julia Eckel (Marburg/Bochum), Erwin Feyersinger (Tübingen), Véronique Sina (Köln), and Jan-Noël Thon (Tübingen).

Just now, two conference reports have been published in different journals:

On März 15 2017, Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal (12.1) published English conference proceedings by Sebastian Bartosch (Hamburg):
Continue to the English report.

And on März 20 2017, ZfM – Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft released a German article on the conference by Vanessa Ossa (Tübingen):
Continue to the German report.

During the last weeks, the research group “Hybrid Narrativity” of the universities of Potsdam and Paderborn received a lot of attention, not least because of their successful funding through the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). The project is sometimes compared to a somewhat similiar Canadian approach, “What Were Comics?”: a relatively new project by Bart Beaty, Benjamin Woo and Nick Sousanis, supported by the University of Calgary and Carleton University.
“This project will develop a random sample set of comic books representing two per cent of all publications produced in the United States each year from 1933 to 2014. Comics will be indexed for a variety of formal elements (story length; page layout; panel composition; volume of text in captions, word balloons, and sound effects; scene transitions; etc.), producing a systematic survey of comic books’ material and symbolic characteristics over time” (cf. project description).
Since not all too many people in Germany are aware of What Were Comics? yet, the ComFor editorial board had a short interview with Bart Beaty, explaining a little bit of the backgrounds:

Read on: Bart Beaty-short interview

Since April 2015, a new research group at the University of Paderborn, called “Hybrid Narrativity,” deals with graphic literature. It is a collaborative project between the Universities of Paderborn and Potsdam, which last four years and has been funded by the German Ministry of Education with 1,9 million Euros. The defined goal of the research group is to investigate the cultural specificity and reading comprehension of so-called “graphic novels.” (Source: idw)

Project description:

“Combining methods drawn from the cognitive sciences and digital humanities with narratology and literary history, our research group aims at a richer and empirically robust understanding of graphic literature and, in particular, the genre of the graphic novel. The group brings together scholars from psychology, computer science, as well as literary and cultural studies to contribute to the establishment of empirical methods in the humanities. The main research goals of the project are: 1) the creation of an XML-language that allows for the annotation of all relevant textual and visual aspects of graphic narrative, including an editor with state-of-the-art image-processing features and a representative database of contemporary graphic novels; (2) collection of an empirical reference corpus of eye movement measures and development of corresponding analysis tools and measures in the form of an R package, (3) deduction and experimental tests of causal hypotheses, using cognitive experiments involving eyetracking and gaze-contingent display change methodology, and (4) the development of central concepts of a narratology of multi-media texts and the empirical description of the genre of the graphic novel from historical and comparative perspectives.”

To project website