Conferences

Winter School “Transmedial Narratology: Theories and Methods”

Termin:
2016 02 23 13:00h - 2016 02 26

Winter_School_Transmedial_Narratology_smallTuebingen University’s Winter School 2015/16, organized by Jan-Noël Thon, brings together nine international keynote speakers to discuss “Transmedial Narratology: Theories and Methods”.

Karin Kukkonen (Oslo) opens up the Comic Book-workshop of the Winter School with “Transmedial Narratology and Comics Storytelling”. Anne Rüggemeier (Heidelberg) gives a presentation on “’I pose for all the characters in my book’: The Multimodal Processes of Production in Alison Bechdel‘s Are you my mother?” and Laura Schlichting (Giessen) continues with “What Transmedia Can Do for Graphic Journalism”.

Other keynote-speaker are Werner Wolf (Graz), Alison Gibbons (Leicester), Jan Alber (Aarhus), Erwin Feyersinger (Tübingen), Michael Butter (Tübingen) , Jan-Noël Thon (Tübingen) himself, Irina O. Rajewsky (Berlin) and Marie-Laure Ryan (Independent).

Complete program
Organizer’s page

Masterclass with Lev Manovich

Termin:
2015 09 23 10:00-17:00

Hybride Narrativität_Förderer

MASTERCLASS ON CULTURAL ANALYTICS WITH LEV MANOVICH

Date: 23 September 2015, 10am-5pm, University of Potsdam
To sign up for the workshop, please contact Jochen Laubrock at: laubrock@uni-potsdam.de. Participation is free but will be limited to 20 seats, so please register early.

Lev Manovich is Professor of Computer Science at The Graduate Center, City University of New York, and founder and director of the Software Studies Initiative. In 2014 he was included in The Verge’s list of the 50 “most interesting people building the future”. He is well known for the automated exploration, analysis, and visualization of big image data, as exemplified in the “One million manga pages” or “Selfiecity” projects. Manovich is the author of Software Takes Command (Bloomsbury, 2013), Black Box – White Cube (Merve, 2005), Soft Cinema (MIT Press, 2005), The Language of the New Media (MIT Press, 2001), Metamediji (Belgrade, 2001), Tekstura: Russian Essays on Visual Culture (Chicago University Press, 1993) as well as over 120 articles which have been published in 30 countries and reprinted over 450 times. He is also one of the editors of the Software Studies book series (MIT Press) and Quantitative Methods in the Humanities and Social Science (Springer).

Organizers’ Page

Conference report “Mediality and Materiality of Contemporary Comics”

ZfM_LogoFrom April 24th to 26th 2015 the University of Tübingen hosted the 2nd Workshop of the AG Comicforschung (Comic Studies Board) of the Gesellschaft für Medienwissenschaft GfM (the German Society for Media Studies) under the header “The Mediality and Materiality of Contemporary Comics”. Keynote-speakers Daniel Merlin Goodbrey (Hertfordshire), Ian Hague (Comics Forum), Karin Kukkonen (Turku), Véronique Sina (Bochum) and Daniel Stein (Siegen), as well as 10 additional presenters, discussed how this relationship has changed in the context of digitalization and an increasingly convergent media culture. A detailed conference report , written by Christian A. Bachmann and Stephan Packard , is now available at Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft (ZfM) , the online journal of the GfM.

-> Conference report.

Workshop-Program “The Mediality and Materiality of Contemporary Comics”

Termin:
2015 04 24 09:00 - 2015 04 26

The-Mediality-and-Materiality-of-Contemporary-Comics_kleinThe 2nd workshop of the Comic Studies Board (AG Comicforschung) of the German Society for Media Studies (GfM), „The Mediality and Materiality of Contemporary Comics“, examines the relation between the mediality and the materiality of comics, particularly focusing on how this relation has changed in the context of digitalization and an increasingly convergent media culture. Various aspects of the topic will be addressed in 10 paper presentations and 5 keynote speeches by international experts.

Friday, April 24, 2015

09:00-09:30 Jan-Noël Thon/Lukas R.A. Wilde (Tübingen)
Introductory Remarks
09:30-10:30 Daniel Stein (Siegen)
Serial Authorship and Comics in the Digital Age
11:00-13:00 Workshop I (Stein)
Sándor Trippó (Debrecen): Doing History in Graphic Literature: An Analysis of Media Convergence in Recent Documentary Comics by Susanne Buddenberg and Thomas Henseler
Jakob Kibala (Hamburg): Infrastructures of Iconographic Knowledge in Comics
14:30-15:30 Karin Kukkonen (Turku)
Materiality with an Attitude: The Case of Transmetropolitan
16:00-18:00 Workshop II (Kukkonen)
Hans-Joachim Backe (Copenhagen): Love in the Kingdom of TV-Heads. Metalepsis as Media Commentary in B.K. Vaughan’s Saga
Markus Oppolzer (Salzburg): Physical and Digital Transformations of David Hine’s Strange Embrace


Saturday, April 25, 2015

09:30-10:30 Ian Hague (ComicsForum)
Circles, Squares and Dirty Windows: A Toolkit for Thinking About the Materiality of Digital Comics
11:00-13:00 Workshop III (Hague)
Christian A. Bachmann (Bochum): The Material of Metamediality: John Byrne – Scott McCloud – Brian Fies
Lukas Etter (Bern): Materiality and Style in Alternative Comics
14:30-15:30 Daniel Merlin Goodbrey (Hertfordshire)
Game Comics: Look, Listen, Play
16:00-18:00 Workshop IV (Goodbrey)
Gabriel S. Moses (Berlin): Serial Boxes #StackCracklePop. Redefining Social Media as a Game-Comics Hybrid
Oskari Rantala (Jyväskylä): Digital Disruptions of Medium-Specific Narrative Techniques Available to Comics


Sunday, April 26, 2015

09:30-10:30 Véronique Sina (Bochum)
(Re)mediation: Comics and Film in the Digital Age
11:00-13:00 Workshop V (Sina)
Sebastian Bartosch (Hamburg): Understanding Comics’ Mediality as an Actor-Network: Some Elements of Translation in the Works of Brian Fies and Dylan Horrocks
Mathias Bremgartner (Bern): In the Intermedial Zone: Comic Page Meets Theatre Stage

The conference takes place in Room 027 of the Neuphilologicum, also known as Brecht-Bau, which is located at Wilhelmstrasse 50, 72074 Tübingen.
Due to limitations regarding the number of participants we would kindly ask you to register your participation at contemporarycomics@graduiertenakademie.uni-tuebingen.de no later than April 15, 2015.

Organization:
Jan-Noël Thon & Lukas R.A. Wilde
Department of Media Studies
University of Tübingen

Winter School Tübingen: Mediality and Multimodality across Media

Termin:
2015 01 28 - 2015 01 30

Poster_Mediality_Multimodality_small The Winter School Mediality and Multimodality across Media examines the forms and functions of a wide variety of multimodal media forms from a range of different (inter)disciplinary perspectives. The keynote speakers will include Charles Forceville (Amsterdam), who is going to discuss Multimodality in Comics. Related issues will also be investigated in the paper presentations, for instance:

Benoît Crucifix (Leuven):
Frozen Moments. Database Logic and Narrative Drawing in Chris Ware’s Building Stories

Lukas R.A. Wilde (Tübingen):
Distinguishing Mediality. The Interplay between Modes and Conceptual Forms in Digital Comics

Fabian Gregori (Dresden):
To Cry Wolf in the Digital Age: Transmedial Narrative in Bill Willingham’s Fables and Telltale Games‘ The Wolf Among Us

Full program and additional information

Organization
Klaus Sachs-Hombach & Jan-Noël Thon
Department of Media Studies
University of Tübingen

Opening of the Comics Collection at the Library of the John-.F.-Kennedy-Institute

jfki-Collection_smallIn 2013, the library of the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies started to systematically develop its comic collection, which had been existing since the early 1970s. With the help of the Einstein Foundation, the library was able to buy more than 500 collections of historical newspaper comic strips, superhero anthologies from all ages, collections of important artists and writers, graphic novels and other current and historical examples of North American graphic narrative art. As part of a cooperation with the Comic Arts Collection at Michigan State University, the library additionally started collecting comic books. Michigan State University will donate double issues from its collection as a continuing donation to the library. The donations span genres and time periods from Action Comics of the 1960s and 70s to science fiction comics from the 1980s and current superhero comics. Together with other popular primary sources as movies, tv series, magazines or newspapers, comics serve as a regular source for research and teaching at the John F. Kennedy Institute. They are of special interest to the Research Unit “Popular Seriality — Aesthetics and Practice”.

The Collection offically opened on Nov. 25, 2014. You can read two talks about the collection that were held at the opening ceremony here:

Julia Mayer: Comics in wissenschaftlichen Bibliotheken und die Comic-Sammlung der Bibliothek des JFKI

Daniel Stein: Comics Studies in Germany: A Look at the John-F.-Kennedy-Institute’s Comics Collection through the Lens of the Research Unit “Popular Seriality – Aesthetics and Practice”

Further Information about the collection can be accessed here: http://www.jfki.fu-berlin.de/en/library/holdings/comics/index.html

Keith Knight-University Tour: “They Shoot Black People, Don’t They?”

Termin:
2014 11 17 - 2014 11 25

Keith_Knight_smallCreated by award-winning indie cartoonist Keith Knight, a selection from 20 years of his socio-political cartoons are presented in a PowerPoint-based slide show called “They Shoot Black People, Don’t They?” this week. Knight is the creator behind K Chronicles; his work can be found in the pages of the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, Daily KOS, Medium.com, and MAD Magazine.
The tour’s last presentation in Berlin will also serve as the opening of the JFKI Library’s comics collection.

Knight will visit five different universities throughout Germany, with his “They Shoot Black People, Don’t They?” presentation. The tour schedule is as follows:
• Mon. 11/17/14 (4:00pm) – University of Siegen
• Tue. 11/18/14 (4:15pm) – University of Bremen
• Wed. 11/19/14 (6:00pm) – University of Osnabrück
• Thu. 11/20/14 (8:00pm) – University of Bochum, at Goldkante
• Tue. 11/25/14 (2:00pm) – Free University of Berlin, at the JFK Library