Why Comic Books?
Multimodal composition is core to the first-year writing curriculum at the University of Rochester. Alongside term papers, students create short movies, interactive websites, comic strips, and more. Comic Life (comiclife.com) is a software program designed to create everything from single-panel cartoons to comic strips to full-length graphic novels.
Students in first-year writing (WRT 105) classes work to reimagine their research topic thesis as a story that could be told as a comic strip. They populate the panels with hand-drawn images, free-licensed images from the internet, or photos of themselves and fellow students acting out scenes, perhaps with a pointillated moire-style visual effect provided by the software. Placing key elements of their thesis topic into boxes in a comic strip also lets students "storyboard" the structure of their papers, gain a different perspective on their paper outline, and in turn strengthen the quality of their academic writing.
ComicLife has also been used in upper-level courses, such as Ryan Prendergrast's Don Quixote class. You can read more about how Professor Prendergrast worked with Joe Easterly, Digital Scholarship Librarian and Kristen Totleben, Humanities Librarian to implement this project on the Digital Ideas for Teaching and Learning site.
How Can DS Help?
ComicLife is relatively easy to use. Usually, a single 30-minute classroom visit from a Digital Scholarship staff member is all that is needed to get students started. We can help with assignment design and provide instruction on the technology.
