I’ve just had an article published in the Society for American Archaeology’s journal Advances in Archaeological Practice. The article – Ceramics, Polity & Comics: Visually re-presenting formal archaeological text – is partly a defence of the use of comics in archaeology in general, and partly a call to examine how archaeologists might make use of more-visually-integrated media such as comics in the presentation of formal, peer-reviewed text.
The article – perhaps unsurprisingly – takes the form of a comic. As part of its focus, it looks at an adaptation by myself of the first three pages of an existing peer-reviewed archaeological text into a comic. The text in question is an article by Michael Whalen and Paul Minnis from American Antiquity entitled “Ceramics and Polity in the Casas Grandes Area, Chihuahua, Mexico”, published in 2012. I adapted the first three pages in to a comic to demonstrate how the article’s visual thesis could be better presented with a more visual approach to the text. It is my contention in the article that there are good reasons and distinct advantages to looking again at media which foreground the visual content and context of archaeology – not just in public outreach, education, etc., but in academic, peer publication as well.
It will be interesting to see what the response to this article will be. Feedback so far from colleagues has been positive, but we shall see what the journal’s wider archaeological audience thinks.
Incidentally, while many peer-reviewed publications have featured comics as part of their content, I think that this is the first academic article to be published entirely as a comic. I may be wrong about this, and it would be interesting to hear of any other examples. I’d like to know what the experience of others who have tried comics as academic publication has been.
[…] of comics in communicating academic research to a wider audience, as well as their potential use within academia. (Anyone interested in this subject should think about coming along to the Applied Comics meet up […]
[…] use of visuality to create narrative, make them, in fact, a comic. And as I did in my article for Advances in Archaeological Practice, he’s arguing for their use as a stand-alone form of professional publication, not simply as […]