From Data to Comic: Qualitative Research Through Comics

• In Event: Methodologies of Comics-Based Research, or "How to Draw Comics the Scholarly Way"

Abstract

In this paper, I recount the creation of a qualitative research comic, “Losing Thomas & Ella” (author withheld), the story of a father’s perinatal loss of twins. Using examples from my work products (page layouts, initial panels, script drafts, etc.), I make an argument for the comics-creation process as a form of qualitative analysis and reflexivity. Both of my roles in constructing “Losing Thomas & Ella” — comic creator and researcher — involved responsibilities of form. The tension between forms originates within the different social languages, indeed different literacy practices (Gee, 1996), of people who produce comics and who produce research, usually quite apart from one another. To do both, then, is to attempt a different kind of literacy, but one that still requires things of its creators. A research comic has obligations to be helpful as scholarship. It also has obligations of aesthetics as a comic.

I not only imported research into a comic, though; I also imported the conventions of comics into research. The comics form has capacities well suited to meeting research and other scholarly expectations, for it allows description, exposition, and speech just as traditional texts in journal articles. Comics accommodate the trappings of academic prose, like editorial comment and citations. Beyond this, though, comics afford their creators sights, motion, sound effects, the elapsing of time, and even sight into places where normal human vision cannot go, like inside the body. The comics form more easily transforms the three-dimensional world of qualitative research into the two-dimensional format of academic publishing. It may not suit every research project (no one approach could), but for some projects comics provide powerful cognitive and representational resources that can bring the subject alive. As graphic novelist Chris Ware said,

I believe that the expressive potentials of comics as a compositional art–with its combination of drawing, poetry, color, writing, pattern, rhythm, typography, and ‘music’ —allow for the greatest possible recreation of the complexity of experience that a printed page can offer. (quoted in Rhoades, 2008, p. 36)

For most qualitative researchers, recreating “the complexity of experience” is precisely their goal, and comics provide more resources for that. This paper provides a vivid example.

During my presentation of this paper, I will offer a guided hands-on activity for participants, so that they can practice turning a qualitative transcript into a comic script. In the process they will see first hand some of the complications of “translating” data into comics.

Author

• Marcus B. Weaver-Hightower, University of North Dakota