New site, PW Review!

As mentioned in the previous post, I've moved this blog to a proper site www.spinweaveandcut.com. I kept all the old archives, plus added resources on comics and education and more. Please join me there! Also - this week, Unflattening got its first review on Publishers Weekly - and it's fantastic. Check it out here and come on over to the new site! See you there, thanks! - Nick

Unflattening Harvard UPress

I'm pleased to announce that my comics dissertation will be published by Harvard University Press in March of 2015! Check out HUP's catalog here to see all the specifics about Unflattening.

This has been in the works for over a year now and I'm thrilled to be able to officially share the news! I've been extremely fortunate to work with a wonderful editor in Sharmila Sen and just a great team at HUP all around. Since defending and handing in the dissertation back in May, with their input I've been plugging away on prepping the book version. The most prominent addition to the dissertation version is the cover - displayed here. (The full cover wraps around the back and onto the flaps as well.) The cover is based on the interior pages that emerged from the "put your feet in my dissertation" invitation and features the outlines of feet from people around the world.

One of the most exciting things for me in seeing this come to fruition is to look back over all my sketches (I've been scanning them as something that will be shared in the notes section) and look at the genesis of ideas scrawled out onto sheets of newsprint as early as 2011 and see how much of what the final work looks like was present in those earliest notes, what changed along the way, never made it in, and only came about much later on. I see it a bit as revealing that our ideas don't emerge like Athena, fully formed from Zeus's brow, rather our thinking coalesces from initial inklings and may take on many forms before the finished appearance in which most people encounter it. Many of these will be in the book, and I plan to share more on my site in the coming months. (The page shown here is the very first page of notes when I started on the project.) 

(Upcoming: I'll be a featured speaker at the International Visual Literacy conference at the Toledo Museum of Art November 7th and all the keynote talks will be open to the public. New to this work? The Chronicle's recent profile is a good way to get up to speed quickly, or click the dissertation label on the upper right for excerpts.) 

Thanks to all for the support over the last several years - it's been a great privilege to develop this work in public conversations - both in person and virtual. Looking forward to being able to share the complete work in just a few short months! - Nick 

From the jacket copy on Harvard University Press's website:

The primacy of words over images has deep roots in Western culture. But what if the two are inextricably linked, equal partners in meaning-making? Written and drawn entirely as comics, Unflattening is an experiment in visual thinking. Nick Sousanis defies conventional forms of scholarly discourse to offer readers both a stunning work of graphic art and a serious inquiry into the ways humans construct knowledge.

Unflattening is an insurrection against the fixed viewpoint. Weaving together diverse ways of seeing drawn from science, philosophy, art, literature, and mythology, it uses the collage-like capacity of comics to show that perception is always an active process of incorporating and reevaluating different vantage points. While its vibrant, constantly morphing images occasionally serve as illustrations of text, they more often connect in nonlinear fashion to other visual references throughout the book. They become allusions, allegories, and motifs, pitting realism against abstraction and making us aware that more meets the eye than is presented on the page.

In its graphic innovations and restless shape-shifting, Unflattening is meant to counteract the type of narrow, rigid thinking that Sousanis calls “flatness.” Just as the two-dimensional inhabitants of Edwin A. Abbott’s novella Flatland could not fathom the concept of “upwards,” Sousanis says, we are often unable to see past the boundaries of our current frame of mind. Fusing words and images to produce new forms of knowledge, Unflattening teaches us how to access modes of understanding beyond what we normally apprehend.

“Nick Sousanis’s Unflattening is a complex, beautiful, delirious meditation on just about everything under the sun; a unique and bracing read.”—Scott McCloud, author of Understanding Comics and Making Comics

“An important book, Unflattening is consistently innovative, using abstraction alongside realism, using framing and the (dis)organization of the page to represent different modes of thought. The words and images speak for themselves and succeed on their own terms. I couldn’t stop reading it.”—Henry Jenkins, author of Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Society

Upcoming Talks & Process Sketches (Multimodality)

Last week (10/10/14), I participated in the #remixthediss event on New Dissertation Models at the CUNY Graduate Center here in NYC. It was a terrific gathering, invigorated live audience, and it was live-streamed to audiences around the country and the globe - and in many sites they hosted their own parallel discussions. Primary organizer, Professor Cathy Davidson now of CUNY called it not an event but the start of a movement. And as part of that, a publicly editable document was made available for listeners to ask questions and presenters answered them live and have continued to build on the document since. You can see that document here, and watch the recorded video of it right here. (If you came to here me, I'm around the 50 minute mark). Reflections and resources from it are posted on HASTAC's site here. Cathy Davidson was featured in Inside Higher Ed this week and speaks about the event movement in the interview. (This resonates with previous panels on new forms of scholarship that i've been involved in from Expanding Forms of Scholarship to Beyond the Protomonograph).

This week, I'm off to Michigan State University to present at the Association for Interdisciplinary Studies annual conference. I've been fortunate to participate with this inclusive organization for about six years now, and this time around I've been invited to give a few remarks about my work at the opening, as well as my individual session, which will also include a comics-making workshop! 

And in early November, I've been invited to give a keynote talk/workshop at the International Visual Literacy Association's conference at the Toledo Museum of Art. Looks like a fascinating gathering and I'm honored to be partaking in it. You can get a little sense of some of the things I'll be talking on from this poster I made for the Oxford Illustration Symposium last year. The Chronicle's feature on my work is another good way for those unfamiliar to get up to speed. 

I want to close this post by sharing some process sketches. I've been scanning all the sketches that went into the dissertation (for inclusion in the book version!), and that's led me to reflect further on my process and how ideas emerge between the collaboration of thoughts in our heads and sketches on paper. It's something i find that makes my work in comics smarter than I am on my own. Anyhow, what follows are a slew of sketches that went into making a page on comics and multi modality from the third chapter of the dissertation, which sets out to theorize on how comics do their work. I posted them here in what in pretty close to the order they were made. You can see that my initial idea was going in a totally different direction (though i still like the idea of talking about omelets as a kind of multimodal process). I then came up with a concept that is more or less what i went with, but then you see all the attempts to get the composition to flow correctly. This culminates in transforming the large hand on the "keyboard" into an arrow of sorts that helps move the reading eye back up after going down for the initial content. Anyhow, I think this offers a sense of the thinking that goes into a page. I'm frequently asked how long pages take to make - and while the drawing in many cases can take a long time - for me, it's always the thinking, how to orchestrate the page to embody the ideas. It's a journey of wrong turns and surprising discoveries. Which is what I feel research always ought to be. - Nick 

Remix Diss and McGee at 90

This site has been quiet for a little bit. But that's not to say I haven't been busy. I'm looking forward to sharing a few announcement as to what I've been up to in just a few weeks. But in the meantime, I wanted to share an upcoming event I'm participating in and a non-comics/education work. 

First up, on October 10 at the CUNY Graduate Center from 4-5:30 pm, I'll be participating in a panel called "What is a dissertation? New Models, Methods, Media." As the name indicates, it'll feature doc students and recent grads talking about their experimental and innovative scholarly forms including digital, multimedia, and, in my case, comics! It's hosted by the super awesome Cathy Davidson, director of the Futures Initiative and founder of HASTAC. I'll be paneling alongside Jade E. Davis of University of North Carolina, Dwayne Dixon of Duke, Gregory T. Donovan of Fordham, and Amanda Licastro of the CUNY Graduate Center. 

The event will be live streamed here and live tweeted at #remixthediss. Virtual partners are invited and there'll  be a collaborative component on google docs. In putting this on, the hope is to gather information and resources about other alternative forms that have been achieved beyond the panelists. (For a past post I did on other researchers working in comics form, see here.) See more details on the HASTAC website here or click here for an interactive version of the poster. It'll be in the English Department Lounge (Rm 4409) ad the CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Ave, NYC. Hope to see some of you there - and please spread the word!  (For the Chronicle's look at my and Dani Spinosa's dissertation work, see here. This came out of a session at MLA called Beyond the Protomonograph.)

On a different front, I'm the biographer of legendary Detroit artist Charles McGee. Charles turns 90 this year and is being featured with an exhibition at Mongerson Gallery in Chicago. I wrote a brief exhibition essay for the show, and share that below. If you're in that city - definitely recommend checking it out. And to learn more about Charles, you can see my earliest interview with him from 2004 here, a 2006 interview in Detroit's MetroTimes here, an interview we did for an exhibition on process here, and the comic I made about him here. Charles is ever an inspiration.

More news and new works soon. Thanks for following along. Onward! - Nick 

Charles McGee at 90: Mongerson Gallery Chicago exhibition essay

An exhibition celebrating the 90^th year of an artist’s life might suggest looking back. For Charles McGee, however, making art is always an attempt to speak the language of the time and explore new means for expression. Thus, this milestone marks simply another day on his journey toward “what’s next?” His eye on tomorrow is not a disregard for what came before. On the contrary, McGee folds past into present, transforming and evolving in a continuity of growth. In some sense, each piece is autobiographical as it evokes the full continuum of his accumulated experiences.

For this exhibition, McGee’s masterful handling of charcoal that first brought him to prominence in Detroit is once again on display. In “Jazz Shouts and Whispers,” his rich textures accompany the patterned surfaces of the amorphic dancing figures that have populated his compositions for the past decade. Layers of experience mingle together as these distinct elements are joined in new conversation. In “Lineage,” the vibrant red highlighting of jagged edges glows against the black and white line work and brings to mind his explorations of neon from the late 1970s – which in turn hearkens his earliest experiences of being dazzled by the signs and lights he saw upon arriving in Detroit, a visual shock for a farm boy from South Carolina. The electricity of that formative moment still burns strongly.

McGee insists that art is necessarily informed by life, and the changes in the work reflect his own changes. Although he recovered his strength and spirits following the stroke he suffered in 2011, his mobility remains hampered. Embarking on new large-scale painting and assemblage pieces became untenable. But as ever, out of a limitation McGee has brought forth a new set of possibilities. McGee’s true affliction, he will tell you, is a life committed to making this work, to obeying his calling. Forging ahead has meant leaving his cavernous studio to work on his dining room table or a board on his lap in bed. Spartan conditions not so different from his young adult explorations into serious art making in a tiny basement apartment where he used a dresser drawer as an easel. By turning to the computer and industrial processes, he harnesses the power of technology to achieve the scale his work demands. His imagination is only emboldened by what these new tools and materials can offer as he translates his sketches into three-dimensional space.

For McGee, art is a sustaining force – a means for him to learn something new each day. And time has been his greatest teacher, continually enriching his quest and providing him with a thirst for greater understanding that he can never quench. In McGee’s words, “I came into art asking questions and I’ll go out asking questions.” - Nick Sousanis, August 2014

RSCON5, Visualizing References, and behind-the-scenes sketches

This Friday, July 12 at 5pm EST, I’ll be doing an online presentation of my work and the educational promise of comics as a keynote for the Reform Symposium Free Online Conference (RSCON5). This annual virtual gathering is put on by an organization of educators called “The Future of Education,” and I offer my thanks to organizer Shelly Terrell for the kind invitation to share my work with this community. I'm pleased to be among such a strong and diverse field of educators, and I recommend checking out the programming and tuning in.

 

If you can’t attend virtually, I hit some similar points at my talk at Microsoft Research last summer, which was recorded. I also turned an even earlier talk from the Sequential Smart conference into an illustrated article (the pdf of which is available here). (And if you're new to this work, the Chronicle of Higher Ed's recent interview serves as a good primer.)

As the dissertation is complete, I’m now in the process of prepping the work for its next phase (about which I’ll speak more of later). One of the things I couldn’t do for the dissertation, but intend to do in its forthcoming iteration, is to take the text-only parts – my acknowledgments, references, and endnotes – and give them more visual form as befitting the rest of the work. I’m dreaming up approaches at the moment – but I’m also seeking suggestions for good examples of what’s out there. I welcome your dialogue on this – drop me a line at nsousanis @ gmail.com – I’d love to hear from anyone with thoughts along these lines.

Since there aren’t new pages that I can post, I thought I’d share a page I’d posted earlier, from Chapter 3, and offer a behind the scenes look at the progression of sketches that led to its creation. This page set up an indepth discussion of the workings of comics and addresses the trouble of the form’s name. I think this is one of the few examples where the development from start to finish, in all its twists and turns, is relatively easy to follow along by looking at my dated sketches. My comments from the endnotes section accompany the images below. Onward! – Nick

From the end notes: 

Page 53: Various alternative names for comics are listed or integrated into the imagery here (for a list of alternative names for comics, see Duncan & Smith, 2009, p. 18). Manga, bandes dessinées, and fumetti are terms for comics respectively in Japan, France, and Italy (specifically of the photo-comics variety). McCloud (1993) and Hogben (1949) connect comics back in time to a lineage that began with the cave paintings at Lascaux. “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet” stems (ha!) from Romeo and Juliet, in which Juliet argues that the names of things do not matter, only what things are.

UCLA and Fabric

This week I'm taking a quick trip to Los Angeles to give a talk at UCLA's Charles E. Young Research Library. The talk is free and open to the public, Thursday May 29 at noon. See here for further details if you're in the area or know folks who'd like to check it out. I'll be talking on and sharing from the now-completed dissertation (!) and we will be spending some time drawing together as well. Should be fun, and I'm grateful for the kind invitation and support from Sharon Farb and other members of the UCLA community.

While this site has been a bit silent of late, life here has been anything but. Our daughter arrived just over two months ago(!) (you can see her toes here). Five weeks ago, I defended the dissertation at the home of Professor Maxine Greene - with my supervisor professor Ruth Vinz, Robbie McClintock, Maxine, and Mary Hafeli. A celebratory gathering. But - despite having passed that milestone, I still had some drawings I wanted to do for the final version. So back to the drawing board before a narrowing date. And then - my hard drive failed - which would have been only a major annoyance and terrible slowdown, were it not for the fact that my external backup failed at the same time. Fortunately, the dissertation was intact on a flash drive, and I was able to get back to work not too long after, though the rest of my data from the last several years ultimately had to be restored via the elaborate and justifiably expensive data recovery process performed by the good folks at TekServ. Some advice - triple backups, don't use a Western Digital backup drive (if it fails, it can't be repaired), and paranoia is your friend when it comes to ensuring you don't lose your data! Anyhow, somewhere in there was graduation, as well as the graduation of many of students from my comics class at Parsons, and finally, yesterday - the final submission of the dissertation. And now that's put to bed. I thought I'd share one sneak peek from the seventh chapter - this deals with the threads - evolutionarily and biological - that make us who we are. The central figure is my redrawing from Vesalius's classic anatomy drawings - which coincidentally and rather appropriately is titled “On the Fabric of Human Body.” This page was rather intense in the research that went into it not to mention its execution, and required some persistence - as it was begun before my defense, fortunately survived the subsequent hard drive crash unscathed, and I finished it some time afterwards. 

With all that's been going on, I've yet to announce the winners of my "put your foot in my dissertation" contest. It's all done, I'm excited about how the pages came out, and I promise to share a look at it, and hope to notify winners and acknowledge all of you that participated from around the globe by next week. For those new to this work, this recent profile in the Chronicle of Higher Education offers a good way to get up to speed quickly. Thanks for following along. Onward - Nick 

Foot Work

Leave your footprints on my dissertation – and win a signed page! (UPDATED w/deadline below)

I’m nearing the finale of the dissertation, and for the final chapter I’m seeking a little help from you – specifically in the form of your feet.

Throughout the work, there have been a number of significant scenes involving feet and shoes, in terms of the paths we tread and the possibility of stepping out. (U of Wisconsin graduate candidate Remi Holden used this particular three-panel sequence from early in the dissertation as themantra of his keynote at the University of Michigan last summer.)

In the final chapter, I’ll be bringing some of these threads together to reflect on education. Consider that my size 10 1/2s don’t look a lot like someone else’s who happens to wear the same shoe size. And so if our feet when held to the same standard are that different, how different must be our ways of thinking…

This is where you come in. Rather than making up distinct foot shapes, I’m seeking a lot of outlines of people’s feet to use as visual information for a sequence tackling this. I’m not exactly sure how the page or pages will unfold, but I’m willing to embrace that uncertainty and see what comes of this.

I’ll be looking broadly at two general categories – feet comparable to my own, US M 10-11 and then ANY shoe sizes, to look at the differences even between the shape of left and right. If I happen to get a ton of one particular size, I may use that as my main focus instead. So that’ll be up in the air till I see what comes in and start to play with it all. I welcome the unexpected discoveries that surface.

If you’re up for it – what I need from you is simply this: trace the outline of each one of your feet and then label it right/left, male/female (what shoe you wear, not your gender), and US shoe size. In my case, this looks like R, M, 10.5, and L, M 10.5.  Then scan or take a digital photo of the tracing, low-resolution is fine (and preferred), as all I need is a clear outline. Label the picture/scan as above without any additional identifying information. Send it to me at nsousanis @ gmail.com with subject heading “foot project” (or some clever pun if you’d prefer).

I will not identify your feet in any way in the work, and will save all the image files in a folder without retaining the sender’s information. I’ll be redrawing the outlines, for visual clarity and consistency as well.

In appreciation of your support, I would like to credit you in the acknowledgments of the dissertation – either your full name, if you choose, or first name and last initial, or anonymous if you prefer. So let me know which: “John Smith,” “John S,” or “please leave me anonymous”.

Additionally, for being such good sports, everyone who submits a pair of outlines will be entered into a drawing to win a signed 11by17 inch print of one page from the dissertation. Three runners-up will receive a signed-mini excerpt from the work. (Winners will be randomly selected.) All will have my gratitude for the contribution and for all the support of this project that I’ve been fortunate to receive.

UPDATE: To be eligible for the contest, foot outlines must be received by Tuesday, April 8!

Lastly, this site may go particularly quiet as I’m in that last push to finish and defend in late April. And any day now, my wife and I will be welcoming our first child – and with her a whole new set of feet…

Thanks for the support! Onward – Nick

For folks new to the work, you can get up to speed quickly in this recent profile in the Chronicle, or click the dissertation link to the upper right for more excerpts from the dissertation.

Coverage in the Chronicle and new page on Commuting

This past week, the Chronicle of Higher Education kindly featured my dissertation work alongside Dani Spinosa’s publicly-blogged dissertation in-progress. I’m overwhelmed by and grateful for all the support and enthusiasm this article has generated. Writer Sydni Dunn provided an indepth look into some of the backstory of how this came to be and its significance in pushing on the forms for scholarship. She also went so far as to get the perspective of my advisors Ruth Vinz and Robbie McClintock, whose openness to this work, I’m realizing I take somewhat for granted as I hear stories of others trying to tread alternative terrain of their own stopped short. I also appreciated the inclusion of the question of “what’s next?” As I find myself in this moment feeling quite fortunate to be doing work I want to do, to share it, and to teach courses I am thrilled to be teaching (comics for educators at Teachers College and a comics readings course at Parsons), I’m also particularly aware that finding an institutional home going forward is a less than straightforward proposition. You can find the article on the Chronicle's site here.

Over the last few years, I’ve been extremely fortunate to have had an ongoing public conversation as I developed this work through conferences and talks. This has also included previous interviews, including in venues based in Russia, Alaska, Microsoft (which also put on an exhibition of the work), the UK, and in the Chronicle before I'd drawn anything. This most recent article, sprang from a  feature mentioning the work in the Chronicle on this year's MLA meeting. Also, in the interest of completeness, Liz Losh, author of Understanding Rhetoric in comics form, included the work in her recent post on comics and scholarship. 

I was particularly delighted to see my dear, departed dog prominently in the Chronicle of all places! This page began as an aside and has in many ways come to summarize the core of the work – that we make sense of our world by many different and diverse modes. And as I said in the interview, my approach from the start to do my doctoral work in comics form was “why not?” – of course one can do smart thinking in comics. Why does any form/mode have a claim on what thinking looks like and what counts? Because that’s how it’s been and stuck in that mindset, we only recognize thinking that looks like thinking that has come before. Which of course influences what learning looks like and how it is constructed.

Along these lines, lately I’ve been talking about how when I studied mathematics (my undergraduate work), people would say to me, ‘oh, you’re so smart.’ When they know about my work in comics, they’ll say, ‘you’re so talented.’ As I reflect on it now, I think I was talented at mathematics, whereas I see the art I do as smart – and as I said in the article, by collaborating with the visual, my comics are smarter than the work I do in text alone. These arbitrary labels, these boxes we divide ourselves into, that put a limit on what we can be. 

In relation to all this, I want to share one new page here that speaks to the unique quality of comics to do two things at once – hold two ideas in a single space – which is also very much where my philosophical concept of unflattening evolved from. In this page from the chapter “Ruts” (regarding the patterns of behavior, the ways of seeing in which we find ourselves entrenched), I wanted to demonstrate commuting as a kind of rut, and contrast it with my wife’s commute – a non-repeating dance around the city taking her to various locations in unique configurations each day. I connected this to the Situationist’s idea of the dérive – literally to drift. Most likely I will talk about this page as part of one of my sessions at the upcoming AERA conference, and my thoughts on it grow out of a presentation there last year on how the work isn’t about illustrating ideas rather it’s having the visual embody the ideas. Here, I thought about how my wife’s paths mapped onto the NYC map could drift across the page while statically in the background, the repetitive commute becomes pattern. It’s a simple enough of an idea – but one I think is richer in comics form in the ways that the two visually contrast and speak to one another. 

Finally, on a more personal note, I’m buying yogurt now with use-by dates beyond the expected arrival of my wife’s and my first child, so this site will likely be a bit silent as we welcome that new experience and I try to bring the dissertation to a close. (I'm sharing my original outline here, I've got the final two columns to draw!) I do have one more post planned before then – a request for some crowdsourcing legwork (or footwork!) for something for the final chapter. Stay tuned and thanks for the support. Onward. – Nick