POST: Learning to Read Academic Papers by Making Data Comics

In a recent “Topics in Dataviz” post in Nightingale, the Journal of the Data Visualization Society, Alyxander Burns reflects on the use of data comics to help students learn data and information literacy skills. In “Learning To Read Academic Papers by Making Data Comics,” Burns (Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Mount Holyoke College) shares a class activity he designed for his class on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) “in which students create data comics as a means to better understand the structure and content of research papers containing human-subject studies.”

As he reflects, “data comics are a type of narrative data visualization which present a data-driven story in a comic strip-like form. While data comics may look like any other comic strip at first glance, they incorporate visualizations into their data-based narratives, using different combinations of visualizations, (narrative) flow, narration, and words and pictures.”

Burns goes on to describe his in-class activity, designed for a 75-minute period and a 10-minute pre-class discussion. Burns describes the activity, provides some examples, and reflects on the opportunities and challenges of this activity.

In the spirit of #DHmakes, this post provides a roadmap for how digital humanities library workers could use low-fi activities, such as data comics, as a way to teach DH concepts, including but certainly not limited to data collection and visualization.