Good Morning, UMCP! - with Scott McCloud
We’ve been enjoying pretty heady and thoughtful presentations at MITH this week. In less than an hour Scott McCloud will speak again at the University of Maryland in SQH1120, but this morning he took questions from facutly and students at MITH.
Conversation ranged widely including the following topics: the relation among comics, film, games, and the computer; mimetic strengths and weaknesses from the “general reader’s” perspective; the culture, visual, information, “literacy” that supports or challenges production of messages for either informational or aesthetic purposes; the role and nature of escape in popular (American?) culture; among other topics (superheros on the sidelines, etc).
What I took away from the experience was, again perhaps like my take on Dr. Liu’s presentation and rhetoric, is very much my own. Somehow, technology has brought back the idea of skill and craft in a culture that has for more than 50 years (and how many wars now?) turned its back on cultures of manufacture. Comics are a skill, a craft, one as worthy as applied chemistry. I’m not taught to apply for graduate school in the humanities by communicating my ideas graphically, but linguistically — and that cultural bias has some consequences that go beyond the crevices of theory, which I think we explored a bit in conversation. Digital humanities, nay scholarship more and more and more, is becoming a guild of women and men of diverse being and purposes who hone their skills with the tools available to them.
Waking up, as a complete outsider in games and comics (and perhaps even Digital Humanities, who’s in there anyway?) is a process, and I need my coffee. The range of issues here is exciting. I can’t wait to hear how Mr. McCloud addresses computers more specifically in just a few minutes. I wish I could blog live from the ENGL Department lecture hall. A fantasy for another day.
May 2nd, 2006 at 9:19 pm
[…] Kevin Fries offers these two excellent reports on recent talks by Alan Liu and Scott McCloud at MITH. […]