John A. Walsh

Studies of participatory culture in comics frequently focus on the superhero genre and the participatory fandom communities and networks engaged with the superhero genre. This study focuses instead on participatory culture in the fashion subgenre of teen humor comics published from the 1940s through the early 1970s and again in the 1980s. I survey the many types of reader-contributed content in Archie Comics’ Katy Keene comics and Marvel Comic’s teen humor fashion comics such as Patsy Walker and Millie the Model. I examine the fan-led revivals of Katy Keene and Millie the Model in the 1980s. Finally, with the aid of an archival collection of reader submissions, I investigate the reader contributions to Marvel’s six-issue Misty comic created by Trina Robbins. These explorations seek to recover a vibrant participatory community of comic book readers, consisting primarily of young women and girls, actively engaged in producing the comics they are reading.

Information studies, from origins in the field of documentation, has long been concerned with the question, What is a document? The purpose of this study is to examine Christian icons—typically tempera paintings on wooden panels—as information objects, as documents: documents that obtain meaning through tradition and standardization, documents around which a sophisticated scaffolding of classification and categorization has developed, documents that highlight their own materiality. Theological arguments that associate the icon with the Incarnation are juxtaposed with theories on the materiality of the document and “information as thing.” Icons are examined as visual and multimedia documents: all icons are graphic; many also incorporate textual information. Icons emerge as a complex information resource: a resource—with origins in the earliest years of Christianity—that developed over centuries with accompanying systems of standardization and classification, a resource at the center of theological and political differences that shook empires, a primarily visual resource within a theological framework that affords the visual equal status with the textual, a resource with enduring relevance to hundreds of millions of Christians, a resource that continues to evolve as ancient and modern icons take on new material forms made possible through digital technologies. And crist was all, by reason as I preve,Firste a prophete by holy informacion,And by his doctryne, most worthy of byleve.—John Lydgate. Life of Our Lady. IV. II. 309–311We confess and proclaim our salvation in word and images.—Kontakion of the Sunday of Orthodoxy

The interdisciplinary field known as digital humanities (DH) is represented in various forms in the teaching and research practiced in iSchools. Building on the work of an iSchools organization committee charged with exploring digital humanities curricula, we present findings from a series of related studies exploring aspects of DH teaching, education, and research in iSchools, often in collaboration with other units and disciplines. Through a survey of iSchool programs and an online DH course registry, we investigate the various education models for DH training found in iSchools, followed by a detailed look at DH courses and curricula, explored through analysis of course syllabi and course descriptions. We take a brief look at collaborative disciplines with which iSchools cooperate on DH research projects or in offering DH education. Next, we explore DH careers through an analysis of relevant job advertisements. Finally, we offer some observations about the management and administrative challenges and opportunities related to offering a new iSchool DH program. Our results provide a snapshot of the current state of digital humanities in iSchools which may usefully inform the design and evolution of new DH programs, degrees, and related initiatives.

This article examines one of the decision-making moments in Petrarch’s editing of his Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (Rvf), when he erases the ballata "Donna mi vene spesso ne la mente" from the partial holograph Vaticano Latino 3195 and inserts the madrigal "Or vedi amor che giovenetta donna" over the erasure, creating a dynamic, palimpsestic relationship between the erased ballad and the Rvf. This shift in the making of the text represents the heart of the artistry of Petrarch’s visual poetics. The study of erasures and palimpsests in the partial holograph and other significant early witnesses helps us understand and trace the history of the work and affects our consideration of modern and contemporary editions of the text. The Petrarchive digital edition of the Rvf () implements new solutions, in the encoding and presentation of the edition, for exposing and highlighting the dynamic, palimpsestic features of Petrarch’s visual poetics.

This paper describes the history, policy, semantics, and uses of the HathiTrust Research Center Extracted Features dataset, an open-access representation of the 17+ million volume HathiTrust Digital Library, including a major current effort to extend computational access in a variety of more flexible and easily implemented ways, including a modern API supporting customizable visualizations and analyses.

Comics, comic books, and graphic novels are increasingly the target of seriously scholarly attention in the humanities. Moreover, comic books are exceptionally complex documents, with intricate relationships between pictorial and textual elements and a wide variety of content types within a single comic book publication. The complexity of these documents, their combination of textual and pictorial elements, and the collaborative nature of their production shares much in common with other complex documents studied by humanists – illuminated manuscripts, artists’ books, illustrated poems like those of William Blake, letterpress productions like those of the Kelmscott Press, illustrated children’s books, and even Web pages and other born-digital media. Comic Book Markup Language, or CBML, is a TEI-based XML vocabulary for encoding and analyzing comic books, comics, graphic novels, and related documents. This article discusses the goals and motivations for developing CBML, reviews the various content types found in comic book publications, provides an overview and examples of the key features of the CBML XML vocabulary, explores some of the problems and challenges in the encoding and digital representation of comic books, and outlines plans for future work. The structural, textual, visual, and bibliographic complexity of comic books make them an excellent subject for the general study of complex documents, especially documents combining pictorial and textual elements.