Z604/Z672 Comic Books and Their Readers

Digital and Empirical Methods for Studying Readership and Fandom
Spring 2024

12:40 - 15:15 Wednesday, Sycamore Hall (SY) 103

Instructor: Associate Professor John A. Walsh, jawalsh@indiana.edu.
Office Hours: Schedule at https://fantastical.app/jawalsh-r1Wz/office-hours.

Associate Instructor: Alex Wingate, alewinga@iu.edu
Office Hours: Thursdays, 1:30pm-2:45pm, and by appointment (click Zoom link in Alex’s profile)

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NVivo lab

Instructions

In this lab, you will code a corpus of 5 comics-related documents (comic books, pieces of fan mail, etc.) of your choice using NVivo to support potential content analysis

1. Choose your corpus
   • You can choose to code documents found in the sharepoint folder of comics John has shared with the class, or, if you are using content analysis in your final project, you may choose to code documents from your final project corpus.
2. Explore your corpus
   • Think about what you want to analyze here. What questions do you want to be able to ask of your data? What codes would help that?
3. Code your corpus
   • Apply some codes. You could create some before you start to code your documents and/or create new codes as you go.
4. Generate a matrix
   • Use the Explore tab > Matrix Coding Query to generate a matrix (table) summarizing the distribution of the codes in your corpus. Files should be in the rows and codes in the columns.

To turn in

• A CSV or Excel file of a matrix query of your corpus with the files in rows and the codes in columns
• A text file with 2-4 sentences describing your corpus, what you chose to code, and why

These two files should be turned in to the “Week 9 Lab” assignment alongside the files for the other lab you chose.