In April, we ran a new workshop!
“Creating a Research Paper Abstract…as a Comic.”
Is it possible to communicate the findings, methods, and depth of a scholarly article while making it more engaging and accessible? Yes, it is! Many academic journals now accept or require graphical abstracts for this very reason. In this workshop, we explored the rise of graphical abstracts, examined how you can construct an abstract as a comic, looked at some examples drawn from ‘the wild,’ and then we tried our hand at it ourselves. Participants brought their own journal article abstracts to work with. This was a practice session!
We created a zine workbook for workshop participants, that has a mix of notes and resources about abstracts, comics, etc., and it also has workspace to process an abstract into story and then craft an actual abstract. Here are a few images of that little zine:
We all learned a lot. And it was a fun mix of participants–scientific researchers, humanities folks, and social scientists, students, faculty, post-docs, even a professional comics creator–all finding connections with each other across this large university, and enjoying the collaborative challenge of converting work into comics form.
