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117: Unflattening & Thinking With Comics w/ Nick Sousanis
18 Plays2 years ago
I was introduced to Nick Sousanis’ work through a Twitter connection, shout out to @AndrewJ, as I wanted to spend more time over the summer with what are broadly called graphic novels. Probably like many listeners, I had read comic books as they appeared in pop culture over the years, The Dark Tower adaptation, the Walking Dead, even “classic” graphic novels, I suppose, like Alan Moore’s Watchmen, V for Vendetta, and From Hell. As a history major, I read the first book of Maus in college. but other than that I never really knew where to go from there. Now, just last month, I had a friend recommend Marjan Sahtrapi’s Persepolis, a graphic memoir of her childhood before, during, and after the Iranian Revolution. I borrowed it from the library, read it in a single sitting, and was hooked. So I immediately put a call out on Twitter on where to go from there and got dozens of suggestions. I’ve spent the rest of the summer catching up on a number of graphic memoirs including the March Trilogy, The Best We Could Do, and Fun Home. Then came Nick Sousanis’ Unflattening.
Nick Sousanis is an Eisner-winning comics author and an associate professor of Humanities & Liberal Studies at San Francisco State University, where he runs a Comics Studies program. He received his doctorate in education at Teachers College, Columbia University in 2014, where he wrote and drew his dissertation entirely in comic book form. Titled Unflattening, it argues for the importance of visual thinking in teaching and learning, and was published by Harvard University Press in 2015. Unflattening received the 2016 American Publishers Awards for Professional and Scholarly Excellence (PROSE Award) in Humanities, the Lynd-Ward Prize for best Graphic Novel of 2015, and was nominated for an Eisner Award for Best Scholarly/Academic work. To date, Unflattening has been translated into French, Korean, Portuguese, Serbian, Polish, Italian, and Chinese.
There is an irony here that we are going to attempt to discuss these very visually linked ideas in an audio podcast, but I will also provide links to the excerpts of Unflattening that are available on Nick’s website.
GUESTS
Dr. Nick Sousanis, Eisner-winning comics author and an associate professor of Humanities & Liberal Studies at San Francisco State University
RESOURCES
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Nick Covington and Nick Susannis
00:00:11
Speaker
Hello and welcome to episode 117 of the Human Restoration Project podcast.
00:00:17
Speaker
My name is Nick Covington and I'm the creative director here at the Human Restoration Project.
00:00:22
Speaker
I was introduced to Nick Zuzanis' work through a Twitter connection, so shout out to Andrew J. As I wanted to spend more time over the summer with what are broadly called graphic novels.
00:00:32
Speaker
Probably like many listeners, I had read comic books as they appeared in pop culture over the years, like the Dark Tower adaptation, The Walking Dead,
00:00:40
Speaker
Even classic graphic novels, I suppose, like Alan Moore's Watchmen, V for Vendetta, and From Hell.
00:00:47
Speaker
As a history major, I had also read the first book of Maus in college, but other than that, I never really knew where to go from there.
00:00:55
Speaker
Now, just in June of 2022, I had a friend recommend Marjan Satrapi's Persepolis, a graphic memoir of her childhood before, during, and after the Iranian Revolution.
00:01:08
Speaker
I borrowed it from the library, read it in a single setting, and was hooked.
00:01:12
Speaker
So I immediately put a call out on Twitter on where to go from there and got dozens of suggestions.
Nick Susannis' Journey into Comics
00:01:18
Speaker
I've spent the rest of my summer catching up on a number of graphic memoirs, including The March Trilogy, The Best We Could Do, and Fun Home.
00:01:26
Speaker
Then came Nick Susannis' Unflattening.
00:01:29
Speaker
Nick Susannis is an Eisner-winning comics author and an associate professor of humanities and liberal studies at San Francisco State University, where he runs a comic studies program.
00:01:40
Speaker
He received his doctorate in education at Teachers College, Columbia University in 2014, where he wrote and drew his dissertation entirely in comic form.
00:01:50
Speaker
Titled Unflattening, It Argues for the Importance of Visual Thinking in Teaching and Learning and was published by Harvard University Press in 2015.
00:02:00
Speaker
Unflattening received the 2016 American Publishers Award for Professional and Scholarly Excellence, the Prose Award in Humanities, the Lind Ward Prize for Best Graphic Novel of 2015, and was nominated for an Eisner Award for Best Scholarly-slash-Academic Work.
00:02:18
Speaker
To date, Unflattening has been translated into French, Korean, Portuguese, Serbian, Polish, Italian, and Chinese.
00:02:26
Speaker
There is an irony here that we are going to attempt to discuss these very visually linked ideas in an audio podcast, but I will also provide links to the excerpts of Unflattening that are available on Nick's website.
00:02:38
Speaker
So Nick, thank you for speaking with me today.
00:02:41
Speaker
Yeah, so I'm Nick Susannis, and I run a comics program at San Francisco State.
00:02:46
Speaker
And as pointed out, I wrote and drew my dissertation entirely in comics form, and then it was subsequently published as Unflattening, which I guess is a graphic novel, though it's not a novel in any sort of way.
00:03:00
Speaker
So these words are all a little complicated.
00:03:05
Speaker
But I'll say I was a comics maker as a kid, and I read comics.
00:03:09
Speaker
I'm certainly...
00:03:11
Speaker
Certainly somebody who could attest to the learning to read strengths of comics.
00:03:18
Speaker
Like I read very early and I think reading comics definitely helped that.
00:03:22
Speaker
And I see it in my own.
Comics in Academia
00:03:24
Speaker
And my daughter was a very early reader as I read comics to her.
00:03:29
Speaker
So I was really into comics as a kid.
00:03:30
Speaker
And then I made my own superhero comics through junior high and high school.
00:03:35
Speaker
But when I got to undergrad, undergrad...
00:03:39
Speaker
Comics is not a thing to do.
00:03:41
Speaker
It's not like if you want to do intellectual things, it didn't exist, number one.
00:03:47
Speaker
And even if it did, I wouldn't have thought about it as an intellectual thing.
00:03:50
Speaker
And I wanted to do those kinds of things.
00:03:53
Speaker
So I studied mathematics and I was always making comics in the background.
00:03:58
Speaker
And it's not till quite a bit later, you know, I was still reading them and still sort of making them, but never not much finished for a long time.
00:04:07
Speaker
But I was in Detroit from rural Michigan, but I was in Detroit for about a decade.
00:04:12
Speaker
And I ran an arts and arts and cultural magazine and wrote about art.
00:04:16
Speaker
And I got invited to be in an art show around the 2004 presidential election.
00:04:21
Speaker
And I only had a couple of days to do it.
00:04:22
Speaker
And so I was like, I'll make a comic.
00:04:24
Speaker
So I made this short essay, comic as essay.
00:04:28
Speaker
And then right after the election, there was a second show.
00:04:31
Speaker
So it's like, I got four days to do it again.
00:04:33
Speaker
So I made a second one.
00:04:34
Speaker
And those those two pieces really like set the tone for my return to comics.
00:04:39
Speaker
in a quite different way than I had as a kid.
00:04:43
Speaker
Shortly after that, we put on an exhibition of art and games.
00:04:48
Speaker
A buddy of mine said, why don't you do the essay as a comic book?
00:04:51
Speaker
I was like, okay.
00:04:53
Speaker
I did this long form comic on the history of games, philosophy of games, how games work.
00:04:59
Speaker
It really involves study of games.
00:05:04
Speaker
Having finished that,
00:05:07
Speaker
it really set the stage for what I could do.
00:05:09
Speaker
And at the time I was teaching at the university and I was teaching, I had a master's in interdisciplinary studies in math and art.
00:05:18
Speaker
And I taught a public speaking class at the university, which I really loved.
00:05:23
Speaker
And I taught a little bit of writing, but mostly the public speaking class.
00:05:27
Speaker
And I thought, you know, being an adjunct is not
00:05:31
Speaker
not a really sustainable career, but I love being in education.
00:05:34
Speaker
I'm the child of a, of a physics teacher and tennis coach.
00:05:37
Speaker
And, and my mom is a, is a naturalist environmental studies teacher.
00:05:42
Speaker
So I had been, I'm the child of educators and I, I,
00:05:47
Speaker
doing all these educational things as a tennis pro.
00:05:49
Speaker
So I made my living teaching tennis for most of my most of my young adult to middle adult life.
00:05:58
Speaker
So I was seeing all the stuff I was doing is educational, but but not in the sort of traditional sense.
00:06:04
Speaker
So I decided I might as well get my doctorate because I like doing these things.
00:06:07
Speaker
And in the comics that I was making, I saw them sort of come together and bring the stuff that I'd love to do with the stuff I cared about educationally.
00:06:16
Speaker
And that that all could all come together.
00:06:18
Speaker
So I sort of stumbled into Columbia Teachers College education program.
00:06:25
Speaker
A friend back home knew somebody there and they said they are interested in people doing curious things.
00:06:30
Speaker
And I was like, I'm doing curious things.
00:06:33
Speaker
So I showed some potential advisors the kind of comics I did and they seemed intrigued and I applied and I got in.
00:06:43
Speaker
So so I came I mean, this is a question I get a lot like, do you have a lot of trouble getting your dissertation approved?
00:06:50
Speaker
You know, because and the truth is I I didn't know it was a big deal.
00:06:57
Speaker
I had no idea.
00:06:58
Speaker
I just thought because of things that you'd mentioned, like Mouse and Persepolis had already been out.
00:07:03
Speaker
I kind of thought that the the argument for comics as
00:07:07
Speaker
as intellectual and educational had been long ones.
00:07:11
Speaker
Scott McCloud's understanding of comics had been out a long time at that point.
00:07:16
Speaker
But it's not really until I got into it that I realized that there was still a lot of barriers to break down.
00:07:24
Speaker
So my work, I knew I was going to do comics for my work, but I didn't know that the comics were going to argue for themselves.
The Concept of Unflattening
00:07:34
Speaker
That became more apparent as I got
00:07:36
Speaker
into it and realize that I had to champion, at least I felt I had to champion, that comics belonged here and that comics should just be one of the many options people could do to do their thinking.
00:07:52
Speaker
Would you mind unpacking a little bit more of like, you just said letting the comics speak for themselves when you were talking about that?
00:07:58
Speaker
What do you mean by that?
00:07:59
Speaker
Like you're expecting to have a lot more pushback or...
00:08:03
Speaker
I get this question a lot that people expected that I had a big fight to make the work happen.
00:08:12
Speaker
And I don't know if because I hit the right time in history, because I was an older student, or because I was just too naive to know that it was a big deal.
00:08:21
Speaker
I was just doing it.
00:08:22
Speaker
I was like, this is what I want to do, and I'm going to do it.
00:08:25
Speaker
And I had a bunch of very senior professors, so they didn't have much to lose.
00:08:31
Speaker
They didn't have much knowledge necessarily of what I was doing, but they didn't, you know, they were intrigued and supportive in those ways.
00:08:38
Speaker
So, I mean, I think a lot of times you see projects like this in the past where you would do the thing, but then you'd have to write a text thing to explain why you did the thing.
00:08:51
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:08:52
Speaker
And that was really important to me that I didn't do that.
00:08:55
Speaker
I mean, I don't think I said this before, but I think that comics speak for themselves.
00:08:59
Speaker
Like, this is a legitimate form of scholarship and it's a legitimate form of meaning making.
00:09:06
Speaker
And in fact, there's things I can do with comics that I can't do.
00:09:10
Speaker
purely text.
00:09:11
Speaker
So very much, you know, my work is an argument for itself and things sort of like it, that it doesn't need that other layer of explainer.
00:09:23
Speaker
Obviously, comics are a little bit
00:09:25
Speaker
If I was doing a performative dance, that might take... Comics still have words in them.
00:09:32
Speaker
They can still have notes.
00:09:33
Speaker
They can still have these things that we recognize.
00:09:36
Speaker
So in some ways, they're not that big a leap to make from what you might have thought of as scholarship before.
00:09:44
Speaker
But they still are.
00:09:46
Speaker
People are still either intimidated or dismissive of pictures.
00:09:51
Speaker
and can do a lot and really complicated.
00:09:54
Speaker
It's a lot harder.
00:09:54
Speaker
If I was writing my dissertation, it would have been a lot faster.
00:09:58
Speaker
I bet, yeah.
00:09:59
Speaker
Especially if anybody has read Unflattening or if you check out the excerpts, yeah, I think you'll see that that is self-evident.
00:10:04
Speaker
It really is something to say,
00:10:06
Speaker
The pictures by themselves, the images, the visual by themselves, maybe requires some of the context to help provide it some context.
00:10:15
Speaker
But then the words by themselves need the visuals perhaps to imply the deeper meaning.
00:10:20
Speaker
And so it really is just the marriage of both of those factors, and especially in the way that you
00:10:25
Speaker
that you use them to literally think out of the box.
00:10:28
Speaker
I think a lot of us, when we think of comic books or graphic novels, think of the squares on the page.
00:10:33
Speaker
And I think you've kind of really opened up that just to use it as a visual space, like you said, for meaning making and to do your thinking on the page.
00:10:43
Speaker
And you write a lot in Unflattening, too, just about that physical process, the connection of the physicality of the pen and the paper and constructing the meaning as you go through that.
00:10:56
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think you said it really well.
00:10:59
Speaker
Constructing meaning on the page or this space to explore is we're sort of accustomed to thinking as being this thing.
00:11:05
Speaker
You put your hand under your chin and you sit still for a while.
00:11:08
Speaker
But thinking when we move, thinking when we're on the run, thinking when we're making marks.
00:11:14
Speaker
I work solo, right?
00:11:15
Speaker
I make solo, but I had this partner in my drawing.
00:11:19
Speaker
The drawings pushed me to think in ways and ask questions that I wouldn't have asked in other ways.
00:11:25
Speaker
It's not necessarily better.
00:11:27
Speaker
I think it's better, but it's different.
00:11:31
Speaker
It's different.
00:11:31
Speaker
It pushed me to ask questions and go directions I just would not have gone if I was purely writing.
00:11:39
Speaker
If I had written this thing, started at time zero, and you can watch two timelines here,
00:11:44
Speaker
And I just stuck to the writing one or just stuck to the comics one.
00:11:47
Speaker
And you saw that they would diverge quite a bit.
00:11:49
Speaker
Wouldn't just be an illustrated version of my written one.
00:11:52
Speaker
And it is interesting, just as a side note, how text as a mode of thinking is really valued both in society, but particularly like in academia.
00:12:03
Speaker
And so it is interesting to see a work like Unflattening just challenging that norm.
00:12:07
Speaker
Why would we not be able to submit a...
00:12:10
Speaker
you know, a YouTube video or like, let's imagine a director at a film school, right, trying to submit a piece of writing.
00:12:17
Speaker
It's just interesting to see how multimodal, multimedium thinking, you know, as a legitimate form of academic expression as much as it is self or self-expression.
00:12:29
Speaker
we're complex creatures.
00:12:30
Speaker
We express ourselves in many forms and we learn in many forms.
00:12:34
Speaker
So why not use more of it?
00:12:37
Speaker
Why not use more of it?
00:12:38
Speaker
I mean, and it's challenging, right?
00:12:40
Speaker
It's hard to, a lot of our formats were created because they fit in something that we could manage.
00:12:47
Speaker
It's harder to deal with pictures in a lot of ways, but
00:12:50
Speaker
I think we can handle it.
00:12:52
Speaker
So there have been a handful of ideas that have been conceptual game changers for me as an educator in terms of shifting my perspective or adding a new lens of looking at a problem or thinking about the world.
00:13:04
Speaker
One of those would be Seymour Papert's constructionism.
00:13:07
Speaker
that notion that we're in dialogue with the objects we create.
00:13:11
Speaker
So whether they're physical or digital, Papert was a big proponent of coding in schools, for instance, that those outer physical models influence and help us construct our inner mental ones.
00:13:22
Speaker
So we're constantly in dialogue with those spaces.
00:13:25
Speaker
And you even spend a chapter in your book that we just talked about actually connecting that physical act of drawing with the notion of construction.
00:13:33
Speaker
And you say in there, we draw not to transcribe ideas from our heads, but to generate them in search of greater understanding.
00:13:40
Speaker
I think to this pile of conceptual game changers, you know, this list that I have in my head, the notion of unflattening seems to kind of have that power for me as well.
00:13:50
Speaker
So to get to kind of the thesis of that book, what do you mean by unflattening?
00:13:55
Speaker
What are the core concepts at play in that work?
00:13:57
Speaker
And, you know, how can our listeners get involved in doing that for themselves and unflattening their own thinking?
00:14:04
Speaker
Part of what I mean by it is that answer is unique to everyone.
00:14:10
Speaker
And one of the biggest, I'm not sure how I'll answer this question, but...
00:14:17
Speaker
I often people make typos when they refer to the book and I get unflattering a lot, you know, which which is funny and I don't mind it that much.
00:14:26
Speaker
But unflattened is the one I dislike the most because unflattened implies a finished thing.
00:14:33
Speaker
It implies something that's done.
00:14:36
Speaker
And I'll get questions like, do you feel like you're unflatened?
00:14:38
Speaker
And I'm like, no, of course not.
00:14:40
Speaker
The idea is that it's something that's always ongoing in the same way that our vision is.
00:14:48
Speaker
Your eyes are moving around, both of them are moving around and picking up spots.
00:14:52
Speaker
That's how our senses work.
00:14:53
Speaker
We're always sort of adjusting how we experience the world.
00:14:58
Speaker
And so that is sort of the core of what I meant by it.
00:15:01
Speaker
It's like always coming from multiple vantage points and changing how you understand your own experience or how you make meaning.
00:15:11
Speaker
So that's definitely part of it.
00:15:15
Speaker
It became a way to fit all these ideas I had about interdisciplinarity, about justifying my own sort of curious background of math and art and tennis, like this physical part and this sort of abstract mental part and the whatever arc.
00:15:33
Speaker
Those are all supposed to be boxes that don't fit, that are separate.
00:15:36
Speaker
And I was trying to say that
00:15:38
Speaker
They're just parts of being human.
00:15:41
Speaker
So some part of unflattening is, you know, is the simple come from two eyes or more.
00:15:45
Speaker
Some part of it is to come from different modes.
00:15:48
Speaker
And a big part is that it's never done.
00:15:50
Speaker
It's never done.
00:15:53
Speaker
And there's things, you know, I mean, I like the thing I made, but there's plenty of things I do differently.
00:15:57
Speaker
There's plenty of things that I've moved on from.
00:16:00
Speaker
And I think, you know, when I talk to teachers, a question that sort of, and I don't want to say this disparagingly, but it bothers me is, I like your book, and what do you think I should do in my classroom?
00:16:13
Speaker
And, like, what do I know about you?
00:16:15
Speaker
Like, that's not...
00:16:17
Speaker
I'm not there, right?
00:16:18
Speaker
Like if I was there and we could talk about it and we could come up with ideas, but part of the goal is that you can do it.
00:16:25
Speaker
You can get there on your own two feet and sort of that idea that you can ask your own questions
00:16:32
Speaker
And you can find your own answers and they won't be, you know, they might not be the best answer you got until until the next year when you get a better one or whatever.
00:16:40
Speaker
But but you can figure it out and you can ask, you know, it's one thing to be inspired by things or have conversation about it, but I'm not capable of telling other people what to do.
00:16:53
Speaker
partner idea in that too.
00:16:54
Speaker
You've got a lovely illustration.
00:16:57
Speaker
And again, if we could show the illustration, I think people would catch on to the idea pretty quickly.
00:17:01
Speaker
But this idea that is a theme in the book is this notion of rhizomatic thinking, which I don't know if that's an original kind of lens of looking at things.
00:17:11
Speaker
I had never encountered that
00:17:13
Speaker
that concept before, but of course mapped out visually in the way that it is on the page is very, is very striking.
00:17:19
Speaker
I didn't know if you could help us understand what's, what's going on with that lens of rhizomatic thinking or how that differs from the sort of linear kind of thinking that you critique earlier on in the book.
00:17:30
Speaker
You know, how do we help support that version of rhizomatic thinking?
00:17:35
Speaker
Yeah.
00:17:35
Speaker
I mean, I didn't, I mean, imagery is all me and putting those pieces together is me, but it's certainly not.
00:17:42
Speaker
I mean, that,
00:17:43
Speaker
you know, Deleuze and Qatari I'm referencing and lots of other people.
00:17:47
Speaker
Right, right.
00:17:48
Speaker
I'm not the originator of such things.
00:17:50
Speaker
And I don't know that I can speak for any of them.
00:17:53
Speaker
I mean, I used it a lot to say like, like text is a great thing.
00:17:57
Speaker
This is it was I think in my early years talking about this, it often sounded like I was anti text.
00:18:02
Speaker
And that's not it at all.
00:18:05
Speaker
But there are, as with everything, everything has its own limitations.
00:18:09
Speaker
And text has its limitations in its sort of linear form.
00:18:12
Speaker
And you try to, you know, you can put only so many parentheticals in your thing before it's a little annoying, right?
00:18:19
Speaker
But like images allow parentheticals in that sort of branching that a rhizome does.
00:18:23
Speaker
So a rhizome is something unlike a tree, which has a trunk and then it splits off the roots.
00:18:29
Speaker
Everything is sort of interconnected.
00:18:31
Speaker
So grass is like that.
00:18:32
Speaker
Aspen is like that.
00:18:33
Speaker
And the banyan tree, which is what I used in one of those pages, is like that, where where everything is sort of all connected.
00:18:40
Speaker
You cut one part of it.
00:18:41
Speaker
You're still still there.
00:18:42
Speaker
You're still there.
00:18:43
Speaker
There's still other ways to get around.
00:18:45
Speaker
Whereas you cut the trunk of a tree and and that's gone.
00:18:48
Speaker
Right.
00:18:48
Speaker
And writing is a lot like that.
00:18:50
Speaker
You cut.
00:18:50
Speaker
You break the chain of writing and it falls apart.
00:18:53
Speaker
You break the chain of an image.
00:18:55
Speaker
There's other ways to connect around it.
00:18:59
Speaker
So I don't know how to say that as rhizomatic thinking so much.
Interdisciplinary Thinking and Comics
00:19:03
Speaker
I think that's a little beyond my ability to speak to it.
00:19:06
Speaker
But I think images work in that way and comics work in both ways.
00:19:11
Speaker
That was one of the things I thought was so amazing about him is that
00:19:15
Speaker
like we do think sequentially, right?
00:19:18
Speaker
Like I know I had to get my kid to preschool and I got to run back and I got to talk to you.
00:19:23
Speaker
And then I've got something after that.
00:19:25
Speaker
Like I, there's a very linear sequence of things that is going to happen to me today or I'm going to do today.
00:19:31
Speaker
Um, but at the same time, uh,
00:19:33
Speaker
You know, our conversation is going to make me think about what I was doing in Detroit in 2004.
00:19:39
Speaker
And I'm thinking about ideas that, you know, that I might need to do in my class now that something you've said are in my new work.
00:19:47
Speaker
So my thoughts are all at once and simultaneous and going in lots of directions, even while I'm marching sequentially through time.
00:19:57
Speaker
So I think the comics page is cool because it can handle that sequence, but it can also allow you all the sort of unusual connections that we make.
00:20:09
Speaker
We make them all the time.
00:20:10
Speaker
We make leaps.
00:20:10
Speaker
We make sideways leaps.
00:20:13
Speaker
So comics are, as you said at the opening, yes, there's this marriage of word and image, which is super important and allows us all these things, but it also changes what reading is.
00:20:23
Speaker
You know, reading, you know, we're used to sort of reading his left, right carriage return, right?
00:20:27
Speaker
You go and the typewriter thing goes back.
00:20:29
Speaker
I guess maybe people don't know what a carriage is anymore, but the carriage return, it comes back, it comes back, it comes back, right?
00:20:35
Speaker
But, but.
00:20:38
Speaker
But comics allow carriage returns if that's what you want, but it also allows you to go move upward and move right to left once in a while.
00:20:46
Speaker
Or just the simple thing like when you encounter the words in a comic, you read the words and then look at the pictures.
00:20:53
Speaker
Which comes first, which comes or do you take in the whole page and sort of view the page and then sort of make your way in and out?
00:21:00
Speaker
So the whole.
00:21:01
Speaker
you know, the whole hierarchy of reading is sort of cut up a little bit in comics and allows for these different possibilities, which to me is one of them.
00:21:09
Speaker
You know, like I make I really thrive on trying to push what reading flow looks like and more even more so in my new work because it's
00:21:20
Speaker
I mean, just got intrigued about that.
00:21:22
Speaker
Like, how can I take you on a little journey each time you encounter the page and make that journey feel a little bit like the idea I'm talking about?
00:21:36
Speaker
So each page moves in a way that is supposed to feel something like I'm talking about.
00:21:42
Speaker
So that adds another layer of, I'm able to convey another layer of meaning
00:21:48
Speaker
even while the pictures are saying something, the images are saying something.
00:21:51
Speaker
There's just a lot coming together.
00:21:54
Speaker
So, yeah, comics aren't simple.
00:21:58
Speaker
And you might think they are.
00:21:59
Speaker
I mean, I think that's the sort of dismissive part.
00:22:01
Speaker
You're like, oh, I can read that quickly.
00:22:03
Speaker
I can look at... And they can be, right?
00:22:05
Speaker
But so can books, right?
00:22:06
Speaker
Like you can make...
00:22:07
Speaker
whatever for dummies or any of those things exist.
00:22:10
Speaker
You can have light reading and you can have not light reading and you can have light comics and not it's.
00:22:15
Speaker
But if you want, you can put so many layers.
00:22:18
Speaker
I mean, that that's really where to come back to what unflattening meant.
00:22:21
Speaker
The word came to me when I was, you know, some of the early classes.
00:22:27
Speaker
I I had a class with my advisor, Ruth Vins, who was an English education professor.
00:22:34
Speaker
And we had to shadow a researcher for the semester, like find another researcher you're interested in and read a bunch of their work and analyze and do stuff with it.
00:22:43
Speaker
And I picked Alan Moore, which is not really an educational researcher, but I was already quite versed in his work, but I read everything and I tried to think about, well,
00:22:53
Speaker
you know, how is how is he and his collaborators using the page to make meaning and and try to understand that aspect of it?
00:23:03
Speaker
And so as I did it, what I what I is coming back to the point here is
00:23:09
Speaker
is that I was thinking about how much information a piece of a comic book page could contain that made it go far beyond the capacity of what a flat sheet of paper seemed like it could do.
00:23:22
Speaker
So somehow I could layer information and interconnect information to make something that was really not flat.
00:23:28
Speaker
Like a flat piece of paper does this much.
00:23:31
Speaker
A comic book page with all of its images interacting, its composition interacting, its words and pictures interacting.
00:23:38
Speaker
All of a sudden, this thing was really expansive.
00:23:41
Speaker
It came out in dimension.
00:23:42
Speaker
So the first time I wrote Unflattening as a word, it was thinking about how comics could present information in it.
00:23:50
Speaker
in a really less than flat way, which also has the connotations of like not boring and all that, too.
00:23:56
Speaker
But I meant that less than just the sort of pure density that you could get on.
00:24:04
Speaker
It takes a lot of time to do that, but yeah.
00:24:07
Speaker
Now, this might be kind of a related follow-up to some of that.
00:24:10
Speaker
I just wanted to mostly point this out to listeners as well.
00:24:15
Speaker
And I had shared the page with you, and I had this revelation.
00:24:18
Speaker
And this was really the thing where this kind of came to me as, okay, this is something special.
00:24:24
Speaker
This has got to be a new way of thinking about things.
00:24:27
Speaker
But perhaps we can unpack this here as well.
00:24:29
Speaker
But
00:24:29
Speaker
On page 81 now, you followed up with that rhizomatic thinking with this wonderful collage of shapes representing the perspectives as text boxes and visuals.
00:24:40
Speaker
Your eye kind of follows diagonally across the page toward its conclusion.
00:24:45
Speaker
A human figure stands on these swirling waves, geometric shapes, and the knotted strands, representing the intertwining of thought.
00:24:53
Speaker
And the text boxes read, you reference, Root Bernstein, found that scientists versed in the arts possess a distinct advantage in making discoveries.
00:25:01
Speaker
So equipped, they are able to see from other sides, play, make connections, and look at problems in expansive ways.
00:25:07
Speaker
Finally, the bottom text of the page reads, to prepare good thinkers, we need to cultivate good seers or seers.
00:25:15
Speaker
And it struck me that this was probably more than just a play on words.
00:25:19
Speaker
Could you help us understand the meaning and power behind that statement?
00:25:24
Speaker
Yeah, don't talk about this one enough.
00:25:26
Speaker
You know, I mean, this is on the surface level.
00:25:28
Speaker
And that's what Ruth Bernstein study discovered, you know, is that science is first in the art.
00:25:34
Speaker
So, you know, this goes back to C.P.
00:25:37
Speaker
Snow's.
00:25:39
Speaker
What is C.P.
00:25:40
Speaker
Snow's where I quoted in here at least once?
00:25:43
Speaker
The two cultures, C.P.
00:25:44
Speaker
Snow's, the two cultures, which is the humanities and the sciences, that that they really shouldn't be separate.
00:25:51
Speaker
And
00:25:54
Speaker
So, I mean, you know, this is on its basic level sort of an interdisciplinary thing that the examples I have here and in other places are people that were versed in arts could look at a crystal in a different way or look at DNA in a different way and see things that maybe people with more data had trouble seeing.
00:26:14
Speaker
And some of these stories have some issues with them.
00:26:17
Speaker
So we'll go into the specifics because I think they've been challenged over the years.
00:26:22
Speaker
But the concept, I think, is clear enough.
00:26:26
Speaker
But I think, you know, and some of it's also certainly an argument just for me being who I am, right?
00:26:32
Speaker
Like that I'm interested in arts and mathematics and I don't think that's so weird.
00:26:36
Speaker
But I think it's really true.
00:26:39
Speaker
I mean, clearly you need to have lots of expertise in something to make big discoveries.
00:26:45
Speaker
But I think when your expertise gets really narrow, it can be really hard to make the connections that make big jumps.
00:26:52
Speaker
You can be really, you know, you can be really cut off from seeing all these other kinds of ways of thinking.
00:27:00
Speaker
So I think very clearly, I mean, look, you know, obviously we might talk about the blind project too.
00:27:06
Speaker
So this, say it carefully that, you know, we, we are visual creatures.
00:27:15
Speaker
Like that's how we've come to be.
00:27:18
Speaker
And we're, you know, uh,
00:27:22
Speaker
We engage with the world with our senses.
00:27:25
Speaker
And if visual is not part of our senses, we're still engaging with our world through a variety of senses.
00:27:30
Speaker
And to pretend we're not, to pretend that we're creatures that sit and think, it narrows us.
00:27:38
Speaker
I think it really narrows us.
00:27:40
Speaker
So I think cultivating...
00:27:43
Speaker
you know, as I said here, the cultivating good seers, our ability to see, our ability to make connections with visuals, which, you know, I think in my current thinking, I would expand, I would try to find other words to use besides purely visual here.
00:27:59
Speaker
But I am talking about comics, so it's okay, I think, to stay in that.
00:28:05
Speaker
The more versed we are in the sort of in the visual arts or other arts, I think the more able we are to think in whatever form we're doing, whether it's mathematics, whether it's the sciences, whether it's whatever, we've got those very basic human skills.
00:28:22
Speaker
And I think the truth really, you know, even deeper is about movement.
00:28:25
Speaker
Like we're creatures that.
00:28:28
Speaker
were animals, right?
00:28:29
Speaker
Animals move.
00:28:30
Speaker
That's what they do.
00:28:31
Speaker
That's what makes them animals.
00:28:33
Speaker
And I've been reading Maxine Sheets' Johnstone as part of my new work, thinking about her work, which is all about movement as sort of
00:28:44
Speaker
as our first way of thinking, as our first, you know, and that's, that is like, what did things do at the beginning?
00:28:50
Speaker
They move.
00:28:50
Speaker
Did they say, I want this?
00:28:53
Speaker
Maybe, but they moved to it, right?
00:28:55
Speaker
They moved to the thing.
00:28:57
Speaker
They moved to the light.
00:28:58
Speaker
They moved to the smell.
00:28:59
Speaker
They moved away from something scary.
00:29:01
Speaker
When you're a baby, you move to the, you move to the smells that you want.
00:29:05
Speaker
You, you know, you recoil from something that hurts.
00:29:08
Speaker
Like that's, that's kind of, so, so how do we,
00:29:13
Speaker
how do we cultivate the sort of core level of our senses?
00:29:18
Speaker
Again, to come back to the visual, how do we cultivate that so that you can bring that to bear?
00:29:22
Speaker
And I don't think it's that some people are artistic and some people aren't.
00:29:30
Speaker
I don't think that's it at all.
00:29:31
Speaker
I think we, by nature of the kind of species we are, are sort of oriented around visual things or other senses that are very strong, if the visual is not.
00:29:42
Speaker
So how do we say that those things matter?
00:29:45
Speaker
And they would have mattered to all of us for our survival 30,000 years ago.
00:29:52
Speaker
But how do we not sort of let them...
00:29:56
Speaker
die.
00:29:57
Speaker
I don't know if that's too strong a word, but how do we keep them fresh and keep them important?
00:30:03
Speaker
And you know, if you want to apply this to schools, it's pretty simple, right?
00:30:07
Speaker
Like what's the first programs to get cut?
00:30:09
Speaker
Your art and music gets cut first.
00:30:11
Speaker
Maybe gym class gets cut first.
00:30:12
Speaker
I don't know.
00:30:13
Speaker
It's a 50-50, right?
00:30:14
Speaker
Like those get cut.
00:30:16
Speaker
Even my daughter happens to go, she got into a public charter school here that's more arts-based and we liked it and she'd gotten in her lottery.
00:30:26
Speaker
And it's a good school.
00:30:27
Speaker
They do things that are a little bit more artsy, but on their like test weeks or conference weeks, the classes that get cut those weeks,
00:30:39
Speaker
there are classes.
00:30:40
Speaker
It's like, ah, we didn't have art music this week.
00:30:43
Speaker
Cause we had these things like, those are the things that get cut.
00:30:45
Speaker
They only got once a week to begin with.
00:30:47
Speaker
And it's a school that's got arts in the name.
00:30:49
Speaker
So, um,
00:30:51
Speaker
You know, and I'm not disparaging any of the other things, but I think we learn to make connections when you're studying painting or thinking about you learn to do things that are good for you just as a human, but they're also good for you in this sort of productive way that we seem to need to think about things like they help you.
00:31:11
Speaker
And I think that's what the point of their study was, the Bernstein study, is that
00:31:16
Speaker
You know, scientists with these kind of trainings could really do make leaps that, you know, and so I don't know, it's a sort of long answer to an impossible problem.
00:31:27
Speaker
Right.
Arts and Sciences in Education
00:31:30
Speaker
But I think these things are important and they shouldn't be an afterthought.
00:31:32
Speaker
It shouldn't be it shouldn't be like, well, and also I guess this would be one other thing I speak about myself.
00:31:41
Speaker
So when I studied mathematics, I would tell people, oh, what do you do?
00:31:46
Speaker
I said, oh, I'm in math classes and stuff.
00:31:48
Speaker
And they'd say, oh, you're so smart.
00:31:51
Speaker
You're so smart.
00:31:51
Speaker
And it's sort of annoying because it's not nice.
00:31:55
Speaker
I don't know.
00:31:55
Speaker
I'm not a big fan of people telling you you're smart.
00:31:58
Speaker
um but then if you make art they say oh you're so talented right and and so there's this wall right there's a big wall between those two things and in my case i think i was a really talented mathematician i was really clever at figuring things out how smart or not i i don't know but i was talented like i could do stuff i could do stuff um and in my art like
00:32:22
Speaker
I mean, I'm pretty skilled, but there's people that are way more skilled.
00:32:25
Speaker
I watch students that like crank out things.
00:32:27
Speaker
I mean, I'm stubborn, so I make things work eventually.
00:32:32
Speaker
But I think making my art has made me so much smarter because I can think in ways that I couldn't otherwise.
00:32:38
Speaker
So, you know, I say this a lot now that I think this barrier between smart and talented has been really, really unhealthy.
00:32:47
Speaker
And it's and it affects both.
00:32:48
Speaker
Right.
00:32:49
Speaker
Like you get science people think, oh, I don't draw.
00:32:51
Speaker
And you get you get art people who are like terrified of mathematics.
00:32:55
Speaker
Right.
00:32:55
Speaker
And that's there's reasons for that.
00:32:57
Speaker
And maybe, you know, I'm not saying people are all the same.
00:33:00
Speaker
Right.
00:33:00
Speaker
Some people are more comfortable with things.
00:33:02
Speaker
Their upbringing makes a difference.
00:33:04
Speaker
The teachers they have make like there's a lot of things that make a difference.
00:33:08
Speaker
So, I mean, for me, one of the most fun things I have is working with drawers, working with adults like non drawers, self-described non drawers, because then I can, you know, I can help them rediscover things and they're so excited and they do amazing things.
00:33:24
Speaker
because they all can, right?
00:33:25
Speaker
They got to navigate the world, which means they know, you know, if I have people make marks in a quick exercise, like if you make a smooth curve, like we all know what that means.
00:33:36
Speaker
We all know what that means.
00:33:37
Speaker
You don't need to be a trained drawer to know that that's something comfortable or calm or, and we know a jagged line.
00:33:42
Speaker
We know the kind of line your face like starts to squinch up when you make a jagged line, right?
00:33:47
Speaker
Like you don't need art training to know that.
00:33:50
Speaker
You just need to have a body.
00:33:53
Speaker
So how do we bring that back in?
00:33:55
Speaker
I think we need to cultivate it.
00:33:56
Speaker
And I don't think that means cultivating it in a way that says, let's train everyone to be a professional artist.
00:34:03
Speaker
That means let's give everyone these experiences and see what they do with them, see how they can apply them to their own experience.
00:34:10
Speaker
And to me, you know, as a guy, this is an argument for comics now, like comics, because some people make comics where they draw these really beautiful, illustrative things.
00:34:18
Speaker
And some people make comics where that's really not part of it.
00:34:21
Speaker
They're stick figures or they're almost pictureless because they allow all these different range of skills.
00:34:30
Speaker
I think comics is a really nice bridge for that.
00:34:33
Speaker
And ultimately, you know, people tend to tell stories or some kinds of things
00:34:37
Speaker
they're communicating with them.
00:34:39
Speaker
So I think it's a way they can latch on to, that's maybe a little less than an abstract art, which I'm not remotely disparaging here.
00:34:47
Speaker
I'm only saying that I can, you know, people can find their way in before they've got skills.
00:34:53
Speaker
They can find their ways out and do all kinds of things.
00:34:56
Speaker
So long answer again, you ask me a short question, I give you a long answer.
00:35:01
Speaker
What you're speaking to is like from an educational systems lens has to be like a paradigm shift in the way that we view expertise or success in those ventures, right?
00:35:10
Speaker
The reason why people would say apply some value towards not just mathematical thinking, but like the process of maybe answering math problems or however we tend to view those particular things or art as being viewed in a particular way instead of being viewed in that interdisciplinary way
00:35:28
Speaker
to see that to see how they can complement each other and how they can support and strengthen each other instead of being you know non-overlapping magisteria where someone specializes early in math and they don't touch those other domains and not seeing how those things can reinforce each other and
00:35:46
Speaker
What struck out to me, to bring it back to that word seer, is less about like a sighted person as being someone who has foresight or insight into those issues.
00:35:56
Speaker
To prepare good thinkers, we need to cultivate good seers.
00:36:00
Speaker
Again, brings it to like, how do we, so much of our school, our education system is not geared around training kids to be insightful.
00:36:07
Speaker
It's to find correct answers to questions that we already know the answers to, or to do those things instead of come up with
00:36:14
Speaker
clever, creative, interdisciplinary ways of thinking.
00:36:17
Speaker
And maybe it's a lapse in the research on my part, but not realizing that your own personal emphasis on interdisciplinary studies really becomes obvious now in that work, how you so literally bring those strands together.
00:36:29
Speaker
Like that's, it's, it's a, the visual metaphor of your whole work is those strands coming together, seeing those different perspectives in contrast to
00:36:37
Speaker
earlier in the work where you show people on the conveyor belt all in line, being molded in these particular ways.
00:36:44
Speaker
So there is a paradigm shift in unflattening perhaps school structures and systems to help support insightful ways of making connections instead of
00:36:57
Speaker
putting people down a particular path towards math or towards English or towards any of these other things.
Accessibility in Comics
00:37:04
Speaker
So to bring things around, you had mentioned the blind accessibility part of that.
00:37:09
Speaker
And that struck out to me, not just because it's the first part of your website, so it's the first thing that you see when you get on there.
00:37:16
Speaker
And immediately that concept just jumped out to me.
00:37:20
Speaker
at human restoration project we're designing this interdisciplinary curriculum for our partners in poland right now and even though each lesson has primarily an interdisciplinary lens we're including dis including disciplinary extensions so that way you might teach uh you might teach an interdisciplinary lesson a particular context but then go into a disciplinary context say in math or science or social studies or language arts or physical education and
00:37:48
Speaker
as one of the art extensions for a lesson called from empathy to action i included some directions to using the link to your blind accessible comics as a resource redesign or remix existing art pieces to improve accessibility to art and culture
00:38:04
Speaker
for range of impairments and disabilities to really think, have people think about the access to either physical art spaces or visual art spaces, et cetera, in different ways.
00:38:14
Speaker
And as an example on your website, you've linked to a completely transcribed box for box version of Watchmen that is intended for screen readers.
00:38:23
Speaker
And it is awesome.
00:38:24
Speaker
I never knew such a thing existed.
00:38:26
Speaker
So I didn't know if you could discuss how
00:38:28
Speaker
How did you arrive at that work?
00:38:29
Speaker
What is the motivation or the inspiration to make comics in particular more accessible and what progress has been made in that area?
00:38:39
Speaker
It's only first on my website because I don't blog much these days.
00:38:43
Speaker
But it's been a big thing we've been working on for a while.
00:38:47
Speaker
So I didn't say this in my sort of secret origin part, but but a big part of of why I made comics was I love them, obviously, but but it was that all the sort of big ideas that I like to wrestle with, I felt like I really liked.
00:39:02
Speaker
what went on in academia in this sort of thinking way, but I really didn't like how exclusive it tended to feel.
00:39:09
Speaker
You know, like you had to have the specialized language to be in it.
00:39:12
Speaker
And I didn't think it was that people weren't smart enough.
00:39:15
Speaker
It was that they just didn't have that vocabulary.
00:39:17
Speaker
And, you know, I mean, it's hard if you don't have the vocabulary, you can't you can't be part of the conversation.
00:39:22
Speaker
So I thought comics allowed me to sort of transcend that and make complicated things accessible and bring people in.
00:39:30
Speaker
And my particular way of doing it is I never really tell you what I'm doing.
00:39:34
Speaker
Like I don't identify and it's all metaphor.
00:39:36
Speaker
So I'd strip out like, you know, you think this is a book about education and I agree with you.
00:39:41
Speaker
But the word school or education or teaching, they don't appear at all.
00:39:46
Speaker
The word interdisciplinary doesn't appear.
00:39:49
Speaker
None of those terms that you would use are in here.
00:39:53
Speaker
So people interpret it in all kinds of ways, which is occasionally scary, but mostly that's what I wanted.
00:39:59
Speaker
So just to summarize that, my goal in making comics as my work was to make it accessible.
00:40:05
Speaker
And I think it's been quite successful in that, except...
00:40:10
Speaker
it's left out one audience in which it's completely inaccessible, like not even a little bit accessible.
00:40:17
Speaker
And I certainly and my work is even worse in that it's all about the visual, too.
00:40:24
Speaker
So not only is it difficult to translate, it's also because there's no story either.
00:40:31
Speaker
There's no simple way to summarize it.
00:40:34
Speaker
It's also all about visual metaphors, which I know are metaphors, and I know that they're drawn, so then they become more concrete.
00:40:45
Speaker
So it's a tricky thing.
00:40:46
Speaker
So I was aware of much of this when I was doing it, but
00:40:51
Speaker
you can only figure out so many things at once, right?
00:40:53
Speaker
You can't be you can't master it all.
00:40:55
Speaker
So, so it's on my mind.
00:40:57
Speaker
And I would periodically, there was a there's a comic for blind readers called shape reader.
00:41:02
Speaker
It's a tactile thing.
00:41:04
Speaker
It's on it's listed on my list of resources.
00:41:07
Speaker
that came out, I think while I was still in the dissertation thing.
00:41:13
Speaker
And I would collect these things.
00:41:15
Speaker
Originally, that's part of my education, part of my website started as a Wiki for my classes.
00:41:20
Speaker
And then I just put it on my site because it just grew so much.
00:41:24
Speaker
It's too many things to maintain.
00:41:26
Speaker
And then it got big enough that it was sort of its own page.
00:41:29
Speaker
There was a number of things.
00:41:32
Speaker
And when I got hired here at San Francisco State, I happened to get hired
00:41:37
Speaker
at the same time as another professor, Ting, who's in, she's in special education, but working with blind students.
00:41:48
Speaker
access.
00:41:49
Speaker
That's her field.
00:41:51
Speaker
And we just got to talking that first week.
00:41:54
Speaker
We were in orientation about comics and making them accessible.
00:41:59
Speaker
And her then boyfriend, now husband, was doing some research on special education in comics.
00:42:07
Speaker
So she had some interest in it.
00:42:10
Speaker
So we just kept talking.
00:42:11
Speaker
And anytime I would see some project about adapting comics for blind
00:42:17
Speaker
blind readers, I would send it over to her and say, hey, does this sound does this sound like somebody who's actually consulted the blind community or does it sound like somebody who thought this was a good idea and doesn't know what they're doing?
00:42:28
Speaker
Most of them have been the latter.
00:42:29
Speaker
But but so anyway, things
00:42:33
Speaker
A few years passed and then I have a student who defended her master's thesis as a comic.
00:42:40
Speaker
And so the library had some questions like, how can we make sure this is accessible?
00:42:46
Speaker
Some people saw that as an opportunity to get really worried.
00:42:49
Speaker
And I thought this was, wow, that's awesome.
00:42:52
Speaker
you know, this is an opportunity to think about how we could do it better.
00:42:55
Speaker
How can we make this better?
00:42:57
Speaker
And we met with the library people and that's how I left that conversation.
00:43:01
Speaker
Like you can do the minimum, right?
00:43:02
Speaker
You can describe the page, you know, say what the text is and do a best, you know, sort of summary of the page.
00:43:08
Speaker
Or maybe you can do better things.
00:43:10
Speaker
And that student did a really thorough job of doing the description.
00:43:14
Speaker
But I talked to Ting about this, and then we applied for some internal grant to have like a small project.
00:43:20
Speaker
And so we teamed up also with the Longmore Institute for Disability on campus.
00:43:26
Speaker
So the three of three of us, Emily Ting and myself started working on this and we had this first thing that was just we got Scott McCloud.
00:43:36
Speaker
I knew Scott and Scott's dad was blind as a rocket rocket scientist.
00:43:41
Speaker
And then Scott's daughter, who's a filmmaker, his older daughter also.
00:43:46
Speaker
developed the same, she got the same gene that causes this blindness.
00:43:50
Speaker
And so we got the two of them, a couple blind accessibility people.
00:43:54
Speaker
And the week before I said, let's, should we just see if the public wants to come?
00:43:58
Speaker
You know, this was going to be sort of this small internal thing.
00:44:01
Speaker
And I put it out on Twitter and like 800 people signed up a few days later.
00:44:06
Speaker
So it was a great conversation, but it prompted us to hold a second thing.
00:44:10
Speaker
We had a symposium that summer with a similar amount of people, but it was an all day.
00:44:14
Speaker
We had a panel on it.
00:44:15
Speaker
tactile comics a panel on.
00:44:17
Speaker
audio panel on new media and then one about depictions of blinded comics.
00:44:23
Speaker
And that was a big thing.
00:44:24
Speaker
And then we thought the next step should be to put some of this into practice.
00:44:27
Speaker
So a design competition to make accessible comics and each team has to include at least one blind low vision member.
00:44:36
Speaker
And that we launched late spring of this year sometime and the submissions have come in.
00:44:43
Speaker
So we're about to judge them to see which ones we got some funding to
00:44:48
Speaker
to fund the projects and then we'll exhibit them when they're finished.
00:44:52
Speaker
So we have proposals for the projects now and then
00:44:56
Speaker
So to me, you know, like I believe in comics as an accessible form, but obviously it leaves out people and I'm not going to stop making comics because of that.
00:45:10
Speaker
So, but how can we, you know, I think about my pages and they're so difficult and so difficult to, and that's the strength of them, right?
00:45:18
Speaker
To me, the strength of them is that they're, the way I use the visual does all these things.
00:45:24
Speaker
How can you make that
00:45:27
Speaker
You know, it's one thing to say, all right, Batman punches the Joker and then he jumps down and the Joker doesn't get up.
00:45:34
Speaker
Right.
00:45:34
Speaker
Like, that's pretty simple.
00:45:35
Speaker
But how do you get the feeling of like this black mass crosses the page and it's in this wide panel and this whatever?
00:45:43
Speaker
How do you do that?
00:45:44
Speaker
It's really hard.
00:45:46
Speaker
And there's all kinds of tactile approaches, there's haptic approaches, there's audio.
00:45:50
Speaker
Even any even even to, you know, descriptive ones could be dramatically different.
00:45:56
Speaker
Somebody might choose to really focus on all the little details and somebody else might do it and say they just want to know what happened.
00:46:04
Speaker
Right.
00:46:04
Speaker
And anyway, so that's it's sort of an accidental thing.
00:46:08
Speaker
I just was curious about it and thought I should be better at it from my own work and my own teaching.
00:46:13
Speaker
And then.
00:46:14
Speaker
teaming up with these other professors at the university, it just kind of snowballed on us.
00:46:19
Speaker
So now, I mean, I'd like to see the industry.
00:46:23
Speaker
You know, you can't if you're interested in Spider-Man and you are blind, you've got to have a friend who's willing to read it to you and tell you what happened.
00:46:31
Speaker
There's no, there's nothing.
00:46:32
Speaker
There's no screen reader.
00:46:33
Speaker
I mean, maybe there are some things, but the Marvel comics doesn't do this.
00:46:37
Speaker
DC comics doesn't do this.
00:46:39
Speaker
And they, it's hard, right?
00:46:41
Speaker
It is a hard thing.
00:46:41
Speaker
Like book publishers have whole teams that are devoted to this and they don't, you know, they just got to read the book.
00:46:47
Speaker
Maybe they get good voice actors and stuff, but at the end of the day, there's not a lot of extra stuff they got to do.
00:46:52
Speaker
Maybe they do a fancy one where they put sounds and stuff in, but comics is a whole, it's a whole other level.
00:46:58
Speaker
And it, uh,
00:46:59
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know.
00:46:59
Speaker
I don't have a lot of expertise in this at all.
00:47:02
Speaker
I mean, the stuff I collect on my website, it's there for people to look at and to learn from.
00:47:09
Speaker
But I think it's important.
00:47:11
Speaker
And I don't know where we'll get to.
00:47:15
Speaker
I'd like to see the industry change.
00:47:17
Speaker
I'd love to see some accessible versions of my own work.
00:47:21
Speaker
I realize that's going to be extremely difficult.
00:47:23
Speaker
I mean, just trans, you said something about words and pictures at the beginning.
00:47:27
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:47:28
Speaker
You know, it's one thing to translate the words, but particularly like I don't write dialogue.
00:47:33
Speaker
Right.
00:47:33
Speaker
So the words in my my comics are often very particular.
00:47:39
Speaker
Like like I use the word lightning, like to make lighter.
00:47:42
Speaker
And, you know, English speakers often spell it wrong.
00:47:45
Speaker
They butcher that word.
00:47:47
Speaker
Right.
00:47:47
Speaker
But I was making a pun.
00:47:49
Speaker
with lightning and the act of lightning.
00:47:52
Speaker
And so that's confusing enough to native English speakers because they spell it wrong all the time.
00:47:57
Speaker
But then when it got translated and I only caught it on like the third translation, because then I started looking up some words because I don't speak any of the languages translated into.
00:48:05
Speaker
They translated the word incorrect.
00:48:08
Speaker
You know, so...
00:48:10
Speaker
understandably, they got the word wrong.
00:48:12
Speaker
They got the word wrong.
00:48:13
Speaker
And so I realized that all, I mean, it's like translating poetry because the words are so specific to how they interplay with the image.
00:48:22
Speaker
They're not, it's not enough to get the word, a correct synonym for the word.
00:48:28
Speaker
It's gotta be the word that connotes the same meaning as the word you use.
00:48:32
Speaker
So it's a challenge, right?
00:48:34
Speaker
It's a real challenge.
00:48:35
Speaker
And accessible comics is, is,
00:48:38
Speaker
is a bigger challenge than translation.
00:48:41
Speaker
And I think too, just providing the space for collaboration and innovation in there, just to highlight the scope of the problem and then get smart, creative people to bring to bear their ideas on it, you know, and no solution is going to be perfect right out the gate, but then just have folks iterating on that and
00:48:59
Speaker
And at least trying to improve the experience for people and make that stuff accessible.
00:49:03
Speaker
I mean, it's with any issue with accessibility.
00:49:06
Speaker
I mean, even one of the things that I think about a corollary, perhaps in the Twitter alt text, you know, as anybody has to share resources now, kind of thinking, you know, how do I, how would a screen reader read this image?
00:49:18
Speaker
Or how do I get the right meaning across in this thing?
00:49:20
Speaker
You know, hopefully it just helps prompt more people to think about how they can make their, you know, those intellectual spaces more accessible for
00:49:29
Speaker
Not just for visually impaired folks, but also for people with other disabilities or issues with accessibility too.
00:49:37
Speaker
Since we first had these conversations about the project, I've done the alt text for all my posts.
00:49:42
Speaker
And it's work, right?
00:49:45
Speaker
I'm like, oh, this is cool.
00:49:46
Speaker
I just want to share it.
00:49:47
Speaker
And then I'm like, oh, shoot.
00:49:48
Speaker
But I always do it now.
00:49:51
Speaker
And I signed up for alt text reminders.
00:49:53
Speaker
So the...
00:49:54
Speaker
three or four times in the last year and a half that I forgot and I get this note that says, you forgot.
00:49:58
Speaker
And I'm like, oh, crap.
00:49:59
Speaker
And I delete it.
00:49:59
Speaker
But I haven't, I don't see a lot of it yet.
00:50:02
Speaker
And maybe in, at least not in comics, maybe in other spaces.
00:50:05
Speaker
NASA just rocked it last week with their, their descriptions are amazing.
00:50:11
Speaker
Yeah, with the James Webb images they released.
00:50:13
Speaker
Oh, yeah.
00:50:14
Speaker
You got to get the James Webb, you got to get the intern or whoever, the social media person to do the transcribe on flattening for you.
00:50:23
Speaker
Yeah, well, I'd love to see it.
00:50:24
Speaker
I mean, I'd love the, you know.
00:50:27
Speaker
And I'll just say one more thing about the project.
00:50:29
Speaker
We had that first or second symposium.
00:50:32
Speaker
I can't remember.
00:50:33
Speaker
I kind of thought I would walk away from it saying,
00:50:37
Speaker
oh, I know what I want to do with my work.
00:50:39
Speaker
Like, here's how I'll make it accessible.
00:50:41
Speaker
But what I left with is like, no, there's a lot of ways.
00:50:46
Speaker
Like there's, you know, there's people in this community already.
00:50:50
Speaker
They know this, like, like one size fits all is, is not the right, because there's, you know, people who were born blind at birth.
00:50:57
Speaker
There's people who were blind much later in life.
00:51:00
Speaker
and they may want different things.
00:51:02
Speaker
There's people who are comfortable with tactile.
00:51:04
Speaker
There's people who don't do any of it.
00:51:07
Speaker
So there is no, like, I'm going to just make this thing and it's going to work for everyone because it's more complicated than that.
00:51:16
Speaker
So it's a big issue, but, you know,
00:51:20
Speaker
We got smart people.
00:51:21
Speaker
We can do things.
00:51:22
Speaker
Yeah.
00:51:23
Speaker
And do I understand, right, that I think I saw videos of the symposium on YouTube.
00:51:29
Speaker
Is that correct?
00:51:31
Speaker
It's all up.
00:51:31
Speaker
Yeah, everything we've done is.
00:51:33
Speaker
So through my website, there's links to it.
00:51:35
Speaker
It's on the education tab on my site.
00:51:38
Speaker
Just wrapping up here, what's kind of your next big project?
00:51:41
Speaker
What are you working on?
00:51:42
Speaker
How can listeners learn more about you and your work?
00:51:44
Speaker
Where can they find you in online spaces?
00:51:47
Speaker
Well, I've been very slowly working on the follow-up gun flattening, which is, I don't know that you can have a sequel to a philosophical comic book that was a dissertation, but I think if you did, it's this.
00:52:02
Speaker
But it pushes on, and some of the stuff we've talked, some of the things that when I give talks about my work or I teach about it,
00:52:11
Speaker
about drawing as a kind of thinking in the body, especially having small children as well, watching them learn through their bodies.
00:52:19
Speaker
They also learn through words, but they're learning through how big their shoulders are when they're weaving through chairs or something.
00:52:31
Speaker
This one, it took me a long time to sort of, I knew what I wanted to do pretty early on, but it took me
00:52:39
Speaker
it took me a while to figure out the thing that made it my work and not just sort of an academic look at these things.
00:52:46
Speaker
Um, and, and the goal of it is to really look back at, at what we are, what made us, what we are, what we are both in growing, but as a species and as a, um, and then look at what thinking is from that perspective.
00:53:03
Speaker
And then in this sort of metaphorical way that I do things, um, uh,
Susannis' New Project
00:53:10
Speaker
think about the implications of that on education, which again, I won't offer any answers or tell you what I'm talking about, but, but I'll know.
00:53:20
Speaker
So it's, it's, it's right now it's, it's,
00:53:25
Speaker
technically titled uh nostos n-o-s-t-o-s which is the greek word for return the delight in return my editor actually suggested it and this is sort of what the odyssey and other things are um nostalgia comes from the same same root um
00:53:46
Speaker
And it's not about nostalgia, but this delight in return.
00:53:49
Speaker
And I think there is delight in sort of reminding how you, you know, you made marks or you sang or you moved your body when you were three or five.
00:53:59
Speaker
And so I'm not 100% sure that I'll say the title at the end, but the idea will be there the whole time.
00:54:06
Speaker
Yeah.
00:54:08
Speaker
that how do we remind of what it's like to be that even as we're not that?
00:54:14
Speaker
And that doesn't mean you forget how to tie your shoes and things like that.
00:54:17
Speaker
It means how do you keep that way of being in the world alive?
00:54:25
Speaker
And again, that doesn't sound maybe that different than how I talked about Unflattening, but it goes farther and it uses the Odyssey as sort of a framing metaphor.
00:54:37
Speaker
doesn't really have anything to do with it but it but it uses it and i've been drawing five five years i've drawn about i've got three chapters um in five years so it's i've had very small children in a pandemic so i my time to work is um it's it's hard it's a much harder book research wise i spent two years drawing uh
00:55:01
Speaker
what a not yet born baby and the first year or so of their lives would be like, which drawing babies is, I probably drew several hundred pictures of babies and that's hard.
00:55:12
Speaker
And just under, you know, I had to under, I had to teach myself all these fields that I don't know.
00:55:17
Speaker
I mean, I had children, but I don't know, you know, all the things about,
00:55:24
Speaker
pendulum walking like how you learned it like i might have witnessed it but i don't i now do right i now know i now know how your lungs switch on when you're born um i'll forget it soon but but i spend a lot of time learning those things so it's a lot of fun to teach myself all this stuff but it's it's
00:55:40
Speaker
each page has, has, you know, dozens to possibly a hundred sources to like wrestle with before I can draw anything.
00:55:49
Speaker
And then I gotta, I gotta wrestle with all the visual sources.
00:55:52
Speaker
So very slowly I am, I am making my way through it, but I'm thrilled with it.
00:55:58
Speaker
Um, and I often show my sketches and, uh,
00:56:01
Speaker
And my sketches and working things, if you happen to follow me on Twitter, often late at night.
00:56:07
Speaker
So you stay up late at night, you can see.
00:56:11
Speaker
And I hashtag them with Nostos and Unflattening too, so that I can keep track of them when I need them for my remembering what I did in the last 10 years after I'm done.
00:56:22
Speaker
And then my website, occasionally I post bits of it.
00:56:25
Speaker
That's a more permanent record of it.
00:56:28
Speaker
So somehow I feel like I don't share it on my website as much as things like Twitter.
00:56:33
Speaker
People see it or they don't, and I don't care.
00:56:37
Speaker
No, that's awesome.
00:56:38
Speaker
Well, Nick, honestly, it's a delight.
00:56:40
Speaker
I mean, your work is wonderful.
00:56:41
Speaker
I'd encourage all the listeners to check out both your Twitter handle, your website.
00:56:46
Speaker
I'll reference those things, as well as your work at Unflattening.
00:56:51
Speaker
Just incredible perspective-changing, a consciousness-raising work.
00:56:57
Speaker
If there's still some time in the summer for listeners to get that and read it before school starts,
00:57:02
Speaker
It could really just help kind of blend those perspectives and bring that interdisciplinary mindset to the work ahead of all of us in the fall.
00:57:10
Speaker
So Nick, thanks for.
00:57:12
Speaker
Yeah, let me, can I have one thing?
00:57:14
Speaker
Yeah, of course.
00:57:15
Speaker
The education part of my website, I have all my drawn syllabi and everything I do in my classes, including all the activities, including my opening exercise.
00:57:26
Speaker
I've documented all.
00:57:29
Speaker
not all of it because I can't keep up with it, but I've documented a lot of what I do and it's there for people to use.
00:57:36
Speaker
So I just I throw that out there to say I want to see what it looks like in my classroom.
00:57:42
Speaker
It's all there and people are free to it's there.
00:57:46
Speaker
I put it out publicly so you can have it.
00:57:49
Speaker
Yeah, that's it.
00:57:50
Speaker
Yeah, I've seen those syllabi and they are they're incredible.
00:57:53
Speaker
So, yes, definitely check those out.
00:57:55
Speaker
It's fun.
00:57:56
Speaker
It's interesting thing like
00:58:00
Speaker
I get students to do things like a sketchnote, that is to sort of draw notes.
00:58:05
Speaker
But I think when I do it myself, that impresses, not impresses in a, well, it's impressive, but it makes it clear that this is important from the first thing.
00:58:16
Speaker
It's a better way for me to see what the class is going to be and for them to see, and then for them to find their own way.
00:58:23
Speaker
I'd like to do even more of that kind of drawing my classwork.
00:58:28
Speaker
But anyway, it's all there for people to have.
00:58:31
Speaker
Well, Nick, thank you very much.
00:58:33
Speaker
Yeah, thanks so much.