Bibliographic record
Abstract
The digital revolution has reconditioned our media landscape, instigating hybridity in traditional forms and reshaping the nature of storytelling through enhanced interactivity. This paper scrutinizes the transformative interplay of digital technologies and comic books, engendering new media narrative forms such as interactive comics and redefining conventional sequential storytelling. As a reflection of this evolution, comic books, long recognized as sequential art, have broadened their narrative scope by integrating elements of motion, interactivity, and game-like attributes. This research explores four distinct types of digital comics: Meanwhile: An Interactive Comic Book (Zarfhome Software, 2018), Framed (Noodlecake Studios, 2014), Florence (Mountains Studio, 2018), and Our Plague Year (Burton, 2022). By adopting Sheldon’s categories of interactivity and Lebowitz and Klug's interactive story spectrum, we analyze these stories' levels of interactivity and linearity. The findings indicate that the complexity, diversity, and multitude of reader agency do not necessarily render a story interactive in terms of content. While these digital comics vary significantly in design, most still adhere to a traditional linear narrative framework despite the diversity and many interactive elements. Only “Meanwhile: An Interactive Comic Book” deviates from linearity, manifesting non-linear, web-like narrative structures and branching story paths. This analysis unravels the nuanced hybridization of digital media and comic books, illuminating how digital technologies reshape and augment our narrative practices. The digital revolution has not only brought about a new storytelling habitat but also expanded our understanding of co-authorship, thus pushing the boundaries of sequential storytelling in an ever-evolving digital culture. It also highlights the importance of recognizing the differences between interacting with the medium and interacting with the story itself. Consequently, this research contributes to the understanding of the intricate relationship between digital technologies, interactivity, and sequential storytelling, paving the way for further exploration in the field of digital comics.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".