APPLICATION. If you have any questions about completing this application, please contact Michael Starenko at or

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1 2018 PROVOST S LEARNING INNOVATIONS GRANTS APPLICATION INSTRUCTIONS 1. Complete this Application Form, in its entirety, and save as Lastname_Firstname_APP (using your name). 2. Complete the Budget Worksheet and save as Lastname_Firstname_BUDGET (using your name). 3. Ask your Department Head to complete the Department Head Certification, scan and save as, Lastname_Firstname_SIG (using your name). 4. all documents to plig@rit.edu, no later than 11:59pm EST, January 22, If you have any questions about completing this application, please contact Michael Starenko at or mssetc@rit.edu. APPLICANT INFORMATION This application is for a (please select one type of grant): Exploration Grant Focus Grant - Active Learning Focus Grant - Applied Critical Thinking Principal Applicant name: Daniel Worden Faculty title: Visiting Assistant Professor dxwind@rit.edu Phone: (Full-time only) College: Academic Affairs Department: School of Individualized Study Department Head name: James C. Hall jchcms@rit.edu Others involved in the project (if any): Steven Galbraith (Cary Collection, Wallace Center) and Rebekah Walker (Digital Humanities Librarian, Wallace Center) Project name: The History of Comics: Archive and Analysis Total funds requested (as calculated on the budget worksheet): $5,000 (requests of $1,000 to $5,000 will be considered) 3

2 BUDGET There is a fillable PDF worksheet to calculate your budget. You can download the worksheet at rit.edu/ili/plig. The total shown on this worksheet must match the Total funds requested in the Applicant Information section of this application form If awarded, additional funds will be provided to cover any benefits and ITS expenses associated with the salary budget requested Note that any equipment or other materials purchased with grant funds are the property of your department and revert to the department after your project is completed TIMELINE AND TASKS Please indicate any variances to the planned PLIG 2018 schedule and your reasons. If you do not intend to deviate from the schedule, you may leave this section blank. Note: the tasks are described in the Dissemination Agreement section. Task Date Proposed Variance and Reason Full project plan submitted to TLS August 24, 2018 Preliminary findings submitted to TLS January 11, 2019 Summary of final findings submitted to TLS August 23, 2019 Final budget accounting submitted TLS August 23, 2019 Participation in ILI/TLS PLIG dissemination event (e.g., PLIG Showcase) November

3 STATEMENT OF UTILITY (two pages maximum) Using the evaluation criteria outlined in the Proposal Evaluation section of the PLIG website, please provide an overview of the project you are proposing, including: Project objectives An explanation of the teaching/learning problem(s) it is designed to address An explanation of the significance of the project to student outcomes and/or the student experience. A brief description of how the project integrates with activity already underway at RIT in a priority area and/or how this approach has been successfully used at RIT already. Comics are a vital part of contemporary culture. They are important not just as objects in and of themselves, but also as influences on film, video games, fine art, graphic design, literature, and even our own senses of self. Over the past 20 years, comics have become a legitimate field of study in universities and colleges across the US and the world. There have been major museum exhibitions of comics art in the United States since the 2000s; comics have appeared on mainstream bookstore shelves and bestseller lists since the 1990s; and, there are now university press book series, academic journals, and scholarly societies devoted to the study of comics. Indeed, there are now a handful of comics degree and certificate programs scattered around the US, Canada, and Europe. My own career as a scholar has developed with this trajectory my first published article, in 2006, was about comics, yet at the time, I pursued the study of comics on the side, as a complement to my major focus on American literature. Over the past ten years, I have published more and devoted more of my time to comics scholarship and pedagogy. In so doing, I have become aware of a problem in the field of comics studies that applies both to the academic study of comics and the teaching of comics: the way that we teach comics has been influenced a great deal by the disciplinary frameworks of English, Art History, and Art departments. Yet, because comics have not been a legitimate medium for academic study for very long, much work on comics has not been supported by research libraries and archives. Directly related to the new effort to study comics as a distinct medium, one of the major concerns of comics scholars today is how comics have been, and are now being, archived in research libraries. Comic books are typically listed in library catalogs as periodicals, and therefore the title of the comic book series alone is what is available in library catalogs. This has proven to hamper research into the history of comic books, as a lot of the data about a particular comic book that a scholar would want to know is not available in catalogs, including the writer and artist of a particular comic book issue, the characters featured in that issue, the number, genre, and length of stories included in particular issue (comic books from the 1930s through the 1960s typically contained multiple stories of varied length in a single issue, often featuring different characters and different genre orientations), and kinds of advertisements in an issue. Because of this, fan-based databases such as the Grand Comics Database are widely used by scholars in comics studies, though they do not provide comprehensive, reliable data. What I propose to do is develop and teach a project-based course in which students analyze a small sample of comic books, collaborate on the creation of a digital finding aid for the content of those books, and then use digital tools to produce quantitative and qualitative analyses of comics. Fortunately, this project will develop in relation to a valuable archive of comic books already housed at RIT. The Cary Collection at RIT houses a unique archive: the Steven Neil Cooper Comic Book Collection. Donated by an RIT alum, this collection consists of the 202 comics books that were published in April Combing through collector s guides, Cooper assembled a comprehensive list of comics available on newsstands during that month, and then went about acquiring the most pristine copies of each of the 202 comics. Cooper donated this one-of-a-kind archive to RIT s Cary Collection in 2010, and I now frequently teach with this collection in my courses on the history of comics (CMDS 242: Comics: Image & Text in Popular Culture & ARTH 550: Art Comics). I have also taught a Classes Without Quizzes using this collection during Brick City Weekend. The collection is useful because it provides a snapshot of comics publishing during a key time in the medium s history. Following a national controversy about horror and crime comics in the early 1950s, the Comics Code Authority was formed in 1954 to effectively censor the content of comic books. By 1956, most comics available on U.S. newsstands bore a Comics Code Authority stamp of approval on them. In the history of comics, it is often assumed that the Comics Code had a 5

4 STATEMENT OF UTILITY (continued) chilling effect on the comics medium that after the code, a lot of artistic experimentation and genre invention declined, leading the way to the resurgence in 1956 of the superhero genre, which had fallen into decline after World War II. Teaching the Cooper Collection allows me to offer a more nuanced version of this received history. First of all, not all comics from April 1956 bear the Comics Code stamp of approval, so the censorship was not as widespread as some historians have assumed. Secondly, by examining the covers of 202 comics, it becomes clear that by April 1956, the superhero genre was not more prominent, and in fact was far less prominent, than the genres that were supposedly hampered by the comics code, such as horror, war, and salacious adventure comics. The history of comics is more varied, and not as clearly defined by the now ubiquitous superhero genre, as we have assumed, and this is largely because scholars and collectors alike have retroactively assumed that the comics most popular today were also the most prominent and popular in earlier eras. The one downside to teaching with the Cooper Collection is that we are not allowed to remove the comics from their protective sleeves. Doing so would harm the collection s integrity, as comics from this era were printed on cheap paper, with staple bindings that will crease when pages are turned. We can only view the covers of the 202 comics in the Cooper Collection, even though students, alumni, and parents have asked to view the interiors each time I have taught with the collection. Owing to this limitation, the finding aid for the Cooper Collection only lists the comic books title and issue numbers (information that is available on the covers). So, we have no clear and verified sense of what is inside the comics in the Cooper Collection, only what is on the front cover. With this PLIG grant, I will work with a student assistant to track down and purchase reading copies of each of the 202 comics in the Cooper Collection. This reading collection will reside in the Cary Collection alongside the Cooper Collection. By looking for copies in reading condition, and not in near mint condition, the cost of the comics decreases dramatically. Many of them can be purchased for between $5 and $50 through sites like mycomicshop.com, and we will work with local comics retailers and Metropolis Collectibles in New York City to locate any harder-to-find titles. Once the collection is purchased in Fall 2018, I will launch project course titled The History of Comics: Archive and Analysis. The course will be offered as a project-based topics course in the School of Individualized Study, and I will also seek to cross-list it as a capstone opportunity for students in Digital Humanities and Social Sciences (a program in which I teach core, required courses). In the project course, I will work with students to develop a robust digital finding aid for the Cooper Collection, one which contains information about the contents of each comic book therein. The finding aids will be developed by analyzing and discussing comics-specific databases that have been developed at the Michigan State University and the Ohio State University s comics libraries, as well as institutions that predominantly serve comics collectors such as the Grand Comics Database and the Overstreet Price Guide, and then by using standards appropriate to the Cary Collection. This work will allow the students to consider what the most useful ways of cataloging this material for future researchers, fans, and scholars might be. Along with working on cataloging data, we will also begin to analyze the comics with digital tools that will count, for example, the number of ads in each comic, the general length of each narrative in each comic, the number of panels per page, the number of words per page and per word balloon, and the prominence of certain genres in the comics. Inspired by Bart Beaty, Nick Sousanis, and Benjamin Woo s What Were Comics? project at the University of Calgary, which seeks to offer empirical data about the entirety of comics publishing from the 1930s to the present, and Michael North s Reading 1922, in which North sought to read every book published in 1922 to determine if modernism was in fact the prominent aesthetic of that year, we will seek to offer quantitative data and new historical analysis of a refined sample of comics publishing, the month of April We will be able to determine if the data leads us to new or surprising conclusions about comics history and the comics medium. For example, are page layouts and panel designs uniform and standardized, or is there a wide degree of variation in page layout and panel construction? How many pages of these 202 comics feature superhero narratives, and how many feature, for example, romance stories? By drilling down into this archive, we will be able to produce a robust snapshot of comics history, the likes of which have never been done. This project course will give students valuable experience creating a digital database, studying archive practices, and analyzing archival materials from interdisciplinary perspectives, and it can be run multiple times with a collection of this size without duplicating work or material. Moreover, this project can extend beyond the Cooper Collection once our database standards are developed, since the Cary Collection currently houses a second, larger collection of comics. 6

5 STATEMENT OF CREATIVITY (three paragraphs maximum) Provide a brief description of how this is a novel approach, or a new application of an existing mode or model of teaching and learning, and/or research about how teaching and learning represents a new paradigm. (Please note that special consideration will be given to proposals that demonstrate a new use/application of a model, system, or technology already in use at RIT.) Comics is a relatively new field of study in higher education, and most of the pedagogical approaches to comics have focused on teaching comics the way that one would teach traditional literature or art history courses. What I am proposing to do is to broaden the approach to teaching comics in four significant ways: 1) by building a comics course around a representative sample of comics published during a finite time period; 2) by asking students to collaborate with one another in the collection and analysis of data about that comics archive; 3) by assessing that data s difference or similarity from received notions about comics history and comic book publishing and design; and 4) by drawing conclusions about what comics actually were in a given historical period, and what revisions we should make to our understanding of comics history. Working with historical comic books will give students a more robust sense of the comics medium and its function in society. In these original artifacts, students will encounter not just comics, but also the letter columns, advertisements, and public service announcements published alongside comics stories. These materials help to highlight how comics circulated and were imagined to circulate among readers, and these materials are not reproduced in reprint collections of comics series. The only way to truly understand the print culture of comics is to look at actual comic books. The Cary Collection at RIT has a robust website that features finding aids for its collections, yet their comics archives remain relatively obscure because they are not searchable in ways that would allow comics researchers to find the kinds of information about the collection that they would likely want. In this project, my students and I will work Steven Galbraith and the Cary Collection staff, as well as the digital humanities librarian Rebekah Walker, to create a comics finding aid that would meet the standards of the RIT Libraries, but that would feature new and unique categories and data specific to comic books (for example, cataloging not just the periodical title, but also the writers, artists, pencilers, colorists, letterers, and editors in each single issue, as well as cataloging materials like genre, characters, advertisements, and letters pages) as well as digital applications that can analyze the material in the Cooper Collection. In this project, students will work as archival researchers, and they will be able to create new knowledge and make that knowledge accessible to scholars and fans. By actively working with an archive, and by asking critical questions of that archive, students will be able to draw larger conclusions about comics history based on a significant historical sampling of comics from a key moment in the medium s history. 7

6 STATEMENT OF EFFICACY (two pages maximum) Provide a brief description of the experiment/research design, methodology, and methods of data collection you will use to gauge efficacy. As is the standard in humanities assessment, I will administer IRB approved surveys to students in the project course, both at the beginning of the semester and at the end of the semester. At the beginning of the semester, I will ask them to articulate their opinions about comics and comics history. At the end of the semester, I will ask them the same questions about comics and comics history, and then gauge how their ideas and knowledge of comics history changed through interaction with archival materials. Along with this comparative exercise, I will also ask students to reflect on what they learned, the skills they developed, and the process of working collaboratively on the archive. The student assessment data collected from these IRB approved surveys and reflections will be used to evaluate the effectiveness of using the archive as a space for active learning and applied critical thinking. Student surveys and reflections will help me to gauge what students learned, and how clearly they can make a connection between the experience of gathering and analyzing data about comics in the archive, and larger analytical insights into comics history. I think that working closely with archival texts will help students engage with larger questions about the artistic, commercial, and social history of not just comics but print culture. Assessment will help me to establish how, when, and even if those connections are made by students in the course. The archival work in the project-based class will be modelled after the kinds of cataloging activities and practices already developed by archivists at the Ohio State University, Duke University, Columbia University, and Michigan State University, and it will be made accessible to future students, researchers, and staff. Other quantitative data from the collection of comics, such as the number of words or panels per page, the number of advertisements per page, will be compiled into spreadsheets, which can then used in a platform like Tableau to generate data visualizations. After completing the spring semester, I will present our work to librarians at the Wallace Center, and we will evaluate the quality of the finding aid and develop a plan for revising and making it available to researchers and the public. This plan will inform future iterations of the project course that will continue to work on the Cooper Collection and/or other comics archives in the Cary Collection. 8

7 STATEMENT OF EFFICACY (continued) 9

8 DISSEMINATION PLAN (optional) Provide details about the journals, conferences, shows, or other external vehicles with strong potential for dissemination of your results. Include supporting documentation, such as preliminary interest or acceptance, with your application, if available. (Please note that special consideration will be given to proposals that have a defined opportunity for external dissemination, such as an academic journal or professional conference.) ILI/TLS will assist with arranging channels for disseminating results within RIT (e.g., annual PLIG Showcase). After implementing this project course, I plan to co-author at least one, and possibly more than one, article with students involved in the project. I will submit article(s) for publication in journals such as Pedagogy, Digital Humanities Quarterly, Archive Journal, and Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society. I will also seek to present this project at conferences such as the Society of American Archivists Annual Meeting, the Modern Language Association, the International Comic Arts Festival, the Comics Studies Society Annual Conference, and the Canadian Society for the Study of Comics Annual Conference, as well as at more public gatherings such as New York Comic Con and San Diego Comic Con. The archival project itself will ultimately be made available to the public via a project webpage, where users will be able to interact with the Cooper Collection. 10

9 ADDITIONAL CONSIDERATIONS Please address these questions, if needed. Will your project require assistance for extensive or unusual media, multimedia, simulation, and/or software development? If so, please explain? No. The Cary Collection already houses comic books, and will be able to accommodate our additional archive of reading copies. All courses offered by RIT must be accessible to students with disabilities, according to Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (rit.edu/studentaffairs/disabilityservices/info). Is your proposed teaching approach accessible to all students, with reasonable accommodation? If not, please explain. Yes. RIT abides by the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 (FERPA), which prohibits instructors from making students' identities, course work, and educational records public without their consent (rit.edu/xvzne). Will any data gathering or sharing for your project raise any FERPA issues? If so, please explain. No. Student surveys for project assessment will be anonymized, and I will seek IRB approval from RIT for assessment activities. 11

10 DISSEMINATION AGREEMENT By completing this grant application, I agree to provide the materials described here, in support of disseminating what is learned from this project to other faculty at RIT. I also agree to return all/a portion of the funds that I receive for this project to RIT if I fail to complete or provide the materials described here. Full project plan (including roles and responsibilities, milestone dates, and pertinent project details) Overview of preliminary findings (may include experiment/study design, lessons learned, initial data collection, and/or literature review summary) Final summary of findings (including data collection, lessons learned, implications for further study, and which may be in the form of an article abstract, conference presentation outline, or short report) Final budget accounting (reconciliation of budget provided with your application and the actual project expenses) Participation in an ILI/TLS dissemination event (e.g., present a poster or other display at the PLIG Showcase) By submitting this application, I accept this agreement. DW (applicant, please initial here) 12

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