My PhD on coherence in visual storytelling combines approaches from comics studies, visual narrative comprehension, linguistics,  and cognitive research. With coherent stories, readers can fit together story parts meaningfully, for instance relating events together as causes and consequences. Those connections are made in the mind of the reader, but can also be signaled by the narrative itself (like using “because” in verbal texts). Establishing coherence is a cognitive process, and therefore this work dives into the cognitive mechanisms that might guide readers in understanding comic narratives.

This understanding is more challenging than people often think. For instance, how do we understand continuity across panels, when characters are rarely drawn the same way twice, or not all parts of an event are shown? About 50% of comics also show “unreal” events in its panels, like dreams, memories, and hallucinations. What cues help readers understand that those events to occur in someone’s mind? How do we integrate those events in a coherent, sensible narrative? With theory, experiments, and corpus studies, this PhD project explored these kind of questions, finding patterns of visual cues that mark relations between events. Comics are more systematic than you might think! 

For more information about this work, please view the projects below or visit my Publications.

My background is in (cognitive) linguistics, literature, stylistics, and cognition of visual narratives. In these fields, my work focused on inferences, metaphors, conceptual blending, and point of view. 

Before my work on visual communication, I investigated the effect of written language on mental imagery. This collaborative work has been published in the book Picturing Fiction through Embodied Cognition: Drawn Representations and Viewpoint in Literary Texts. More information about this publication can be find here, and you can find the book here.