Henry Jenkins, the father of convergence culture, writes about visual linguistics of comics and graphic storytelling. Comics are a great gateway into Transmedia storytelling.
Mazzuchelli is one of my favorite artists in comics; not only because of Batman: Year One or Daredevil: Born Again (both amazing works), but also the City of Glass comic in the article.
What's so powerful about this piece is how it talks about comics bringing the picture plane and language together, what McCloud in "Making Comics" refers to as "montage."
Thank you!
A novel released in 1500 word segments each day through an iphone application. Part of the work can only be read if physically in the geolocation which coordinates with the text. These optional side stories, called "field reports", are tied back into the larger narrative. They are written in relation to the surroundings which they are placed, so the reader is getting visual cues by the setting. By Matthew Derby. He is also the senior interface designer for Harmonix.
I just read about this recently, really fascinating. It turns out the same group Foldit, is working in a similar format to develop better methods of teaching math and science in schools. And because these digital solutions are available in a virtual world, they are able to use tools like the internet to bring together gamers all over the world and really "hive mind" solutions to these scientific problems. In the article I read, the scientists talk about the flexibility the gamers have in working with 3D puzzles, and how it doesn't take long at all to solve these visual puzzles because it's just a game, and with a little bit of guidance it doesn't take long at all to catch the gamers up to speed with how proteins and enzymes 'should' fit together. Obviously there are some flexible rules, otherwise the computer would have figured it out earlier.
So I just thought this application was really fantastic, especially when networked to include potentially more of the public sphere. Makes me scientifically endlessly optimistic!