Graphic Possibilities is a research workshop in the Department of English at Michigan State University. GP engages with comics through two interrelated branches, critical inquiry and engaged pedagogy, as a means of bringing together faculty and graduate students with current and burgeoning interests in comic studies. Each year, the Department offers a series of Research Workshops organized around scholarly and teaching interests shared among faculty and graduate students. The Workshops build intellectual community and provide an informal mentoring structure for students. I work with two graduate student coordinators to design and implement Graphic Possibilities. You can learn more about Graphic Possibilities by visiting our website.

The Wikidata Cycle

Comics as Data North America (CaDNA) is an ongoing collaborative project that examines library catalog data to explore geographies of publishing and library collecting policies in North American comics. Continuing an institutional history of creating collections as data, a group of Michigan State University librarians, digital humanists, and faculty formed a working group in 2018 to compile and analyze comic book data. Since the Fall of 2020, I have worked with CaDNA under the Graphic Possibilities banner. Working alongside the graduate co-leads (Justin Wigard and Nicole Huff) and with Kate Topham from the library, we have taken up a cycle of Wikidata Edit-a-thon as the next data stage in this project. These events seek to address gaps in the digital record.