Empirical studies of comics readership and fandom
John Walsh
Faculty Mentor
John Walsh (Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering)
Project Description
Students will engage in research on comics fandom and research. Comics fandom research explores how readers engage with comic books—not just as consumers, but as active participants who write letters, contribute ideas, and shape comic culture. This research looks at fan letters, editorial pages, and other “paratexts” to understand how readers express identity, community, and critique. My work in this area includes creating the Comic Book Paratexts digital archive (https://biblicon.org/cbp/), which collects and analyzes fan-written content from American comics. I also developed the Comic Book Readership Archive (CoBRA) and have published studies on 1970s fan culture, teen humor comics, and reader contributions to titles like Amazing Spider-Man and Dial H for Hero. Using digital tools and archival research, we can trace how fans influenced comics—and how comics reflected their readers.
Technology or Computational Component
Comics fandom research often involves managing and analyzing large volumes of archival material—especially fan letters and editorial content from mid-century comic books. To support this work, we use a range of computational tools and digital methods. Text encoding (often with XML and the Text Encoding Initiative, or TEI) allows us to structure and annotate fan content for detailed analysis. We also apply text mining, topic modeling, and named entity recognition to uncover patterns in reader discourse. Some projects, like the Comic Book Paratexts archive, involve building searchable digital collections using custom metadata schemas and web development frameworks. Others incorporate machine learning for genre classification or sentiment analysis. Students interested in the technical side can learn to write scripts in Python, use tools like Voyant or MALLET for textual analysis, or help develop new markup vocabularies such as the Comic Book Markup Language (CBML). These skills are valuable across the digital humanities and can be adapted to many forms of cultural heritage research.