Picturing Text: Comics and Other Imagetexts
Prinicipal Investigator for George A. Smathers Libraries mini-grant, funded for $2,880 to digitize 20,000 pages from Fun magazine (53 volumes, 1861-1901, approximately 15,900 pages), all issues held by the University of Florida of P*S: The Preventive Maintenance Monthly by Will Eisner (approximately 60 issues and 3,700 pages), and several significant imagetexts selected from the Penny and Sol Davidson Collection materials including the Imagerie d'Epinal, three volumes of The Comic Almanack, and the science-fiction fanzine containing the first appearance of Superman.
- The project will result in these materials being scanned, quality controlled, converted to text for searching, and added to University of Florida's Digital Collections. Narrative finding guides by title/area will be created alongside the digitized materials to provide background on the work and/or illustrator to contextualize the importance of these materials for casual and scholarly uses while also linking users directly to the materials.
- The digitized materials will also be used to create two online exhibits, one to serve as an appendix for a larger grant proposal and one for the annual University of Florida Comics Conference to publicize the materials.
- All materials will be housed within the University of Florida's Digital Collections.
Details on Materials
- Fun, dubbed "Funch" by some readers, was a contemporary to Punch. Fun is more closely related to theater, making it more relevant to the Belknap collection. Fun is also unavailable from any online venues. The existence of Fun itself provides useful commentary on the significance of Punch and comic magazines in Victorian England and in times since. Researchers and teachers will be able to use Fun as an independent artifact as well as in comparative studies with Punch and in analyses of particular topics.
- The P*S: The Preventive Maintenance Monthly, by Will Eisner allows researchers and teachers access to materials not otherwise available. These materials are particularly rich because they are government technical manuals for use in training and safety. They support technical writing research and instruction, particularly the technical writing classes which thousands of students take each year. These materials will also greatly aid the comics studies program, studies of Jewish literature, and studies of government documents (the US Army has more recent issues of P*S online, but these will be new additions submitted for inclusion in their online collection).
- The Comic Almanack is an important imagetext and it could serve as a prototype for digitizing more of the Libraries' collection of almanacs by period, theme, or imagetextual quality. The Comic Almanack is of particular interest because it includes illustrations by George Cruikshank (a prolific illustrator and caricaturist who created over 15,000 etchings and engravings) and because The Comic Almanack includes texts by William Thackeray and other important literary figures. The literary connections could be used to pursue additional projects in relation to the Howe materials. Imagerie d'Epinal; and the science-fiction fanzine containing the first appearance of Superman are significant for their uniqueness, rarity, and relevance to comics studies. These materials are of particular interest to researchers and will be cornerstones highlighting some of the many avenues for continued growth.