Project for COM-480 Data Visualization Course at EPFL
Comic books are intended to help many young people experience the first connection with the magical world of books and cinema. As such they have a profound impact on the way the mind, judgment and future preferences of a child develop during their coming of age. At the same time, comic books represent a way to better understand the social, economic and political reality they were created in. While doing this project, we would like to see how comic books were used over time to show opinions and imagination of their creators and we hope our visualization would help in the discussion of the reasons some characters were represented in a certain manner. As a living legend of the comic books world, Stan Lee once said:
Some people will say, ‘Why read a comic book? It stifles the imagination. If you read a novel you imagine what people are like. If you read a comic, it’s showing you.’ The only answer I can give is, ‘You can read a Shakespeare play, but does that mean you wouldn’t want to see it on the stage?’
This quote was only one of the things that inspired us to dedicate this project to not only commenting on the way comic book characters evolved but try to visualize it so that all of the discrepancies and differences would become even more obvious. The main objective would be to create a sequence of the way the representation of good and evil has shifted across time, but also of the ways the culture of diversity became more present in the entertainment industry.
We are all aiming to live in the world full of diversity and acceptance, but even with all of the improvements in recent years have brought us, have we achieved enough? We hope our data visualization will give us all some much-needed answers.
Other colleagues, Readers, Comic book fans
- How good and evil shifted over time?
- In what ways the culture of diversity became more present?
Data scraping was performed in 2014 from Wikia website. There are two CSV files containing information about the characters. Data was take from fivethirtyeight/data/comic-characters.
First dataset dc-wikia-data.csv has 6896 rows and 13 columns, whereas marvel-wikia-data.csv has 16376 rows and 13 columns. Dataset columns include eye color of the character, gender, year of first appearance as well as the total number of appearances since then. The page ID from Wikia will be used as an identification number.
More information on dataset analysis could be found here.
Milestone 1: Proposals
Deadline: October 26th
- Abstract in 300 words
- Research questions
- Dataset description and analysis
Milestone 2: Functional project prototype review
Deadline: November 20th
- Collection of design requirements techniques used together
- Making sketches, wireframes, moodboard that will inspire implementation
- Initial version of visualizations
- Technical implementation
- Website with the visualizations
Milestone 3: Final project
Deadline: December 18th
- Presentation
- Screencast
- Process Book finished
