One of our local shopping centers is a converted textile factory, so they made a comic to describe the history of the building and its conversion!

More praise for Speaking with Pictures, my upcoming graphic novel on language, cognition, and visual communication. I'm counting down the days until this finally gets out and I can't wait...👀 visuallanguagelab.com/sip

And yet LLMs have been let loose in government and education.

Today in AI sucks, stop using it

Our university is in the process of allowing AI use in assessment, a supposedly pragmatic response to its ubiquity. This means I can't ban it on my comics course. This might bolster students' desire to avoid it.

I kind of want to go back and edit all of my master's essays to add that comics are not only a legitimate form of literature but that we now have evidence proving they are an innately human one.

The least shocking thing. But don't worry, linear story telling is only a feature of comics!! /s

Considering that I’ve demonstrated LLMs can’t handle any of the subtextual engines in prose, this isn’t surprising, but it remains shocking how not good at it the technology is. The Future!

Narrative and spatial relationships are two fundamental aspects of human cognition. LLMs are consistently terrible at both and have no obvious path to improving.

Not shocking, to be honest.

I messed around with this in a far less scientific fashion and: yeah.

Here's an interesting new study exploring whether LLMs are able to understand the narrative sequencing of comics and... even the best AI models are *terrible* at it for pretty much all tasks that were analyzed aclanthology.org/2025.finding...

Thanks a lot!

I forgot the most important: good luck to @cogirmak.bsky.social !

This is really interesting and I will definitively have a look! A long time ago, when I was a student, I did my project on this topic for a Semiotics module, at a much smaller scale. Funnily enough, it was about compiling and writing about all the different types of movements in the Tintin books.

♥️

Congrats to @cogirmak.bsky.social whose dissertation is now printed and ready to be defended in a few weeks! She researched the visual depiction of motion events as part of our broader TINTIN Project, so here’s a little thread of her work… www.visuallanguagelab.com/tintin

Our special issue on ‘Parallelism in the Architecture of Language’ is now published! Huge thanks to all contributing authors, reviewers, Eva, Neil, and the topiCS journal team for their excellent work 📚🗣️🧠🤖🙏🏻 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/17568765...

My upcoming graphic novel, Speaking with Pictures, on cognition, language, and visual communication is out in only 3 more months... www.visuallanguagelab.com/sip

They gotta bring Carp Rider to Shonen Jump

but such judgments may be influenced by people’s exposure to manga 😍

Did you know that if you buy my book on Amazon, Jeff Bezos makes 5 times as much as I do on each copy sold? Sharing some behind-the-scenes book math on why buying directly from presses is best for EVERYONE (except Bezos) in my newsletter today! aubreyhirsch.substack.com/p/book-math

A fun find: Hokusai used background motion lines about 200 years ago in this page from one of his books of picture stories. This is the oldest example of these that I know of, and interestingly manga tend to use these more than other types of comics (See corpus in: www.visuallanguagelab.com/poc)

My upcoming graphic novel Speaking with Pictures is now officially at the printer and I'm counting down to when it's released in February! www.visuallanguagelab.com/sip

A few years ago I had a visiting PhD who knew around 16 languages, and yesterday my visiting PhD revealed he knows 19 languages. Apparently my lab attracts hyperpolyglots!

Jim Lee's impassioned words about why DC will never use AI have already won New York Comic Con.

Yeah! Promotion!

Arts than we do. I also think that the relatively recent research that @neilcohn.bsky.social & alike have been doing has meant that we need to broaden our understanding (& be much more ambitious) in what we can achieve as a medium, both for creators & the readers who love it. So I think here that

And I truly meant what I said!! It was a blast reading this again!

Thanks to @bodowinter.bsky.social for the wonderful endorsement of my upcoming graphic novel about language, cognition, and visual communication! visuallanguagelab.com/sip

I cannot emphasise enough how much anyone with even a passive interest in comics needs this graphic novel on their radar.

Thanks to @bodowinter.bsky.social for the wonderful endorsement of my upcoming graphic novel about language, cognition, and visual communication! visuallanguagelab.com/sip

But the combo is unique. Nikki makes an important point that language has become its own evolutionary system adapting to human minds/brains that evolves culturally and generates structure which seems to make it unique

Let us know the answer!!

I think one thing people agree on is that we need to know more about the ingredients and building blocks of language and then compare it to other human behaviours and animal behaviours. Theresa&Nikki stress that many(maybe all)building blocks are shared at least to some degree with different animals

The Poznań #Linguistics Meeting 2025 Grand Debate: "Human #Language: is it unique?" feat. Wolfgang Dressler, Magdalena Wrembel, Raymond Hickey, Nikki Ritt, @thematzing.bsky.social and @neilcohn.bsky.social

That is, while I do not think it was made the way it is (prompted?) with intent, I see a usefulness to its “wrongness”

This image confuses in a way so pleasantly (to me) that I wish it was not accidental slop.

If you look at the thumb of the hand holding the duck and compare the length of the girl's arms, it gets even weirder. 🤯

Another reminder that graphics are decomposible… I assume this was created by AI because the top implies the girl walks forward but the legs and feet suggest waking away. Each part is well-formed but the whole is odd

I've found the work and posts of @neilcohn.bsky.social super interesting to follow on this front: researching how comics encode and how readers construct meaning.

Great plenary by @neilcohn.bsky.social at the 2025 Poznań #Linguistics Meeting: "Reimagining linguistic uniqueness in a multimodal paradigm"

I’ve heard people doubt that graphics can be broken down into “minimal units” but here’s Hokusai clearly showing how to build pictures out of basic parts from over 200 years ago (from the Hokusai Manga exhibit at the Creative Museum in Tokyo)

I'm sorry, worldwide, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable permission to my voice and likeness? For what now? In any manner for any purpose??? This is in academia/.edu's new ToS, which you're prompted to agree to on login. Anyway I'll be jumping ship. You can find my stuff at hcommons.org.

cool study, visual depiction of motion in 300 comics across the world by @cogirmak.bsky.social @neilcohn.bsky.social Might be of interest to @dialhforhagai.bsky.social @soengery.bsky.social @hannahtempler.com @kochalka.bsky.social @tomtomorrow.bsky.social etc (or not 😬, if not sry)

Thanks a lot! 😊

Fascinating stuff!!

With different cues, it’s possible to explicitly indicate direction, convey varying levels of speed (especially with more lines) and even depict multiple moments. I love this work, even though it pushed back my defense time. Curiosity matters more to me 🥹

Images don’t necessarily show a single frozen moment. Look how they can depict multiple moments at once:

I was mesmerized by the idea that something static can convey not only motion but also temporality, and I decided to test it empirically. It wasn’t an easy task, as the way our data was organized didn’t make it straightforward. But now, here is our paper! ♥️ www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi...