On the road to deciding which type of humorous text we would
encode, Jeremy suggested we try Bo Burnham’s funny poetry book “Egghead: Or,
You Can't Survive on Ideas Alone.” It is supposedly a very funny book that incorporates
images and humor into poetry. Sadly, none of us could find a
copy for our decision meeting last week, and we ended up deciding to use Allie
Brosh’s giggle inducing book “Hyperbole and a Half.” The book is based on her
website which includes blog style web comics, please go look it up, you will
not regret it but you will lose an hour of your life.
“Hyperbole and a Half” is an exciting encoding challenge
because it has various levels of descriptive hierarchy within the text as well
as complex comics. The text is not nearly as funny without reference to the
comics and the same can be said for the comics (As seen below, funny alone, but
rib cracking hilarious when read in context).
Additional information is also included in the comics that augment the humor level of the stories.
The first problem we encountered in our efforts to
encode a sample of “Hyperbole and a Half”, was deciding which type of TEI text body
guideline to use. The book really does not fit neatly into any of the available categories,
but while re-reading the class blog we stumbled upon Comic Book Markup Language
(CBML). CBML is “an XML vocabulary for
encoding multiform documents that are variously called comics, comic books, and
“graphic novels” as well as other documents that integrate comics content or
that share formal features with comics content” (Comic Book Markup Language, 2012).
So far it fits perfectly with our encoding project!
Another reason Allie Brosh’s book is such an interesting
challenge is the fact that it began as a web comic which employs HTML. Next it was
transferred into a physical format with additional comics. Now we are attempting
to re-digitize the text through TEI based CBML. Round and round we go!
It will be interesting to compare the HTML code to our finished encoding
project.
Works Cited:
Comic Book Markup Language. 2012. “What is CBML?” Last
Modified May 17, 2012. http://dcl.slis.indiana.edu/cbml/
All images were taken from;
Allie Brosh. 2013. “Hyperboyle and a Half.” Accessed February
12, 2014. http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.ca/2010/02/boyfriend-doesnt-have-ebola-probably.html
Oh hey there, it's just Jesse strollin' on in from The Future of the Blog. My group is also using CBML, but to encode a decidedly more somber text. Our selection is "We Are On Our Own," a graphic memoir about a little Jewish girl's experiences with her mother during the Holocaust.
ReplyDeleteSorry to bring such a damper on your super rad project post, but I'm very interested to see how you make use of CBML. Have you selected the comics that you are going to encode? I'd love to hear about what aspects you think are the most important parts of these comics to represent.
We actually ended up encoding a graph image/panel within the book, which changed which type of TEI code we used. We ended up basically taking a few elements from CBML, like , alongside regular TEI compliant XML, as posted on the TEI website, to try and successfully represent the complexity of the graph/panel.
DeleteSo for us, the most important CBML elements were the panel divisions. What about you guys?
Sarah, thanks a bunch for introducing me to this blog! I laughed so hard that I cried. Really. I'm not sure how I'd be able to concentrate on coding with all this hilarity in my face! Looking forward to seeing how your project turns out, though.
ReplyDelete