RNUAL is a few weeks ago, and the weather is about to turn nice again. It's hard to sit and make much progress when the sun burns through the window. It's easier to read in the early mornings, but even that fills me with a practice-based guilt.

I've been pushing through Robin Nelson's Practice As Research In The Arts, which I probably should have read three or four years ago.. if not ON my actual MA. But it didn't exist then.

“[Following Heidegger, I use this term [praxis] as do others… to indicate a mode of knowing which arises through doing-thinking (practice) prior to any articulation in propositional discourse (theory)” (Nelson, 2013: 188).

The function of praxis within my inquiry can, if not careful, haunt my quieter moments of not-doing-anything. During RNUAL, I relied upon the sketchbook to deploy aspects of praxis; there is a definite sense in those books of theory and practice being related in a murky illustrated lit review, a loose objective set earlier in the project. The appearance of writers, reaching out from the page in order to remind my future self that they have said something crucial but sometimes elusive persists.

Seth Bullock thinks Wikipedia's not the best / Sketchbook page / June 2020

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Feedback from RNUAL focused on the aspect of my inquiry I seem most inclined to resist: the notion of the Western. Louise Williams, my BA Illustration tutor, coined that... I've been using it on and off ever since. My use of the West to scaffold this inquiry creates a dangerous intertwining of practice and thinking - I've been looking this year at a wide range of storyworld-based activities, or notions that could easily intersect. Narrative- and world-theory, of course, but there are many other paradigms within this PhD Workflow. The diagram, the encyclopedic fiction, the rhizome, the frame and the boundary. Recently, Simon Grennan's request to contribute a definition on polygraphy has sent me into a tangent of reading Bakhtin, which involved me rewatching Robert Altman's McCabe & Mrs Miller (1971). Nathaniel Rich quotes Altman, discussing the sound mixing on McCabe: “'You don’t need to hear everything people are saying to know the world they’re living in,” he said, identifying a strategy common in literature" (Rich, 2016). The scene in question seems (to me) to be a saloon scene introducing McCabe, whose voice recedes into a phalanx of imperceptible dialogue. It doesn't matter what people are saying, says Atman. That they are present, speaking, establishes the world of McCabe; he recedes, a participant rather than a narrative force - certainly at this point.

I consider the moment in Leone's Once Upon A Time in the West (1969) where the train conductor hurries a pair of Native Americans from the train carriage: "get that lead out ya asses, ya Redskin Warriors!". This, and the two black men helping Jill McBain to carry her luggage across the platform, are spoken of – or themselves speak (the two valets converse about their families) – events that refer to extraneous events and worlds, expanding our frame momentarily to worlds beyond Leone's tightly constructed world of archetypes. Another narrative, another film, as David Jenkins says of the stagecoach in My Darling Clementine.

"The distinction between narration and digression loses much of its pertinence in the novelistic practices of the eighteenth century", says Thierry Smolderen in The Origin of Comics (2014: 13-14). His polygraphy welcomes the pertinence of overlapping voices. William Hogarth, like Altman some 200 years later, would welcome voices that both narrate and digress within his framing practice. [Digressing now, I'm curious if framing is my practice.] Smolderen notes that Hogarth's action of drawing "halt[s] time", his work "creating an interface through which the ancient culture of engraving can interact with modernity" (Smolderen 2014: 18). Smolderen sees Hogarth's engravings as decidedly postmodern. An artform whose construction relies on layers of voices, labyrinths of meaning, its characters transcending time and medium to speak to its readers who will "lose [themselves] in the details and .. return to them in order to generate comparisons, inferences, and endless paraphrases" (Smolderen 2014: 8). Not unlike the Western, whose later stages often come replete with references within and without its own thematic, semiotic and discursive cues. I have a vague recollection of Christopher Frayling referring to Once Upon a Time in the West as a film constructed of quotes: but I shall have to find that.

So. My sketchbooks do this. Half the time, I cannot recall why things happen in the way they do: below, Samuel Beckett - the Irish mythical poet-sprite, not the one from Quantum Leap - enters a saloon. Well, he doesn't. He's not entering a saloon; the saloon doors here indicate that I draw him as entering one world from another. He's moving into a false world from his own existence. I'm not sure why. He's also quoting his own book, Molloy (1951), which I may have been reading with my sketchbook open, thus making this drawing occur. It seems to me, quoting Beckett-Molloy, that some such incident occurred about this time.

Once upon a Beckett in the West / Sketchbook page / June 2020

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To his left is a far more interesting image. It's a cognitive rough; me planning for RNUAL. I planned my presentation along visual lines, connecting up thought-images by framing them as if panels or - in the case of a PDF presentation - slides. The town facacde seen above is intended to function as cinematic Western-set; each facade represents an author who offers a threshold from my world into the world of their respective cognitive framework. Thus, Beckett is coming into our (the reader's) world from outwith; perhaps from his own world. The sign suggests that he's leaving his own world-saloon to come into a false world. The world of the drawing he can't exist in in actuality, except he can because I will it. And if you can see-in to that world - to reference Woldheim, Grennan et al - then you will comprehend the extension. It's a world, framed by a door, framed by dialogue that digresses from a Western setting by shifting forward across time by some 75 years, and space by traversing one ocean. He appears on the next page:

Samuel Beckett in a map of Western action / Sketchbook page / June 2020

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This time, he's on the move, wearing a hat. Still we can see those crinkles. This drawing depicts how a seen-in figure could conceivably exist in the diagrammatization of a western plot. I was wondering how might I map out intersections of plot - and indeed, a simply tumbleweed. This shows our main character, but suggests that his journey across the plain (or chronotope) intersected an event that had included a second, unidentified character. The character #2 then digresses from the event, which went on to intersect with Samuel's timeline, and almost intersected again at a later point. As we can see from the sun, these events have taken place over the course of a few hours - enough that the sun can travel roughly 90˚. Referring back (as ever) to Laure Ryan's statement that a storyworld is "very difficult to diagram" (2014: 33), I'm feeling quite pleased with this work. It suggests a form of approaching the answering of my research question through practice. I think it might be one of the most important elements of this year's work, and in turn seems fundamental to explaining, through practice, what Another Narrative, Another Drawing is really about.

What's more, I was only able to verbalise it once I had drawn it . And now I can turn back to it, theorise, and move on. It's a good, fundamentally-exploratory piece of practice. Not the best drawing ever, but I know what it means, to appropriate Robin Nelson: "The tacit might ... include modes of knowing (such as embodied cognition) which cannot be readily formulated by [explicit or postivistic] means” (Nelson 2013).

And there's a minimality to this. I resist (as ever) the urge to reform or reframe this cognitive drawing, preferring to retain it as map first, trace later. Next steps: a vacation. I've figured out a bunch of stuff I'd like to draw, so I'm taking a blank notebook on a week's holiday to see what emerges.

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References:

Nelson, R. (2013) Practice as Research in the Arts: Principles, Protocols, Pedagogies, Resistances. UK: Palgrave Macmillan

Rich, N. (2016). McCabe & Mrs. Miller: Showdowns. [online] The Criterion Collection. Available at: https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/4256-mccabe-mrs-miller-showdowns [Accessed 17 Jul. 2020].

Ryan, Marie-Laure, Introduction in Ryan, Marie-Laure and Thon, Jan-Noël, Storyworlds across Media"(2014). University of Nebraska Press

Smolderen, T. (2014). The Origins of Comics. From William Hogarth to Winsor McCay. USA: University Press of Mississippi.

I was recently recommended to Simon Grennan by Ian Hague to contribute two definitions to an upcoming publication. A glossary of research terms, Simon asked me to define storyworld and polygraphy. The first is something I am ever more familiar, and confident, with. The second is new to me. It's a hybrid of intertextuality and postmodernist notions of semiotics, seemingly targeted directly at the multilayered visual imagery of proto-comic-book makers of the 18th, 19th and very early 20th centuries. Anyway, I had a few shots at both, and these are where I came down.

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STORYWORLD:

Marie-Laure Ryan defines a storyworld as “the world of the characters” (2014: 32). In both factual and fictional writing, a storyworld extends the discourse held within the framework of the narrative to a place beyond itself; through the collusion of the reader (for it is the reader on whom a storyworld must depend), a “global mental construction” (Herman 2002: 5) can be formed. Ryan & Thon note that any multimodal storyworld can be “constantly expand[ed and] revised” by creators and fans alike” (Ryan & Thon 2014: 1). The reference points for this extended world will fall to the reader: a so-called “real” world will often suffice, unless the reader is told otherwise (Ryan 2014: 35). Thus, when a character within a story refers to some distant time or place (such as the Wild West) the reader has a set of historical, social and cultural references on which to draw. In comic books, both intradiegetic and extradiegetic elements are at play; the former is the text within the speech bubbles representing the mental world of a character. But its presentation - the bubble or frame itself - is extradiegetic, the narrator framing the boundaries of the storyworld. A storyworld is that which is referred to, but unexplained: a moment in the past, a place beyond the horizon. 

References 

Ryan, M. L. (2014) Story/Worlds/Media: Tuning the Instruments of a Media-Conscious Narratology. In Storyworlds across media, edited by Marie-Laure Ryan & Jan-Nöel Thon, 25-49, USA: University of Nebraska Press, 2014.

Ryan, M. L & Thon, J. N. (2014). Storyworlds across media: Introduction. In Storyworlds across media, edited by Marie-Laure Ryan & Jan-Nöel Thon, 1-23, USA: University of Nebraska Press, 2014.

Herman, D. (2002) Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. USA: University of Nebraska Press.

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POLYGRAPHY:

Polygraphy is described by Thierry Smolderen as a “prominent feature” (2014: 51) of the engraved art of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century artists and illustrators such as William Hogarth and Rodolphe Töpffer. Citing Hogarth as an early pioneer of sequential art, Smolderen concedes that the complexity of its presentation, “replete with incidents, allusions and secondary plots” (2014: 8) is, for contemporary audiences, difficult to read. The reader is invited to “lose [themselves] in the details”, to “generate comparisons, inferences and endless paraphrases” (ibid). Employing an approach Smolderen describes as humourous and largely “unsystematic”, illustrators of this era engaged in “productive exchanges” with emerging media. Thus emerged an intertextual overlapping of visual imagery, which Smolderen equates with the polyphony - or multiple voices -  of Mikhail Bakhtin’s linguistic philosophy (Baetens & Surdiacourt, 2011: 595). This early work bridges the gap between the eccentric novel and modern panel comic art through the introduction of sequence to single images. Smolderen’s innovation is to reject the notion of “the drawing as a single field”, and to “redefine it as a set of items and signs to be deciphered” (ibid). As the comic strip moved away from its original setting of newspapers and journals, this polygraphic, intertextual discourse was slowly abandoned.

References

Baetens, J. & Surdiacourt, S. (2012). How to ‘Read’ Images with Texts: The Graphic Novel Case. In The Sage Handbook of Visual Research Methods, edited by Eric Margolis & Luc Pauwels, 590-600. London: SAGE Publications Ltd.

Smolderen, T. (2014). The Origins of Comics. From William Hogarth to Winsor McCay. USA: University Press of Mississippi.

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Funny thing is, although the notions of storyworlds and its potential to sprout new, out-of-frame narrative directions are very much part of my research and practice, I hadn't quite understood that polygraphy is, in many ways, much closer to my approach to making work. Reflecting on the work I have done - especially in commercial practice - I can observe that I engage in a variety of discourses when responding visually to a written text. Indeed, detail-driven, multilayered (and, I hope, humorous) image-making is very much Wesley's stock-in-trade. One of the aspects of my practice-led thinking that I have yet to explore in depth (come on Summer) is that of communication with art directors. I rely frequently in my MA teaching practice on the term "language doing the work of eyes" (Tyler 1986). Much of Simon's work in Narrative Drawing, and in his later critique of Neil Cohn's Visual Language of Comics (2013) explores what the term language (and grammar) really means in systems of semiotic analyses within sequential narratives. Polygraphy is one of those terms which starts to indicate that images were being designed with 'reading' in mind. Although Smolderen describes the interplay between engraving, comic sketches and periodicals as 'unsystematic', he does indicate that these images are to be read; understood in contexts of wider discourse, utilising a range of stylistic approaches within one image, referencing the oncoming media of cinema, photography and advances in print. Could this relate back to Wolheim's seeing-in; the printed page in a late-19th century periodical acting as a paratext for the words within the publication.. an image as a singular field, yet designed to be processed grammatically, through a multi-phasic intertextual reading? Recently I produced an illustration for Harvard's in-house magazine; asked to draw one of its most interesting professors - a music and sound specialist called Alexander Rehding - I produced this piece:

Alexander Rehding for Harvard Magazine | May 2020

This is, pretty much, the kind of work I tend to do now. As far as 'language doing the work of eyes' I flip this on its head - my reading and cognitive perception of the text generates imagery which populates a storyworld. I've no idea what Alexander's office looks like. The text never mentions long arms, coffee, iMacs and notebooks. He might not have a Cambridge degree hanging on his wall, and I'm pretty sure no building at Harvard would offer this view of the college from its windows. The feedback from the illo was generous, and the article's writer stated that the illustration - and me as maker - "seems to understand Alex at a deeper-than-text level.." by incorporating items "unmentioned in the story but present in the picture."

Here, I think I'm realising that there is an intersection between polygraphy - the single field, multi-readable image - and the storyworld; the potential for a text to infer worlds, and for those worlds to reach outside its own frame of reference to other objects and intertexts. At this point, in drafting my Annual Report for the end of the first year of my PhD (OMG, already..), I speculate that the interface is constructed cognitively and perceptually, as opposed to the physical form of the drawings that lead to an 'end' result. I always thought I'd be thinking about the roughs, or the sketchbook. But perhaps I'm going back a stage or two earlier; I think marginalia might be the next place to look.

In the end, they didn't go for the long arms.. some older art editor said "why the long arms"? I say "why not". But I couldn't justify them being there. Except they felt right. Except they looked wrong. 

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Tyler, 1986, Clifford and Marcus, p. 137. In Visualizing Research by Carole Gray & Julian Malins, p.95, 2002. UK: Ashgate.

Sweet, J. (2020). "RE: Wesley for Harvard and Nasa". Email to Jackson, P. 27th May 2020.

Ideas for Thesis c.2025. (2020)

On the AfR, my aim was stated as the production of an interface between storyworld theory and narrative drawing. Since the end of January I have focused on the definition of this aim, and developed a literature review to encompass the key terms within my research and to use both practice and grounded theory to clarify what an interface is in this context.

Methodologically-speaking, much of my clarity around practice has come through a combination of the work produced for the Unfolding Narratives exhibition in March, and reflective writing. I approached the exhibition with the intention of using diagrams as a possible exploration of a constructed interface. Drawing on Deleuze & Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, Marie-Laure Ryan, K. Foote and M. Azaryahu’s Narrating Space and further reading within David Herman’s Storylogic, I seek to redefine the role of drawing practice in the depiction of worlds. Simon Grennan’s Narrative Drawing continues to help me position my understanding of drawing within narrative and world-making contexts, namely, the point at which the goal of bridging the gap between a drawing and a world becomes tenable. In this line of thinking, the clarity toward methodology focuses on the cognitive interface that a practitioner represents when beginning to map and trace a world.

The aim speculates that production or constructing an interface is possible and that, in doing so, it can demonstrate the necessary quality for drawing to depict the extent of a narrative world. Unfolding Narratives demonstrated that cognitive mapping through diagram-making might offer a constructed interface between the storyworld of an existing fiction – My Darling Clementine (1946) – and the practice of narrative drawing. My initial proposal positioned that the sketchbook consisted of intertextual frameworks, these drawings a constructed interaction between mark-making and world-making. However, in that proposal, I suggest that the drawing is the interface.

Since the AfR I have begun to question the intention of drawing from an aetiological perspective; that is to say, from a cause and effect approach. The intention behind a drawing is, as Grennan explains, to both make a mark and for that mark to be a representation. Its meaning is both the nature of the mark itself, as well as being a depiction of something wider. When that depiction is world-centric – the series of marks required to depict or imply an extended world – then it throws up methodological questions as to what I cognitively intend before the act of drawing takes place. In recent months I have begun to reposition my contextual approach to interface using the work of Johanna Drucker and Wolfgang Iser as well as the work of Erving Goffman, Jerome Bruner, David Herman and Marie-Laure Ryan. The experiential, reader-centric notion of a storyworld intersects with my work as an illustrator, but not the illustration itself. I hypothesize that the practice at the base of my methodological approach is the practice of cognitive world-making: a pre-drawing drawing, a rough or a sketch. This shares more with the rhizomatic map than it does the traced depiction of illustrative style. In this instance, the construction of the interface requires the positioning of Herman’s “global mental representation” as marks. My question might be what – or who – the interface is in the context of a drawing-as-world process.

Such is the nature of my project that every email regarding an expectation of a submission, a thing to read, or a territory yet unexplored momentarily FREAKS ME OUT. Imagine my horror when, last Friday, I opened my PhD Outlook only to be confronted with a request for an abstract (300 words) for a 15-minute presentation to be delivered, via the distorted reality of Collaborate Ultra.

Yet, as ever, I do this. I do this at 6.24am, which seems to be the time I do most sensible things in Lockdown. Post-Unentwined Clementine has been an extraordinarily busy time, but simultaneously quiet. Lockdown has enabled me to enjoy late afternoon bike rides; add this to my methodology. It gives me time to respond to the inductive findings of numerous PDFs and to sketch, in my head, new interfaces between worlds and narrative-drawing. So it is, when someone shoots an email saying "hey, write us 300 words about your presentation" I can actually do it in 248. Can I actually present this in 15 minutes? HA. 

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Once Upon A Spacetime in the West

My presentation will focus on the defining of a key part of my research question: the idea of an interface. Interface theory offers an approach to cognition and experience in relating to conceptual frames. As both a drawer and illustrator, my practice involves the cognitive mapping of “worlds” in order to manifest visual content – often from textual or verbal stimuli – through an act of “goal-oriented” drawing. My most recent practical explorations of these ideas stem from a moment in the 1946 John Ford western movie My Darling Clementine.

This work, exhibited in March 2020 as part of LCC’s Unfolding Narratives work-in-progress show, demonstrates a practice-based approach to world-mapping through narrative drawing. In order to illustrate abstract concepts of storyworlds and chronotopia, I use the cinematic “western” as a referent in time and space. Its visual language and narrative discourse are a basis for grounding and concretizing complex ideas through practical drawing-as-thinking.

Using drawings from my sketchbook and work from the exhibition, I will position my current thinking around interface-making; drawing, and the act of producing ‘sketches’ or ‘roughs’, is a cognitive process that acts upon a series of key texts. As a ‘place between’, interface thinking shares parallels with panel narratives, semiotic theory and cognitive acts of storyworld theory. I am currently working on a contextual review that uses storyspace mapping, diagram-making and narrative drawing to frame future practical experimentation, which will be the next key stage of my methodological process.

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It astonishes me how proud I am that I can compress eight months of reading, thinking and drawing into so little space. If that ain't chronotopia then I don't know what is. EDIT: I don't know what it is.

Water towers / 2005

There are many things which recur through my sketchbooks. One of these is the American water tower. So obsessed with these towers was I that I developed a very simply graphic language to depict them - the triangular top (or bottom), a cylindrical body and a cross-hatched superstructure beneath. They're not exactly complicated to draw.

When Neil Cohn first starts to discuss schema in The Visual Language of Comics (Cohn 2013: 10) it is in reference to the authorship of characters within drawing, notably the "graphic structure[s]" that allow us to recognise and create forms. Cohn's approach to comic books' visual language is to use the grammatical structure of written language to explore the morphology of drawing systems in sequential imagery. He describes morphology as the study of "units of meanings manifested in a modality" (Cohn 2013: 23), and seeks to explore how these can be seen as visual units "stored in people's memory" (Cohn 2013: 24). Cohn expands on this by using what lexicographers and grammatologists call open- and closed-class items. Andrew Carnie tells us that "parts of speech that allow new members are said to be open class. Those that don't (or where coinages are very rare) are closed class" (Carnie 2013). Cohn argues that "most .. drawings are open-class items" as they can be added to easily through invention, adaptation, stylistic shifts et al. But in comic books, he states that a closed class exists in the form of speech bubbles and motion blurs, for example.

Cohn's work, and Simon Grennan's further exploration (and critique) of these ideas leads me to question the schema within my own modality. As an illustrator, much of my work is commissioned based on an existing portfolio which demonstrates a style. Though the content of these illustrations changes at a perceptual level (as I draw a wide variety of things) the way in which I make a mark is, essentially, the same. Grennan, in A Theory of Narrative Drawing describes the making of a mark as a goal-oriented drawing where the goal is twofold: to make a mark (thus making the drawing 'complete') and to use that mark to depict my intention of showing (thus, also, making the drawing 'complete'). He says that the drawer "selects from a number of possible .. actions" (Grennan 2018: 2) which can combine into a schemata of sorts, akin to syntactical choice in constructing a meaningful sentence; or, those actions may not combine into a meaningful whole, but be simply a set of drawn marks. He presents the difference between drawing as action, and that action of drawing resulting in depiction (2018: 8). There are activities and there are goals. They don't always overlap. Sometimes the same activity achieves the same goal - for instance, when the act of making a type of mark depicts the same thing; Cohn's schema shows a compelling diagram of "fluency" in the storage of vast, complex schemata, and a diagram show comic artist Erik Larsen's combination of schemata form a distinctive, systematic lexicon of hands, noses, forearms and jaws (Cohn 2013: 29). But there are times, says Grennan, where the same marks are made to achieve "very different goals" (Grennan 2018: 9); I sometimes copy and paste a mark made for the edge of someone's face in a line drawing to become a part of a foot, which I suspect is not making the same mark, but recognising that an activity designed for one goal can effectively be bastardised for another purpose elsewhere. I do this a LOT when I am working on Photoshop.

I've been reading Cohn and Grennan concurrently, and trying to come to terms with this idea. My proposal, which feels like a lifetime ago, talked of frames at the edges of so-called worlds. In that version of what I am now doing, the frame offered a way of unboundarying the drawn-world; my diversions into the function of that drawing led me to Deleuze and Guattari's notion of the diagram, and my understanding of world-building in and around texts started to veer toward Genette's paratext. But I had been overlooking narrative-drawing in favour of other structural modalities. Cohn's approach to schema connects to my own idea of practice, to an extent; that said, I rarely repeat Cohn's schemata within my own work - possibly because I don't often draw sequential narratives. Cohn's work led me to [re-]read aspects of Piaget's theory of cognitive development. Schemas, says Piaget, "are the basic building blocks of .. cognitive models, and enable us to form a mental representation of the world" (Piaget 1952 in McLeod 2018). Stored patterns of behaviour are what Cohn uses to attempt a structural understanding of comics' visual language, because the way drawings are made resembles the way that we structure language. But Grennan counters this because of the uniqueness of visual depiction: we not only see the depiction, but also the "marks that constitute the depiction" (Grennan 2017).

Simon Grennan uses the term 'seeing-in' which he borrows from Richard Wolheim (Wolheim in Grennan 2018: 25). Referring to Woldheim's 'seeing-in', Tamarin Norwood describes it as "the difficult relationship between surface and image" (Norwood 2015). Quoting Woldheim, "when seeing-in occurs, two things happen: I am visually aware of the surface I look at, and I discern something standing out in front of, or (in certain cases) receding behind, something else. […]". Grennan has a number of issues with Cohn's morphology; principally, that the way we topologically and proximally understand the syntactical structures of language is very different to the way we understand visual signs. An image of a thing can only depict the thing but what, in the image, do we class as depiction? Grennan states that, whilst there is some degree of "'repleteness' in depictions" as there might be within a sentence, where we can count lexical items (Grennan 2017), the way in which we understand and experience the depiction makes its repleteness indefinable. "There is only the depiction and its objects and nothing else", he states. But the associative powers of visual signs are instrumental, not only in the way we deconstruct a 'single' depiction, but even more so when we observe them in a sequence. Switch the order of a sentence structure, says Grennan, and its meaning becomes incoherent; doing the same to a sequence of depicted images may not alter its coherence.

At this still-early point in my research, I am not only trying to assess my own practice (which is clearly goal-oriented in the sense of Grennan's depiction, as I am often trying to render a series of visual codes into a coherent, interpretivistic system of signs that enhance the understanding of accompanying linguistic material) but I am also mark-making based on schematic uses of marks which, through the physicality of how I move a pen across paper, look like the drawings that I make (or, should I say, Wesley makes - but the goal-orientation of a style adopted by an alter-ego intentionally created in order to explore a style is a whole other thing). My research question has recently been hammered into shape. I currently am waiting for my AfR form to be returned from the CRC, and I expect there to be a series of recommendations as to what my project seeks to achieve, how it will do that and why it is necessary.. but I feel most comfortable with the question as it now appears:

"What can an interface between storyworld theory and narrative drawing tell us about the minimum necessary conditions for worldbuilding and storytelling?"

I like the word interface in this form of the question; Ian Hague suggested this. It also contains the word I am currently most excited about - 'minimum'. Schema exist, according to Piaget, in order for us to construct world views, or global mental models. Though I am wary of Cohn's morphological interface between words and images (mainly because Simon Grennan's critique is so damning), the word schema has suddenly entered my lexicon in looking for something new, here, in the way a world is drawn-as-story. Something minimal.

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Carnie, A. (2013) Syntax A Generative Introduction.Third Edition. UK: Wiley-Blackwell

Cohn, N. (2013) The Visual Language of Comics. UK: Bloomsbury

Grennan, S. (2019) 'Drawing's stories: an introduction to drawing and narrative.' Conference: Comics Forum 2019. Leeds City Library. 8th November 2019.

Grennan, S. (2018) A Theory of Narrative Drawing. UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

Grennan, S. (2017) Neil Cohn's 'visual language theory contradicted by experience of the iconic sign. Conference: The International Conference of Graphic Novels, Bandes Dessinées and Comic. University of Dundee. June 2017.

Hills, D. (2020). Review of Van Gerwen, R. (ed.) Richard Wollheim on the Art of Painting: Art as Representation and Expression Cambridge University Press, 2001. Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. Available at: https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/richard-wollheim-on-the-art-of-painting-art-as-representation-and-expression-2/ [Accessed 24 Jan. 2020].

McLeod, S. A. (2018, June 06). Jean Piaget's theory of cognitive development. Simply Psychology. https://www.simplypsychology.org/piaget.html

Norwood, T. (2013). Wollheim: seeing-in and twofoldness - Dr Tamarin Norwood. [online] Available at: http://www.tamarinnorwood.co.uk/seeing-in/ [Accessed 24 Jan. 2020].

Drawings from Nous Les Arbes | 2019 | Exhibition / Fondation Cartier: Paris

Something I am becoming more aware of is the way in which my explanation of this research inquiry is interpreted by others. A common question asked, once doctoral study is mentioned in conversation, is "what's it about?". I have a ~15 second version, a one-minute version, and a walking-to-a-distant-landmark version. Also, it is edited according to the person to whom I present the inquiry. HC says I should record the responses of these disparate parties and begin to collate them as part of the inquiry. Yesterday she made this suggestion again: we have friends visiting from France, and the subject of research came up.

I met Jerome Heno in 2000, on the second year of our BA in Graphic Design, Illustration and New Media. We're both educators, makers and wallowers. Yesterday morning he asked about my PhD proposal, and I explained it as we walked down the hill, giving me a solid 6 or 7 minutes to verbally present my ever-shifting conceptual map. Gray & Malins state that a concept map "allows us to develop an overview of the topic.. applying critical criteria and methods" to "develop a sound understanding" of the many concepts, theoretical frameworks and fireworked ideas whipping and whizzing around in the loosely boundaried research framework (Gray & Malins 2004: 41). Later that evening, he presented "two things I think might be interesting to you for your PhD" (Heno, J. 2019):

One was, quite simply, "Proust". The second was the strangler fig.

(Any mention of Proust takes me, aptly, to two places; one is a piece I produced for the Daily Telegraph in 2013 and the second to a conversation I had with an MA student hanging her final show in 2016; she was eating a packet of madeleines. She said, unprompted, eating, and with no knowledge of À la recherche du temps perdu, "I will never forget this time in my life".)

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(Roughs and captions to art editor regarding a piece on Marcel Proust, 2013)

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This week I learned of Edward Mendelson's 1976 coinage of the term 'Encyclopedic Novel'. In my quest to discover if, indeed, an encyclopedia has been used as a narrative in graphic novels or comic-book form (still nothing..), I was momentarily alarmed to discover that encyclopedic fiction existed ("In searching for information, be prepared to be simultaneously depressed and excited" [ Gray & Malins 2004: 43] ) before realising that it did not refer to what I am currently hypothesizing. Mendelson uses the term encyclopedic narrative as a way of defining a genre "of central importance" to the Western canon, stating that it has not been fully recognised. Encompassing Dante, Joyce, Cervantes, Melville, Faust, Rabelais and the contemporaneous publication of Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow in 1973, Mendelson seeks to categorise the production of 'encyclopedic authors' who utilises all the styles, lingustic range, social purview of 'his' state or nation to produce texts of such vastness that they come to define the nation itself (Mendelson 1976). That these seven early members of Mendelson's Encyclopedic Narrators produced some of the heaviest books known is no coincidence; their aim was, Mendelson tells us, to "imitate epics" whilst writing about the "ordinary present-day world" instead of a chivalric history (ibid). Jerome Heno explained that he is reading an abridged, illustrated version of Joyce's Ulysses to his daughter, who frequently complains that the narrative world expands away from the action of Bloom or Dedalus, digressing into strange, perpendicular, and seemingly disconnected worlds.

In Sideris's The Encyclopedic Concept in the Web Era (2006), he states that the reader should expect the hypertext-based knowledge catalogue to be "easily navigable and searchable, that is to say, with clear structure, unambiguous instructions and abundant orientation facilities." Not so, Ulysses; a comic-artist called Robert Berry is undertaking / undertook a graphic-novel adaptation of Ulysses, utilising digital forms of comic-making to 'layer' meanings beneath the comic-page and allow an indexible, exploratory background to the complex hypotext (Ulysses Seen, 2009–). He states that "unlike a print or film adaptation, our digital page is capable of leading readers inside the text to further explanation. You can see a word balloon containing a foreign language, tap it on your iPad and get a pop-up translation without leaving the page" (Murphy 2014). It's not entirely clear where Berry is in the process of making his encyclopedic opus; after all, he set out to explain an epic as opposed to "imitat[e]" one. "Can you think of a more famous modern novel where new readers need as much help as they do in Ulysses?", asks Berry (ibid).

Mendelson notes that encyclopedic novels originate as products, wherein aspects of "the world's knowledge" in that timeframe are contained and compressed, forming a "full range" of a nation's cultural knowledge through synecdoche and a multiplicity of perspectives. They come from the form of epics in terms of structures, but have abandoned the subject matter (Mendelson 1976).

So to the strangler fig. When considering why Jerome had connected my proposal to this strange quirk of nature, it became clear that my description of a paratext had prompted his analogy. I had suggested the setting of a fiction within a paratextual outline, explaining how a hypertext might, for Genette, feed off the core hypotext. Until this point, the similarity between paratext and parasite had not occurred. Para is latin for "beside" or "by"; the term parasite comes from the Greek parasitos meaning to eat at the table of another (Liddell and Scott 1940). The strangler fig has a growth mechanism through which it envelopes a host tree, having by necessity adapted to seeking light in dark forests; it uses the tree to climb toward sunlight. Structurally, it surrounds the tree, and in some cases the host will die, leaving the strangler fig "columnal", surrounding a hollow space where once stood its source of life (Wikipedia 2019).

Can a paratext act in the same way? The encyclopedic novel seeks to contain all which is known in the culture from which it originates, which is a form of "sitting beside" knowledge; by possessing that within the text, Joyce et al form gigantic hypotexts, yet these are in a way parasitic: they feed off the society whose "wider expanses of national and mythical history" (Mendelson 1976) supply vast contexts, whilst using myriad structural, linguistic and narrative codes and become, as Mendelson has it, a "literary monument", noting that they are neither "attractive or comfortable" (ibid).

Jakub Zdebik uses the notion of the rhizome in Deleuze and the Diagram (Zdebik 2014: 29) to describe Proust's Recherche as a work that grows "denser from the inside", comparing it to the encyclopedia. It is "dense and non-hierarchical", citing Italo Calvino's idea that Recherche is an "open" system (ibid). Zdebik returns to the idea of a map (2014: 32), stating that the encyclopedia functions (for the "philosopher") as a "map of the world", allowing "great elevation" and multiple perceptions of worlds; a map can render a great distance the size of a thumb, but one might stand in the streets of Paris and not "catch a glimpse of another world" (ibid) [note 'Mobius Strip' Paris in roughs for Proust [2.], above). Worlds here are offered as canons of knowledge: arts & science; "fulcrums" between time and space, including a "full account" of technological, scientific, geological and mathematical pluriversality (Mendelson 1976). Zdebik reminds us that Deleuze and Guattari (in A Thousand Plateaus) compare the tree against the rhizome; a tree is hierarchical and stable, whereas the rhizome is seen as "aleatory", a nimble, "multidimensional" action through time, space and knowledge.

Luc Herman and Petrus Van Ewijk seem to support this rhizomatic approach to knowledge; an "all-encompassing" system of ordered knowledge would "ignore the fact that reality's complexity prohibits it from being captured completely" (2009). They see the "totalization" of encyclopedic knowledge as illusory. Proust seemed, according to Zdebik and Calvino, unable to totalize knowledge and perhaps completely aware of this. Berry seems to believe Ulysses achieved this, but is borderline unreadable in any century. Something about the rhizome appeals to me, but it is perhaps the strangler fig with which I feel most connected narratively; its seeds begin in the middle of the tree, seeking the light as it moves upwards whilst simultaneously reaching down to establish the roots that may, eventually, destroy the very thing it requires to gain stability. If that ain't my research process to date then I don't know what is.

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Herman, L. and Van Ewijk, P. (2009). Gravity's Encyclopedia Revisited: The Illusion of a Totalizing System in Gravity's Rainbow. English Studies 90(2):167-179


Jackson, P. (2013). "RE: Marcel." Email to Wood, G. 11th November 2013.

Liddell, H. G., and Scott, R. (1940). A Greek-English Lexicon. revised and augmented throughout by Sir Henry Stuart Jones. with the assistance of. Roderick McKenzie. Oxford. Clarendon Press.


Mendelson, E., (1976). "Encyclopedic Narrative: From Dante to Pynchon". MLN. 91 (6): 1267–1275

Murphy, T. (2014). “Comics Become the Purest Language for Recounting Memory”: We Celebrate Bloomsday with Ulysses “Seen” Creator Rob Berry – Broken Frontier. [online] Broken Frontier. Available at: http://www.brokenfrontier.com/rob-berry-interview-ulysses-seen-james-joyce-bloomsday-graphic-novel/ [Accessed 3 Nov. 2019].  ‌

Wikipedia Contributors (2019). Strangler fig. [online] Wikipedia. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strangler_fig#/media/File:Strangler_fig_inside.jpg [Accessed 3 Nov. 2019].  ‌

Sidderis, A. (2006). The Encyclopedic Concept in the Web Era. The 7th International Symposium on Virtual Reality, Archaeology and Cultural Heritage VAST. M. Joannides, D. Arnold. F Nicco/ucci, K. Mania (eds).

Anything that Shane Carruth says in reference to Primer (2004) is almost too smart to comprehend. In addressing its time-dimensions in Village Voice in 2004, Carruth refers to Feynman's spatio-temporal diagrams, regarding them as the same process whether you view it forward or backward. "..when you walk to the door [in movie-time and -space] you have to walk every moment between here and there, so it seems that, if you’re moving through time backwards, you should have to pass through each moment back to get there. That would be the price you pay. " He perhaps refers here to the risks of having been through time already; Primer examines the dangers inherent to friendships when external factors come into play - in this case, time-travel and its moral repercussions - and how a "feedback loop" can create temporal paradoxes that don't necessarily break the universe. "Whatever’s going to break is probably going to be you" (ibid).

Notebook page (2019) Red diagram is based on Primer diagram (2006) by WIlliam Lee0 / Wikipedia.

The notion of time, space, hypertext, web, encyclopediae and world-theory are starting to align. Sergio Cicconi refers me to Borges' Book of Sand (1975) as "a volume of incalculable pages, an inconceivable and nightmarish object - 'an obscene thing that defames and corrupts reality'" (Cicconi 1999). Primer, for me, is similarly 'corrupt', and not only through its distortion of time and reality; it is inconceivably massive, pushing at the edges of comprehension, earning a reputation as a challenging watch. Roger Ebert calls it "maddening [and] fascinating", and delights in its belief in its audience's intelligence (Ebert 2004). I found Cicconi's article Hypertextuality at the bottom of one of those early-internet indices of text and diagrams; the Encyclopedia of Knowledge Organization. Founded in 1989, its principle aim is to "promote research, development and applications of knowledge organization systems that advance the philosophical, psychological and semantic approaches for ordering knowledge" with a key focus on the development of the online encyclopedia, which it, itself, is (ISKO 2019).

It has a Borgesian entry on Hypertext written by Riccardo Ridi, a professor of library and information science at Ca' Foscari University in Venice and a moral philosophy graduate (Ridi 2013). Hypertext is, according to Ridi,  "multilinear, granular, interactive, integrable and multimedia ... describable with graph theory and composed of several information units (nodes) interconnected by links that users can freely and indefinitely cover by following a plurality of possible different paths" (ibid). Pluriverses, again. The top diagram in the illustration above was an attempt to convey some of Ridi's ideas regarding the nodal interconnection between hypertexts and a hypotext (or in this case, a 'canon' text). Ridi cites Maurizio Zani in determining that hypertext is mostly reliant on the notion of granularity; "smaller self-contained parts still making sense.. still usable". This of course depends on the sophistication of the reader; Scheneider and Smoliar use Barthes' Elements of Semiology (1973) to position the active behaviour of a reader in making meaning through syntagmatic and associative sign-signifier relationships within hypertexts (Scheneider and Smoliar 1997). Hypertext isn't about enhancing writing, but allows a "brave new world" to emerge for a reader as their intellectual power is enhanced through these incalcuable, infinite nodes of knowledge. They note that the presence of a "link" in hypertext (often underline and coloured blue) "introduce complications that are generally not associated with other signs", not even the associative sign-relationships present in a dictionary (ibid). The link, as signifier, infers movement; that movement's relevance, however, remains unknown until the link is clicked, and the comprehension of that knowledge will (or will not) be understood until the journey is made. Umberto Eco, they note, frames this as "inferential walks" (Eco 1979 in Scheneider and Smoliar 1997) with the reader "always actively hypothesizing" (ibid).

Primer puts a pressure on the viewer to actively hypothesize. The constant need to understand how time and space are being manipulated, and that understanding being seemingly intangible - a "puzzle film that will leave you wondering about paradoxes, loopholes, loose ends, events without explanation, chronologies that don't seem to fit" (Ebert 2004) - certainly requires the viewer to question what, where, when and how the plot even works. When is narrative possible when a diagram is almost necessary to help us understand what is about to happening, or has already will happen, or happened to us in six hours' time?

So, the red diagram above was drawn hastily after a reading of several notions on hypertext (both Ted Nelson's 1965 definition and Genette's semiotic approach) and a consideration of how this might intersect with Carruth's idea of temporal activity. I wondered again about how an encyclopedia is time frozen, time-in-motion and time-going backward, and how a reader's encounter with an encyclopedia entry might transform their knowledge of a storyworld (or a canon) so that, when they return to that entry, it is no longer the same. Of course, in reality, that entry will remain fixed until it is edited (a process that can take place far faster and far easier on Wikipedia - hence the philosophical and ethical approaches of Ridi to organising information) but its meaning is unfixable; Barthes assures us of that (setting texts against texts "in such a way as never to rest on any one of them" [Barthes 1997]). But despite the ethical concerns of transforming the encyclopedia as it is read, I imagine that Diderot and D'Alembert might have truly enjoyed the knowledge-creation of web encyclopediae; labyrinthine, infinite, but incredibly author-able. My diagram considers the encyclopedia as time-slipping narrative; what if, when we leave the world of A1 (a single entry) to visit referent A2, our possible return to world A1 becomes impossible because the act of reading A2 has rendered A1 impossible; it becomes locked up in a feedback loop, and we become an alternative world in our understanding of what is happening. I need to look at more readerly- and writerly-diagrams.

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Barthes, R. 1973. Elements of Semiology, A. Lavers and C. Smith, translators, New York: Hill and Wang.

Cicconi, Sergio. 1999. “Hypertextuality”. In Mediapolis: aspects of texts, hypertexts, and multimedia communication (21-43), edited by Sam Inkinen. Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter. Also available at http://www.cisenet.com/cisenet/writing/essays/Hypertextuality.pdf.

Ebert, R. (2004). Primer movie review & film summary (2004) | Roger Ebert. [online] Rogerebert.com. Available at: https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/primer-2004 [Accessed 26 Oct. 2019].‌

International Society for Knowledge Organization [ISKO] (2018). [online] International Society for Knowledge Organization. Available at: https://www.isko.org/index.php [Accessed 26 Oct. 2019].‌

Lim, D. (2004). A Primer Primer. [online] Villagevoice.com. Available at: https://www.villagevoice.com/2004/10/05/a-primer-primer/ [Accessed 26 Oct. 2019].‌

Ridi, R. (2013). Hypertext (IEKO). [online] Isko.org. Available at: https://www.isko.org/cyclo/hypertext [Accessed 26 Oct. 2019].‌

Schneider, T. and Smolia, S. W., (1997). Signs, Links, and the Semiotics of Hypertext. 1st International Workshop on Computational Semiotics.

Deleuze, in asking what constitutes a diagram, states that it is a "map of relations between forces" (Deleuze and Hand, 2014). He goes on to speculate that its powers pass through "every point.. or rather in every relation from one point to another" (ibid). I've thought less about space-time this past week, and focused more on the ideas I explored last week on the notion of the diagram and how this may connect back to my practice, my broader inquiry, and the form of the completed works. It's becoming clearer that the integration of my practice is going to function by way of illustration.

Eye diagram | Sketchbook | 2017

Stephanie Black outlines how illustration as an "emerging field of research" may "contribute to the transition between paradigms through its ambitious approach to image–text relationship", noting that practitoners and writers in the field describe illustration practice as "illuminating and therefore operational" (Black 2014, my emphasis). The idea of operational drawing, for me, connects back to the illustrated encyclopedia of Diderot. Jakob Zdebik uses words like "fluid" or "unstable" to capture the elusive transition between the idea of a thing and the thing-as-formed - the notion of a structure as well as the plan for that structure (Zdebik 2014). I cannot help but think of Bruner's expansion on the fabula and syuzhet (Propp, Shklovsky, Derrida et al); for Bruner, the fabula should be “as loose fitting a constraint as we can manage concerning what a story must ‘be’ to be a story” with the syuzhet acting as a deliberately authoral set of choices in which to join together single elements of plot.

As an extradiegetic feature of storyworlds, an encyclopedia offers the opportunity to construct an indexible narrative framework or frameworks. The Cambridge Dictionary offers this definition: a book or set of books containing many articles arranged in alphabetical order that deal either with the whole of human knowledge or with a particular part of it (Cambridge Dictionary 2019). In his 2011 introduction to Paul Ricoeur's Time and Narrative, William C. Dowling cites Aristotle's idea of an "ordinary life.. made up of actions and events that take place in meaningless succession". Dowling then recalls E.M. Forster: narrative is "one thing because of another"; not only a succession of events, but a causal sequence. But then, the narrator's role could be said to be that of organiser; in the case of an encyclopedia, it could be a metaleptic intruder inside the existing world. It could be someone who directs how a core text is read, performing a role akin to Gerard Genette's allographic paratext; the margins of a storyworld where meanings can be explored and compounded (Mirenayat and Soofastaei 2015). 

Zdebik describes Encyclopédie as a mission to "emancipat[e] knowledge" during the Enlightenment (Zdebik 2014). Cambridge Dictionary's definition (above), its provenance notwithstanding, is as concise a description as one could offer; it doesn't mention truth, which seems [to me] a strange omission. Diderot and d'Alembert's hope for their Encyclopédie is "a kind of map of the world", which David S. Ferris explores in length in Post-modern Interdisciplinarity: Kant, Diderot and the Encyclopedic Project (2003). Diderot and d'Alembert's desire is for the Encyclopédie to maintain "one point of view" (D'Alembert 1751: 99) but they admit that it becomes a "tortuous path" (Ferris 2003), a labyrinth which despite aiming to contain all knowledge in the smallest space, "becomes a space where knowledge is siphoned... reaching outside its parameters ... spilling out of the boundaries configuring a site" (Zdebik 2014). Knowledge, here, seems pluralistic; an epistemological framework centred on a singular world-idea, but I want to think about how these rhizomatic threads of possible idea-worlds might escape the boundary of the still-framed labyrinthine encyclopedia.

Can I make an encyclopedia? And what knowledge would, or should, it contain? If I follow Bruner's possible worlds, then I might suggest that an encyclopedia could be a fabula of a storyworld; the loose-fitting constraints that orbit the central, structural world. But here's the best thing: an encyclopedia could be argued - and constructed ("a series of books" - Cambridge 2019) - to exemplify space-time; all events in a narrative framework, exploding at once in a simulatenous happening. I sometimes read Wikipedia entries about a movie whilst I am sitting watching that movie. I am intruding on the telling of the story by pausing, moving the frame aside so I can make the Wiki window larger; I am reading a paratext, an intertext, I am perusing epitexts (Genette et al) and behaving metatextually. I am exploring the frame within the frame on a visual- and text-based level, possibly considering alternatives to the current temporally-fixed syuzhet provided by the writer, cast and crew; my stimulated imagination jumps ahead, amid tales of alternate endings and deleted scenes. Best of all, I could even edit that Wikipedia article whilst I am immersed inside the world(s) of the story, or comment on clips on Youtube. I could tweet at the actors and directors, or begin typing my own fan fiction in TextEdit.

At our supervisory meeting, Nina pressed the idea of what I am trying to find out, and how I might envision the form of the completed artifact. I ambushed Ian earlier this week and asked if he knew of a comic book that takes the form of an encyclopedia; though I am well aware he is not omniscient, he said he couldn't think of one; perhaps because it would be difficult to "make narrative work" in such a format. Well, that sounds like new knowledge, a fundamentally experimental, methodological pursuit. Two questions emerged (amongst many others!) in our meeting: "what happens when narrative is in two places at once?" and "when is narrative possible". The latter, I think, refers to the "loosest possible constraints" of Bruner. The first, to quantum mechanics, choose-your-own-adventures and the as-yet unread The City and the City by Meiville. Both feel answerable in the paratext(?) of the omniscient encyclopedia. I have a quote somewhere (Parsons, I think, on MA Narrative Environment's own Wiki) that explores how an encyclopedia might intrude upon a narrative; in discussing Sherlock Holmes, they state that whilst the encyclopedia is comprehensive to the reader about that world, nobody within that world has access to the encyclopedia. So not everyone in the storyworld knows that Holmes lives at 221B Baker St., for instance. And nobody within the world knows all that is knowable within that world; not even Holmes himself. But we can. And we could give Holmes a copy.

Sherlock Holmes ideas page | Sketchbook | 2017

There's something wonderfully Brechtian about this; it renders an already 'epic' storyworld 'frame-able' but then immediately suggests a way in which that frame can be broken. It connects me back to a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode (Elementary, Dear Data) in which an all-knowing artificially-intelligent digital projection of Professor James Moriarty escapes the confines of 'his' programming to navigate and understand the highly-complex world of 24th-century space travel (Roddenberry et al 1988). His first task: to find out from the computer what the hell's going on. And in doing so, one imagines, to have consumed Conan-Doyle's entire canon, as well as the countless analyses, reprints, forewords and re-tellings of Holmes that came afterward - its paratexts and metatexts, if you will. And, but for the ephemera and media references to Holmes that inevitably littered my own childhood, this episode of Star Trek was my first real introduction to the storyworld of Sherlock Holmes, to the extent that, when I quote Conan Doyle, I am often recalling it from episodes of a science-fiction television show written a century later.

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Cambridge.org. (2019). ENCYCLOPEDIA, Cambridge English Dictionary. [online] Available at: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/encyclopedia [Accessed 21 Mar. 2019].

Black, S. (2014). Illumination through illustration: Research methods and authorial practice, Journal of Illustration vol. 1 issue 2.

D’Alembert, Jean Le Rond. Discours preliminaire des editeurs de 1751. Ed. Martine Groult. Paris: Champion, 1999.



D’Alembert, Jean Le Rond, and Diderot, Denis. Encyclopédie. In Diderot, Oeuvres Complètes, vols. 5–8.

Deleuze, G., and Hand. S. (2014). Foucault. London: Bloomsbury. 



Dowling, W. C., (2011). RICOEUR ON TIME AND NARRATIVE: An Introduction to Temps et récit. USA: University of Notre Dame Press.



Mirenayat, S.A. and Soofastaei, E. (2015). Gerard Genette and the Categorization of Textual Transcendence. Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences, [online] 6(5). Available at: https://www.mcser.org/journal/index.php/mjss/article/viewFile/7520/7202 [Accessed 23 Oct. 2019].‌



Roddenberry, G., Brian Alan Lane and Arthur Conan Doyle (1988). Elementary, Dear Data. Star Trek: The Next Generation. IMDb. Available at: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0708704/ [Accessed 23 Oct. 2019].



Zdebik, J. (2014). Deleuze and the diagram : aesthetic threads in visual organization. London: Bloomsbury Academic.