Exploring graphic pathographies constructionA multimodal analysis

Résumé

Recently, different social media platforms and websites communicate medical information via short comics or cartoons. These comics present medical experiences from two different perspectives. The first from a medical professional¿s viewpoint and the second from a patient¿s viewpoint. Specifically, the second viewpoint centers around personal medical experiences. These experiences are shared through graphic memoirs or graphic pathographies (Williams 2014; Trabado Cabado 2020). They are long visual narratives that explore different aspects of living with a medical condition. Subsequently, the study analyzes textual and visual elements that communicate medical information about different aspects of a medical condition such as the symptoms, medical treatment, medical procedure, and side effects. Moreover, we center on five objectives: 1) to identify specific technical and medical knowledge communicated in a predetermined graphic novel corpus; 2) to identify visual elements (text, image, color, panel transition, word-picture combination, narrative plot, a point of view, etc.) used to represent this knowledge; 3) to document, analyze, and interpret how readers decipher these resources and what they understand from them; 4) to discover readers¿ basic reading practices, such as seeking additional information, consulting external resources that aid or contribute to their reading process, and interacting with graphic pathographies, and 5) to contextualize medical graphic narratives and their role in health literacy or knowledge and social practices concerning an illness. Furthermore, we design the project in track with a New Literacy Studies framework in combination with comics narratology ( Street 2003; Cassany 2009; Gee 1999; Barton and Hamilton 2012; Mikkonen 2017). The study consists of two stages: first, we created a corpus of 17 graphic pathographies in four languages: English, Spanish, Catalan, and French, that covered various medical conditions such as autism, bipolar disorder, cancer, and Crohn¿s disease. We continued, to analyze the graphic pathographies under a predetermined coding system. However, we noted emerging themes that we later added to the coding system. Secondly, we conducted semi-structured interviews to learn about the participants' reading habits. We learned that different visual and textual elements combinations helped them understand the reading packets we created. Finally, the results suggest that visual elements communicate different aspects of medical experiences. Specifically, there are shifts between the image and text across specific narrative sequences that present detailed information about a medical procedure, treatment, or its side effects.