Shannon Tien is a newly-minted MA from Concordia’s Department of English. Her Master’s Research Project uses the local comics publisher Drawn and Quarterly as a case study to investigate the relationship between contemporary print culture, the small press, and the cultural legitimization of printed comics as art in Canada.
Authors | Shannon Tien
Articles on Amodern by Shannon Tien
A NETWORK ARCHAEOLOGY OF UNAUTHORIZED COMIC BOOK SCANS
High-quality scanners, cheap storage media, open file formats, peer-to-peer networking and high-bandwidth home connections have all contributed to the unauthorized online availability of magazines and comic books. But what is a scholar to do when confronted with such objects? Is a set of digital comic book scans an “archive” in the traditional sense? How do we study the circulatory practices of comic book scanners when traces of their activities barely exist? And what are the ethics of studying objects that would not exist without copyright infringement, yet are unavailable in most libraries? This paper presents the initial findings of an ongoing research project into the production, circulation and consumption of unauthorized digital comic book scans.