Research publication as graphic storytelling

On Sunday, I spent several hours at Barnes and Nobles. I thought a change of place from my apartment would help me concentrate better on paper writing. So I drove down to the Barnes and Nobles bookstore and spent about a half hour trying to find a comfortable and relatively quiet place (what's with people chatting in bookstores anyway?) where I could plug in my laptop. After about an hour of trying to concentrate on work I gave in and decided to sample the rows of delicious-looking, shiny, new books. I found a book that I have been wanting to read for a while now - "Understanding Comics" by Scott McCloud - and was immediately hooked.

McCloud's book is a fascinating journey into the world of comics. Starting with the history of comics and cartooning, he provides explanations for the universal appeal of simple iconic figures in comics. According to him, cartooning is a form of "amplification through simplification". The reason why cartoon characters are usually very simple renderings of the human form is because our "non-visual self-awareness" is very simplistic. Thus, the simpler the cartoons (think stick figures vs. photographs), the more we identify with them.

Since audiences are expected to identify with the cartoons, those are rendered in a simple form. However, no one expects the audience to identify with the background (landscapes) and so those are usually rendered in more detail. For instance, those of you familiar with the Tintin comics must have noticed how Herge drew very iconic characters against very realistic backgrounds. Japanese comics use a style where some characters are simple while others are drawn more realistically (with more details) in order to objectivy them, thus emphasizing their "otherness" from the reader.

I have recently been thinking about what research writing can learn from graphic storytelling, especially the art of writing comics. McCloud says that "Simplifying characters and images towards a purpose can be an effective tool for storytelling in any medium". Storytellling is the most important part of research for there is no point to research unless others are made aware of its results. Whenever research is reported, irrespective of whether the scientist has a positivist or interpretivist view of the nature of knowledge, certain aspects are highlighted more than others to suit the goal of the researcher or to better examine the hypothesis.

For instance, say I conduct interviews to examine whether the deployment of an electronic medical record (EMR) in an emergency department has decreased mortality rate. In the course of my interviews, I may learn something completely unrelated to this goal. I may learn that there has been a rise in malpractice lawsuits brought by patients since the EMR was implemented. EMRs provide better access to data and decisions related to care provision. This access may lead to patients feeling more confident to sue doctors for negative outcomes of care. However, since the goal of the study was to examine mortality rates after the implementation of the EMR, the increase in malpractice suits is a finding I may omit completely from my results. Thus, I will remove certain details from the story (simplification) and highlight certain other details (objectification) to serve my goals. Doesn't this make reporting research a lot like writing comics?

I wonder if the idea of simplifying certain aspects of a story for greater reader identification while rendering other aspects in detail to objectify them can be used to make research writing more effective. There are other tricks I think research writing can borrow from comics such as when to use action-to-action transitions and when to use aspect-to-aspect transitions. More on this later.