Sandra and Woo… and science!
Sandra and Woo has caught the attention of the scientific world; it seems like every second “Proceedings of …” article series features a reference to our little comic! … Well, not really ;), but there are now indeed four scientific articles dealing with Sandra and Woo!
The first two articles, in German, were written by linguist Jun.-Prof. Dr. Ulrike Preußer from the University of Duisburg-Essen. Unfortunately, I can’t link them here since they were published in commercial magazines and are not available online. In her articles, she takes an in-depth look at the German versions of our strips #1 A Sly Raccoon and #17 The Forbidden Fruit and how comics can be used by teachers to generate literary interest in grade schoolers. The second article “Das war ein Schock, das mit der Schlange!” about The Forbidden Fruit features several reactions of third and fourth graders after reading the strip. Only one boy, Marius, immediately got the reference to Adam and Eve. Sandro was totally shocked by Woo’s behavior! 😉
- Ulrike Preußer: “Literarisches Lernen am Comic – Zur Visualisierung literarischer Verfahren”, kjl&m forschung.schule.bibliothek, 3/2013, kopaed verlagsgmbh, München.
- Ulrike Preußer: “Das war ein Schock, das mit der Schlange!”, Grundschulunterricht Deutsch, 2/2014, Oldenbourg Schulbuchverlag, München, pp. 16–22.
The other two articles, in English, were written by the computer scientists Philip Buchanan, Bachelor of Engineering at the University of Canterbury, Michael Doggett, Associate Professor at Lund University, and Ramakrishnan Mukundan, Associate Professor at the University of Canterbury. In their articles, they use artwork from Sandra and Woo to present a new automatic algorithm for extracting properties of an individual artist’s style and applying those properties to other drawings.
- Philip Buchanan, Michael Dogget: “Transferring Characteristic Proportions to Modify the Artistic Style of Cartoons”, Proc. Computer Graphics International, Bournemouth, UK, 12–15 June 2012.
- Philip Buchanan, Michael Dogget, R. Mukundan: “Structural Vectorization of Raster Images”, Proc. Image and Vision Computing New Zealand IVCNZ-2012, Dunedin, New Zealand, 26-28 Nov 2012, pp. 319–324.
Proof positive that educational material can be Funny and the desire to get the punchline can segue into a teaching aide.
@ Crestlinger:
Well, there goes my point.
Guess you could say that the comic is so good, it’s almost a science?
Here is an article that proves that Larissa knows Woo is intelligent. 🙂
http://rsfs.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/3/6/20130029.abstract
This is sooo cool! Congratulations, Novil & Powree!! It really says something for your efforts with Sandra & Woo. (Probably does nice things for your ego too. ;-))