PhD student Qiuyan Guo will present her research at the Flyover Comics Symposium, which will be held virtually on September 24-25. The symposium is organized by members of the comics studies communities at the University of Illinois, University of North Texas, and Michigan State University.
In her talk, "Gender Representations in Superhero Comics Descriptions," Guo will discuss an ongoing research project.
"My project looks beyond what is inside a comic book issue and focuses on its description given by the publisher, as an indication of both the storyline development and the eye-catching elements selected at the publishing point," she said. "Through bag-of-words strategy in text mining, each description is examined along with the gender appearance in that issue, to explore the relationships among storyline developments, promoting strategies, and character genders."
In addition to comics studies, Guo's research interests include information literacy and readership, fandom, and the information behavior of fans active in online communities. She earned her bachelor's and master's degrees in archive/information resource management from Jilin University in China.