29 September 2026 to 3 October 2026
OeAW Main Seat
Europe/Vienna timezone

The Ninth Art in Lexicography: The Power of Comic Strips

1 Oct 2026, 17:00
30m
01 | Johannessaal (01 | Johannessaal, OeAW Main Seat, 1st floor)

01 | Johannessaal

01 | Johannessaal, OeAW Main Seat, 1st floor

Austrian Academy of Sciences Dr. Ignaz Seipel-Platz 2 1010 Vienna

Speaker

Gilles-Maurice de Schryver (Ghent University)

Description

This paper presents the background to a book on the visual history of academic lexicography, being a sequence of hundreds of one-page comic strips, created through conversations with LLM chatbots and GenAI image generators, each page representing a major publication in the field. Of course, I knew that this submission would be a gamble: Would a comic version of a conference paper be taken seriously? Well, one extremely positive adjudicator gave it a ‘Strong Accept’, and a more critical one gave it an ‘Accept’. Adjudicator 1 summarised it head-on, writing that it is “an extremely original contribution to the field, as it addresses the impact and outreach of scientific research both within and beyond academia”, while Adjudicator 2 pointed out that it is “untraditional but entertaining, and comic strips could very well be part of lexicography”. In what follows, my original extended abstract is presented first, after which I interact with the feedback left by Adjudicators 1 and 2. No doubt, and again, a very uncommon approach, but times have changed in the era of generative AI.

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