As I read Francesca Petronio’s thesis Raised on TV: A Queer Teen’s Guide to Syndicated Sexualities in light of the readings for this week and the interplay between form and content, I found myself wishing it played a little more with format. The introduction describes it as “a play on the by-now retrograde concept of a TV Guide”, but other than a more conversational tone (“these kids just love to clap,” she remarks in a discussion of a satirically queer-positive community in Faking It) it hews pretty close to a traditional academic thesis. The introduction is followed by chapters on the three television shows she’s chosen as her focus, interspersed with captioned screencaps. There’s a title page, an acknowledgments section, etc., exactly as you would expect from any other graduate thesis.

I can’t help but wonder what the thesis might be able to say through juxtaposition and visuals were it to mimic a TV Guide in other ways. Petronio uses a three-pronged Media Content Analysis approach that she attributes to Caitlin Campisini, examining her subjects in regard to the political economy of the networks creating them, the content of the shows themselves, and the reaction of news media and online fandom. But she works through those linearly, and all in the same manner: summarizing, with citations, then analyzing. What might it look like to place news headlines or (screencapped or otherwise captured) twitter threads about queer content in these shows across from the summaries of the event, mimicking advertisements in a retro TV guide? What would it do to Petronio’s analysis if it were read in the linear-yet-simultaneous way that Nick Sousanis highlights in his talk on dissertations and academic work in comics form? How would that change the decisions she made about what to place with what on which page or two-page spread?

Or, to break out of the TV Guide conceit, what would the same dissertation look like in video form? The screencaps in Petronio’s thesis are attempting to show understated or subtextual chemistry, a kind of casual queerness outside of specific or “known” indicators. But the very stillness of her images is pinning that down to a specific moment, ready to be made into a new, knowable sign. Presenting the same work in video format could preserve the original fluidity of motion, emotion, and interaction, and through it, the fluidity of identity that Petronio is examining and advocating for.

I analyzed “Beyond the Vale: Visualizing Slavery in Craven County, North Carolina” by Marissa Kinsey. Ms. Kinsey, using historical data on the enslaved population of the county during the antebellum period, created pie charts, bar graphs, and other charts that illustrated and compared various facets of slave-life in the county at the time of the 1860 Census.

            The form of the project impacts the audience it serves in very meaningful and specific ways. The visual representations, by displaying in a visual manner stark contrasts, lay bare the brutality that was chattel slavery. In a bar graph that depicts the numbers of slaves owned per slave master vs. the number of dwellings provided, the blue bars depicting the number of slaves dwarfs the red bars that depict the number of dwellings provided, allowing viewers to imagine the type of cramped and unlivable types of living situations many slaves had to endure. In a bar graph depicting the number of slaves owned by each slave-owner, we see visually that 4 slave-owners owned more slaves than about 18 other slave-owners combined, emphasizing the fact that humans were viewed as mere property to be purchased to the most affluent purchaser. Another web-chart shows the interconnectedness of slaveholding families with not only each other, but of non-slaveholding families through intermarriage, showing perhaps visual proof of how widespread support for the peculiar institution was maintained.

            What these visual representations do for the meaning of the project is provide a foundation, a visceral one at that, for the empirical truths of slave life in the county at that particular time. Ms. Kinsey sought to provide a more balanced view of the truth about slave life in the county with the use of hard data to balance out the biased local narratives that have historically received primacy. Though hard data enables Ms. Kinsey’s bar graphs and pie charts to exist, they provide the reader with not only the truth about slave life but also a new emotional understanding of its prominence and inhumanity.