Readers of “The Rotation,” Himmelfarb Library’s blog, have recently enjoyed a number of comics created by Rebecca Kyser, one of Himmelfarb’s reference and instruction librarians. Rebecca has been creating and sharing comics that teach information literacy. In this “Surviving the Stacks” series, characters like Ponzi the shark, the Copycat, and Rebecca herself explain topics like artificial intelligence, plagiarism, and predatory publishing in an entertaining visual format.
If you’re not familiar, here are sample frames from “Why Can’t We Just Google It?” and “Mimic in the Machine: Chat-GPT and A.I.” to give you a taste.
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We sat down with Rebecca to get the scoop on these comics – and a sneak peek at some upcoming topics!
What is the origin story of these comics?
Every year at Himmelfarb, we do an art show, where staff and students alike can submit artwork to showcase at the library. I've done educational comics before and thought it would be a great time to use a skill I don't use as often in my day-to-day librarian work. People liked the Quackery comic, and when I later was put on our social media team, I thought it might be worth producing more so we could have more visuals for the blog. And around five or so strips later, here we are!
How did you become a cartoonist?
I've always been a doodler, but never one for realistic art. In my senior year of college, I had finished my required coursework for my major, but needed to take electives. Lynda Barry, a well-known cartoonist, taught a cartooning class that was really well-regarded for non-art majors so I signed up and quickly fell in love with it. I've drawn on and off since then.
What do you hope readers will get out of these comics?
I think there are a lot of concepts that can be hard to understand due to being either highly technical or just a little dry. The goal of adding comics is to communicate those concepts in a way that is more digestible than solely written text. You can use visual metaphors to better express some ideas and make them stick.
What topics should we look forward to next?
By the time this comes out, the next one on cognitive bias will likely be published. Now that we're in the school year proper, I'm trying to align monthly topics to relate to what folks are doing in class. I also plan to visit copyright more extensively in the future, which people often have lots of questions about.