Project description:

This is an interactive comic version of the Nashville debate between Trump & Biden. The main attraction is the comic-book-experience the interactive gives to the reader. It also includes data visualisation elements and a search feature to highlight information.

Impact reached:

It was a novel way to present a transcript of actual proceedings to the audience.

Techniques/technologies used:

We used comicgen.js to render the interactive comic, d3.js for the visualization, Python & Excel to handle data.

What was the hardest part of this project?

Since we were only using the text and not video images as data, it made it harder to determine the emotion of the comic characters (Trump & Biden).  We could have used the transcript from the previous debate to train a classification model, but we just didn’t have the time to build one. So we manually tagged the emotions, and certainly didn’t enjoy that.

What can others learn from this project?

Comics are a fantastic way to reach out to your audiences. There’s scope for comics in news events that expose transcripts – debates, interviews, sports commentary etc. Open source libraries like comicgen help you create both static & interactive comics. MakeBeliefsComix , StoryboardThat & Pixton are other exciting comic libraries you could try. 

Project links:

gramener.com/presidential/nashville-debate