Comics have long been a focus of scholarly inquiry. In recent years, this interest has taken a methodological turn, with scholars integrating comics creation into the research process itself. In this article, the authors begin to define and document this emerging, interdisciplinary field of methodological practice. They lay out key affordances that comics offers researchers across the disciplines, arguing that certain characteristics—multimodality, blending of sequential and simultaneous communication, emphasis on creator voice—afford powerful tools for inquiry. The authors finish by offering some questions and challenges for the field as it matures.

Drawing from the research methods of three distinct literacy studies, in this piece, we highlight the visualisation approaches integral to our enquiry processes as researchers working to make sense of literacy and learning. We aim to encourage, provoke even, a conversation about visualisation processes in literacy research by sharing the individualised ways in which we (1) leaned on metaphors and visual aspects of musical notation to uncover new insights into the social nature of composing, (2) created comics shaped by particular aesthetic choices that influenced enquiry and meaning-making, and (3) utilised insights gained from dynamic visualisations of data to see nonlinear patterns of writing development. With the descriptions of these studies and their methods as samples, we argue for a shift in focus from visualisation as an end product of analysis to an additional focus on the process of visualising as analysis.

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