Visualizing Medical Data through Graphic Novels In more recent years, there has been a burgeoning interest in graphic novels exploring health and medical themes. Researchers and practitioners across different fields have in particular been drawn to these texts as medical narratives. That is, these texts are ways of conveying the health care experiences of individuals affected by health and medical issues. In this presentation, I wish to explore how graphic novels of health and medicine act as a form of medical data visualization. In this respect, graphic novels of health and medicine provide an alternate and complementary way of conveying health and medical related issues previously represented exclusively through spatial and statistical data. To illustrate this idea, I will compare the spatial and statistical depiction of mental health data with how such information is presented in graphic novels of health and disease. Courtney is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography and Human Environmental Studies, San Francisco State University.
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