Making The Invisible Visible: Hyperlinked Webcomics As Alternative Points Of Entry To The Digitised Gertrude Bell Archive

Web environments can support non-specialist access to prestigious and complex scholarly archives. We report on the creation and evaluation of webcomics that incorporate hyperlinks, a technological innovation that makes digitised artefacts from the Gertrude Bell Archive visible to learners. This shows readers the need to examine the evidence on which interpretations are based: an issue fundamental to academic researchers and archivists, but that might otherwise be obscured in educational and entertainment media. Moving beyond the established use of digitised archives by academic researchers, we explore wider issues of access and use. Quantitative analytics suggest readers read all pages of the comic and accessed digitised sources. Qualitative feedback and consultation with young people found the hyperlinked webcomics to be credible comics in their own right as well as their value as situated points of entry to archive material. Observed reader behaviour identified opportunities to encourage more structured exploration of the digitised archive.