The making of the comic

Introduction: How it all began

Have you ever been to the Historical Reading Room of the Tübingen University Library? And have you wondered why a scene from the Odyssey is depicted there as a mural? If you have, you may have had a thought very similar to one that one of us once had – namely, that the souls of the dead can awaken when we look at what they have left behind for us. Their books, for instance.

And since there is a trend these days not only toward second books but also toward smartphones, we thought it might be a good idea to look for new ways to bring knowledge from times past and from books of old to life and into a contemporary form. (Of course, printed books are still contemporary and hopefully always will be). And so we *almost* had no choice but to make a webcomic that has been optimized for reading on mobile devices, and in which text and image form a harmonious unit, so that reading not only sparks curiosity, but can also be enjoyable.

But what kind of knowledge are we looking for in a contemporary form? Well, in our case it is empirical social research, its history and its origins. Our point is to show that women did research in the past, too, but that this was often forgotten down the line. What makes our case even more exciting is that the women researchers who appear in our story formed a living and working collective. The place of research was not the distant South Seas, but the immediate living environment, the metropolitan reality of life in Chicago at the end of the 19th century. This is the subject of our story, and because we have discovered much in it that is surprisingly topical, we are telling the story in a form that we hope will be considered worth reading both on this side and beyond the university-academic fringes.

"Pragmatism reloaded – the settlers of Hull House" – there's a lot behind that title. It's best to start from the beginning. Hull House is the name of the housing project in which large parts of the webcomic are set, in Chicago at the end of the 19th century. We call our protagonists the "settlers" in reference to the term "settlements" (as such housing projects were known at the time) because it captures very well the pioneering spirit that drove the settlement reform movement, and thus Hull House. (Honestly, we had the idea because a few of us love a similarly named game). Life and work at Hull House were shaped by many different currents and intellectual influences. One of them was the philosophy of pragmatism, as developed at the University of Chicago, among others, with whose philosophers there were friendly contacts. In Hull House a special variety of pragmatism was lived and promoted, which was later called "practical pragmatism" or "critical pragmatism" (Deegan 1988/2000 - click here for literature). Because of this, and because the philosophy of pragmatism is currently experiencing a revival in Europe, we have given our webcomic this title.

This project, as well as the work of the settlers of Hull House, is a collective effort. Those of us who worked on the final product are part of the "Grünbergkollektiv" - you can learn more about us on the "about us" page. We would like to thank many other participants: firstly, all the participants of the master seminar "Chicago Pragmatism in Theory and Practice. Origins of Empirical Social Research in the U.S." in the winter semester 2019/20. For a whole semester we discussed texts by Jane Addams, John Dewey, George Herbert Mead and others, argued about democracy, got disgusted at the thought of streets full of garbage, tried to understand pragmatist action theory and the meaning of the reflex arc concept, and incidentally kept thinking about what all this could have to do with a comic. From among the seminar participants, we would like to thank especially David Ratzel, Felicitas Braun, Katharina Weyland and Lennart Harting for their respective contributions to the comic, which are included in the form of background texts.

We would also like to thank the filmmaker Eva Oswald, who accompanied us during several sessions and a walk and who shot a short film about the creation of the comic from the seminar context.

We would like to express our sincere thanks to the management of the German Education Ministry project "Successful Studying in Tübingen" and to the newly founded Methods Center of the Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences for their generous financial support. This support not only made it possible for illustration and web design to be carried out so professionally, but also enabled some participants to continue working on the project as assistants after the end of the seminar.

This is because the comic manuscript was created outside of the seminar and was completed in the summer of 2020. When thinking about the visual implementation, we stumbled over questions that we probably wouldn't have asked ourselves otherwise: Did garbage trucks exist back then? Did people write with fountain pens? Could you ring a doorbell or did you have to knock? There were, of course, writing challenges that we had to overcome: Who are the characters Agathe and Franke? What are their motivations for this adventure? How do we want to portray Jane Addams? How do we create suspense? What makes a comic interesting? Which of our darlings do we need to kill off?

For these matters and more, we were able to rely on Maike Gerstenkorn, who is not only excellent at illustrating, but also extremely adept at storytelling. For embedding the comic strips into a web design environment, where all the background information fits in nicely, we got support from Kevin Körner and Annika Nagat, lecturer and student of the Digital Humanities Master’s program (if you want to know more, have a look at the About Us page).

In addition to these content-related questions, we regularly pondered our actual goal actually. What kind of audience are we targeting? Why? What do we want to achieve with this webcomic? Is it for fun or can it be used as an educational device? The answer is up to you, dear readers. After all, with a multitude of source references inserted into the comic panels via hyperlinks (click here for the editorial), it is possible to learn more about pragmatism, social research, social work and sociology even when the webcomic has been read out. Have fun exploring!