Comic Vine: Participatory and Idiosyncratic Documentation of a Semantic Platform

Comic Vine (CV) is a semantic platform focused on documenting published comics. Developers Dave Snider, Ethan Lance, and Tony Guerrero launched the site on December 2006 as part of their first series of proprietary wiki platforms covering various entertainment industries. More than a wiki, CV was at launch a news and review website covering comics and offering discussion forums for users. This article examines how a semantic platform has developed to offer descriptive features catering to one industry (comics), using a proprietary architecture. Using the walkthrough methodological approach, I find that such practices, while not adhering to open-web standards, contribute to architectural design diversity (ADD). Standards in semantic data often push toward common grounds and exchange parameters. The ADD concept presented in this article focuses on highlighting divergent technical schemes in the computing sciences that do not rely on a few standards. I draw mainly on approaches and theories from information studies, grounded in contextual insights from communication studies and human-computer interaction.