Adapting historical drama for the web: a model for metadata backed publishing of historical drama programmes

In this paper we describe how creative writing techniques were used to develop a non-linear model of narrative structure for historical drama and how an ontology was developed to facilitate publishing it on the web as transmedia content

Gotta face ‘em all: Pokémon, Japanese animated characters, and the emergence of playful visual animism

As a result of technological innovations and new cultural practices, the contemporary mediasphere is increasingly populated by digital(ized) faces. The phenomenon is not limited to human faces, but includes a vast universe of fictional animated faces, variously called ‘characters’, ‘mascots’ or ‘kyara’. In Japan, while certainly not new, kyara have been spreading thanks to globalization, digitalization and media-mix strategies. Through the connection between visual design, fictional narratives and socio-cultural consumption, kyara can be considered semiotic figures of in-betweenness, key symbolic mediators in the Japanese mediascape. Their anthropomorphic face design mediates the cultural boundaries between the human and the non-human, the animate and the inanimate, nature and culture. Furthermore, their post-modern narratives mix inspiration from the past and the present, from myths to science fiction. Lastly, they involve an encyclopedic reworking between fiction and reality, mythical references and secularization, between the domains of seriousness and playful make-believe. The article aims to explore the semiotic dimensions of kyara in contemporary Japan, with emphasis on their logic of representation and cultural outcomes. These will be investigated through the analysis of the Pokémon franchise, which will make it possible to describe the emergence of new semiotic patterns of ‘playful visual animism’ in the process of media facialization of everyday life.    &nbsp

Introduction: Possible Worlds Theory Revisited

This volume systematically outlines the theoretical underpinnings of the possible worlds approach, provides updated methods for analyzing fictional narrative, and profiles those methods via the analysis of a range of different texts, ..

Computational Media and the Core Concepts of Narrative Theory

During the last two decades, computational media-a technology able to simulate virtually any system-have permeated all aspects of contemporary society and culture. So far, narratologists have mostly neglected this progression, which is also known as the digital turn. While the current developments have called our attention to phenomena such as narrative representation across media, the core of narrative theory is still firmly rooted in concepts constructed from the basis of verbal structures and content that can be deemed fixed or unconditional. This article argues that we need to extend the scope of narratological inquiry toward the machines of computational media. With the help of conceptual tools borrowed from software studies and digital humanities, the article first identifies three main properties which distinguish the computer from the earlier forms of media: database, procedurality, and reciprocity. It is then shown how these properties challenge some of the core concepts of narrative theory-plot, character, and storyworld-in the analysis of storytelling in computational media. Finally, it is suggested that in the future, narrative theory might put more emphasis on, firstly, authorship as design and, secondly, the performative acts that the designs invite and enable. The article thus points toward understanding the transformative effect of computational media on the ways in which we see the world and engage with it through the time-honored gift for storytelling.Peer reviewe

(G)hosting television: Ghostwatch and its medium

This article’s subject is Ghostwatch (BBC, 1992), a drama broadcast on Halloween night of 1992 which adopted the rhetoric of live non-fiction programming, and attracted controversy and ultimately censure from the Broadcasting Standards Council. In what follows, we argue that Ghostwatch must be understood as a televisually-specific artwork and artefact. We discuss the programme’s ludic relationship with some key features of television during what Ellis (2000) has termed its era of ‘availability’, principally liveness, mass simultaneous viewing, and the flow of the television super-text. We trace the programme’s television-specific historicity whilst acknowledging its allusions and debts to other media (most notably film and radio). We explore the sophisticated ways in which Ghostwatch’s visual grammar and vocabulary and deployment of ‘broadcast talk’ (Scannell 1991) variously ape, comment upon and subvert the rhetoric of factual programming, and the ends to which these strategies are put. We hope that these arguments collectively demonstrate the aesthetic and historical significance of Ghostwatch and identify its relationship to its medium and that medium’s history. We offer the programme as an historically-reflexive artefact, and as an exemplary instance of the work of art in television’s age of broadcasting, liveness and co-presence

Film Websites: a Transmedia Archaeology

Websites have become a familiar feature of contemporary cinema and they contribute to the overall audience experience. Yet as a hybrid of storytelling and marketing, they have often been seen as little more than promotional ephemera, and they have rarely been critically examined. Film websites are fragile, and their presence as artefacts to study is threatened by a range of commercial and cultural factors. Consequently, film websites have not been well preserved, and many disappear before they have been appraised. Through the development of a transmedia archaeological approach, this thesis establishes that film websites are worthy of consideration as a form of entertainment and as cultural artefacts in their own right. This thesis critically evaluates the film website and its cultural conditions from several perspectives. As a form of transmedia - a term, an academic concept and a production practice that has evolved since the early twentieth century and this thesis sets out a way to understand the development of this important concept and draws on recent scholarship in the field to critically evaluate key ideas. Through media archaeology, which is an emergent historiographical perspective. Some media archaeological propositions are developed into practical tools for the analysis of film websites. Whilst those propositions tend to draw on a tradition of materialist and technological viewpoints, in this thesis they are extended to include approaches that examine the audience experience. As film website design has developed, formats have standardised and one convention to emerge is the in-movie story world website. A particular narrative trope (or, in media archaeological terms, topoi) is the ‘evil corporation’, which is common in science-fiction, western, and social commentary films, but takes on specific significance when the film website enables ludic and interactive forms of what has been described as ‘extended cinema’ (Atkinson, 2014a:16). Using ideas gleaned from world-building the ‘evil corporation’ topoi is analysed in some detail. In archival settings where film websites are preserved, partially held, or lost. Through case studies where archival presence yields insight into the development of the film website form. Online awards provide a case in point as they valorise website design, and through their archives of annual winners, can be understood as a ‘shaper’ of practices, defining what film websites are, and may be in the future. Importantly, it is found that archives don’t simply preserve artefacts. Embedded in film website fan bulletin boards are ‘traces’ of audience encounters with promotional campaigns. Qualitative analysis techniques are used to 'scrape' these locations and interpret the 'conversations' in an analytic manner to examine audience experiences of nostalgia for the future

Producing Affection : Affect and Mediated Intimacy in Pokémon

Pokémon is a global multimedia franchise formed around a core series of videogames and a variety of characters to collect, learn about, and play with. Throughout its decades of development, Pokémon has grown into a media mix comprising of digital and analog games, animations, comics, toys, and a plethora of branded merchandize, all centering on the Pokémon characters and the audience’s relationship with them. In this thesis, I explore how affection is formed and distributed in Pokémon. I view the relationship with Pokémon characters as a form of mediated intimacy, theorizing it as feelings of affection and closeness expressed through and aimed at technology. Through this, I discuss how technological and fantastical bodies wield agency and actively participate in the formation of everyday affects. By drawing primarily on game studies and affect studies, I develop an interdisciplinary method for playing and reading media texts for their affects and use it to analyze the media mix of Pokémon and the affective relations therein. I focus primarily on the Pokémon videogames that serve as the core product of the entire media mix. I examine what it means to construct an entire media mix based on videogames and play and suggest this as a key interpretive arrangement for understanding the mediated intimacy of Pokémon. This study presents the mediated intimacy of Pokémon as the result of the ludic and technological foundations of the Pokémon media mix, at the heart of which is the role-playing form of the original videogames and the way they have positioned audiences as participants and characters in the world of Pokémon. In this playful environment that overlaps fiction and everyday reality, the media mix guides its players to conduct a form of affective labor to access and traverse the textual whole of Pokémon and furthermore aligns this effort with the diegetic theme of caretaking as captured on the transmedia bodies of Pokémon. Additionally, this work contributes to the theorization and rethinking of intimacies by exploring affection in human and non-human networks as an entanglement of biological and technological actors.Tuotettua kiintymystä. Pokémonin affekti ja medioitu intiimiys Pokémon on globaali monimediakokonaisuus. Sen keskiössä on joukko videopelejä sekä niiden hahmoja, joita kerätään, joista opitaan ja joiden kanssa leikitään. Pokémonista on vuosikymmenten mittaan kasvanut mediatuotteiden rypäs, media mix: monista tuote- ja julkaisukanavista koostuva kokonaisuus, joka sisältää digitaalisia ja analogisia pelejä, animaatioita, sarjakuvia, leluja ja brändituotteita, joissa kaikissa korostuvat Pokémon-hahmot sekä yleisön suhde niihin. Väitöskirjassani tarkastelen, miten kiintymystä rakennetaan ja levitetään Pokémonissa. Tutkin Pokémon-hahmoihin muodostettuja suhteita medioidun intiimiyden käsitteen kautta. Tutkimuksessani suhteet näyttäytyvät kiintymyksellisten tunteiden tiivistyminä sekä läheisyytenä, jota ilmaistaan teknologian avulla ja sitä kohtaan. Näin tarkastelen, miten teknologisten sekä fantastisten kehojen toimijuus näkyy arkipäiväisten affektien muodostumisessa. Ammentamalla pelitutkimuksesta ja affektitutkimuksesta kehitän monitieteisen metodin mediatekstien pelaamiseen ja lukemiseen, ja käytän sitä Pokémonin media mixin, sen affektien ja sen piirissä muodostettujen kiintymyssuhteiden analysointiin. Keskityn erityisesti Pokémon-videopeleihin, jotka toimivat koko media mixin ydintuotteena. Tutkin, miten Pokémonin media mix on rakennettu ensisijaisesti pelilliselle ja leikilliselle pohjalle, ja ehdotan tätä tulkintamallia keskeiseksi Pokémonin medioidun intiimiyden ymmärtämiselle. Tutkimuksen tuloksena esitän Pokémonin medioidun intiimiyden muodostuvan Pokémonin media mixin leikillisistä ja teknologisista juurista, joiden perustana on alkuperäisten Pokémon-videopelien roolipelillinen rakenne sekä se, miten sen avulla pelaajat on asemoitu hahmoiksi Pokémonin maailmaan. Fiktiota ja todellisuutta sekoittavassa leikillisessä ympäristössä Pokémonin media mix ohjaa pelaajia hoivan ja huolenpidon teemojen kautta tekemään tunnetyötä tuoteperheen mediatekstien parissa ja piirtää tämän työn tulokset Pokémon-hahmojen monimediakehoille. Lisäksi väitöstutkimukseni osallistuu intiimiyden laajempaan teoretisointiin ja uudelleenmäärittelyyn tarkastelemalla elollisten ja leikillisesti elävien toimijoiden suhteita biologisena ja teknologisena yhteenliittymän

Worlds and Readers: Augmented Reality in Modern Polaxis

This article presents a close reading of the augmented reality (AR) comic Modern Polaxis, which was created by Stuart Campbell. Possible Worlds Theory was applied to discuss how fiction, which creates its own possible worlds, integrates the additional layer(s) of AR into its storyworld. The analysis additionally sheds light on the reader’s position and how the augmented layer may affect the literary experience. We also discuss how the AR interface may contribute to digital literature more generally.publishedVersio