Porting Transmedia Storytelling to Journalism

This thesis examines how the methods of transmedia storytelling emerging in the entertainment industry might be used in a journalism context. Journalism is facing many crises, not the least of which is a loss of readership and perceived relevance to its public. Presented with an ever-expanding array of media with which to interact, the public is more difficult to attract to a socially relevant issue or a politically important story. Faced with similar issues, the entertainment industry has developed a means to engage with fans in a way that draws them across multiple media platforms, better captures their imagination and engages them personally into the story being told. Transmedia Storytelling lets narrative unfold on multiple lines, from varying perspectives and with the help of the fans themselves. Scholars of the methodology describe it as the art of world building. This thesis illustrates that journalists can better engage their publics by adapting the methods of transmedia storytelling to journalism. By comparing entertainment transmedia storytelling theory and technique with examples of journalism that illustrate one or more of these techniques, this thesis explores whether journalists can reach more individuals, achieve better engagement and participation from their publics and more thoroughly communicate the complexity and context of any story

Post-Millennial Queer Sensibility: Collaborative Authorship as Disidentification in Queer Intertextual Commodities

This dissertation is examining LGBTQ+ audiences and creatives collaborating in the creation of new media texts like web shows, podcasts, and video games. The study focuses on three main objects or media texts: Carmilla (web series), Welcome to Night Vale (podcast), and Undertale (video game). These texts are transmedia objects or intertextual commodities. I argue that by using queer gestures of collaborative authorship that reaches out to the audience for canonical contribution create an emerging queer production culture that disidentifies with capitalism even as it negotiates capitalistic structures. The post-millennial queer sensibility is a constellation of aesthetics, self-representation, alternative financing, and interactivity that prioritizes community, trust, and authenticity using new technologies for co-creation. Within my study, there are four key tactics or queer gestures being explored: remediation, radical ambiguity and multi-forms as queer aesthetics, audience self-representation, alternative financing like micropatronage & licensed fan-made merchandise, and interactivity as performance. The goal of this project is to better understand the changing conceptions of authorship/ownership, canon/fanon (official text/fan created extensions), and community/capitalism in queer subcultures as an indicator of the potential change in more mainstream cultural attitudes. The project takes into consideration a variety of intersecting identities including gender, race, class, and of course sexual orientation in its analysis. By examining the legal discourse around collaborative authorship, the real-life production practices, and audience-creator interactions and attitudes, this study provides insight into how media creatives work with audiences to co-create self-representative media, the motivations, and rewards for creative, audiences, and owners. This study aims to contribute towards a fuller understanding of queer production cultures and audience reception of these media texts, of which there is relatively little academic information. Specifically, the study mines for insights into the changing attitudes towards authorship, ownership, and collaboration within queer indie media projects, especially as these objects are relying on the self-representation of both audiences and creatives in the formation of the text

Comics for inclusive, technology-enhanced language learning

The visual language of comics is widely understood, and comics are now used for teaching and learning, for raising awareness and for dissemination. Comics offer a creative alternative for teaching that motivates and engages struggling and reluctant readers. How can foreign language teachers of English be supported to create inclusive, technology-enhanced teaching and learning with comics? This chapter synthesises literature from cognitive psychology, neuroscience of storytelling and education to better explain why comics are effective and can address the challenges of learners with specific learning difficulties such as dyslexia who may have a range of issues associated with reading, writing, memory, attention and motivation. Current teaching practices, including methods and resources, are reviewed to understand how teachers can be supported. A new perspective highlights the importance of narrative and emotions in comics and how multimodal and transmedia approaches, using web-comics, can be used to support inclusive foreign language teaching

Transitioning from Transmedia to Transreality Storyboarding to Improve the Co-Creation of the Experience Space

Transmedia storytelling is a digital based marketing approach in present day consumer markets. Typically applied to spanning or segueing stories or experiences across media such as film, books, comics and video-games to reach broader target audiences, often triggering a narrative, into which customers can participate and co-create the narrative. Common aims at customer engagement have been through shared stories on present day social media. However, for the creative-consumer, sharing on social media falls short of fully immersive storytelling ecology. Creatives (traditional designers and consumers) would benefit through tools and processes for incrementally expanding dimensions, mediums, fidelity, and shared interactions and senses across multiple media and interactive realities. This paper presents use cases of Transreality Storyboarding Framework (TSF), a design framework that affords creation of experience spaces for consumer-product engagement. Further, we propose a TSF app, to allow non-expert designers/everyday-consumers to contribute to storytelling, participation and production of product experience spaces

Reconfiguring the reader : convergence and participation in modern young adult fantasy fiction

PhD ThesisThis thesis explores digital-age literary and reading practices as they were influenced by participatory culture at the turn of the century. Participatory culture is analysed here through the work of Henry Jenkins, Hans Heino Ewers, Margaret Mackey and Katy Varnelis and is recognised as one in which individuals are socially connected to each other in an environment that offers support for creating and sharing interpretations and original works. It has relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic participation, and fosters the sense of community growing around people’s common interests and ideologies, as expressed through performative manifestations such as gaming and fandom. Because juvenile fantasy fiction generally, and J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series (1997-2007) specifically, were at the centre of significant developments in response to participatory culture, Rowling’s books are used as a case study on the basis of which changing practices of reading, writing and interpretation of story, principally by children and young people, are mapped and appraised. One aim of this thesis is to evaluate how far participatory culture has affected what it means to be a reader of a text that exists in multiple formats: how each version of the text constructs and addresses its readers/viewers/players/co-creators, and the dynamics and interdependence between the different versions. A second but related aim is to test the claims of new media theorists, including Janet Murray, Pierre Lévy and Marie-Laure Ryan, among others, to establish how far texts, readers and the processes of reading have in fact changed. Specifically, it looks at how far the promises of reader participation and co-creation have been fulfilled, especially within the genre of children’s literature

Transmedia Strategies for Participatory Politics in Russia: Alexey Navalny’s Grassroots Campaign

Transmedia storytelling scholarship has been progressing rapidly over recent decades. Yet, a question that remains open is the lack of analysis of political transmedia campaigns. This political communication thesis contributes to filling that gap. Its goal is to develop a flexible and locally-specific approach to analysing transmedia political campaigning. To understand the context that affects the destinies of transmedia grassroots campaigns, the study turns to social movement and grassroots activism scholarships. In particular, it employs the idea of political opportunity structures to conceptualise those external opportunities and threats that affects transmedia campaigns in politics. To mitigate the negative aspects of a political climate, reduce the costs of political participation for active citizens and make their political change efforts more efficient, political organisers can mobilise valuable resources through transmedia campaigning, the thesis argues. Thus, the thesis incorporates the analysis of opportunity structures and mobilising resources to propose a new analytical approach to the study of political transmedia campaigns. Because this analytical approach reinterprets transmedia strategies through the lens of opportunity structures and resource mobilisation, I will refer to it in the thesis as the opportunity structures and mobilising resources (OSMR) analytical approach. The thesis tests it with the case study of Alexey Navalny\u27s 2013 mayoral campaign for Moscow. The case study outlines the opportunity structures of modern Russia and discusses the transmedia strategies Navalny’s campaign used to overcome some of their negative aspects. In doing so, the thesis enriches transmedia storytelling scholarship with insights from other disciplines and offers a flexible and locally specific approach to analysing political transmedia campaigns

“New ways of telling”: African textual forms and dissemination in the age of digital media

In the age of digital media, creators are using the versatile nature of information and communication technologies and the ubiquity of the web to publish and distribute texts, circumventing traditional gatekeepers such as publishing institutions. In Africa, where web access and digitisation are relatively new, storytellers are eagerly exploring new mediums and the possibilities that they provide for African narratives and African representation. This thesis looks at the digital platforms of the African Storybook Reader, the FunDza Literacy Project, and Long Story SHORT, as well as Dudu Busani-Dube’s novel Hlomu the Wife, which first gained popularity on a blog platform. It examines three different web series, An African City, The Foxy Five, and Tuko Macho, as well as a transmedia documentary, Love Radio. The texts are grouped into literatures disseminated from digital platforms, localised narratives that explore the urban African woman, and narratives that make use of participatory culture. These are texts that make use of digital tools and platforms to create and disseminate African stories, making diverse and indigenous narratives more easily accessible to both local and global audiences. This thesis argues that digitisation and the global nature of the internet have created opportunities for Africans to become producers and exporters of indigenous information and representation, rather than passive consumers of imported knowledge, or subjects of external characterisation

Lost in a Transmedia Storytelling Franchise: Rethinking Transmedia Engagement

In the age of media convergence, transmedia storytelling - the distribution of story elements across multiple media platforms in the service of crafting an overarching narrative - is increasingly prevalent. This dissertation examines transmedia engagement through a focus on Lost's transmedia storytelling franchise and a confluence of technological, industrial, and cultural shifts, including the advent of podcast technologies, the rise of alternate reality game storytelling, and increasing producer-audience communication. Taken together, these transformations create new terrain on which normative understandings of producer-text-audience relationships are continually challenged, reconfigured, and even reinforced. This dissertation views these relationships through the concept of "viewsing" (Harries, 2002) - a hybrid form of engagement encouraged by transmedia storytelling franchises in which the qualities of "viewing" and "computer use" merge. Although viewsing provides an important conceptual framework, previous scholarship stops short of applying to concept to the producer-audience and audience-audience relationships. Using a thematic analysis methodology, this study examines the fan cultures surrounding two podcasts dedicated to Lost - The Official Lost Podcast and The Transmission - and expands the concept of viewsing to include text-audience interactivity, producer-audience participatory storytelling, and audience-audience collaboration and antagonism. It concludes that transmedia storytelling franchises encourage viewsing - interactive, participatory, and communicative multi-platform engagement

Convergence culture : an approach to Peter Pan, by J. M. Barrie through "the fandom"

Traballo Fin de Grao en Lingua e Literatura Galegas. Curso 2017-2018The aim of this research paper is the comparison between the original book of Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie with the narrative of fan phenomenon through online web pages such as Archive of Our Own, and FanFiction, among others. The reason why I decided to select Peter Pan is because it has an influence not only in English narrative but also in youth literature and culture. Moreover, these web pages are chosen because of the amount of different fanfictions that are published regarding this particular English novel. The main idea of this TFG is to constitute how the notions for instance of appropiation and remediation, that was coined by Jay David Bolter, work in these new narratives. Furthermore, how the fandom uses the original book not only in Order to create a new story but also to rewrite the relevant aspects (i.e. setting, characters behavior and appearance, crossovers and so on) for the community. Therefore, there would be not only a close reading of Barrie's novel, but also throughout my research paper several notions that I consider meaningful to my analysis will appear, such as participatory culture or fandom. I would also like to cover the core concept of my TFG, that is, convergence culture which was introduced by Henry Jenkins. lf I succeed, the result of this convergence culture would also be connected to the impact of I prosumers in the contemporary world