In this book, the authors examine manifestations of transmedia storytelling in different historical periods and countries, spanning the UK, the US and Argentina. It takes us into the worlds of Conan the Barbarian, Superman and El Eternauta, introduces us to the archaeology of transmedia, and reinstates the fact that it's not a new phenomenon.

Transmedia Character Studies provides a range of methodological tools and foundational vocabulary for the analysis of characters across and between various forms of multimodal, interactive, and even non-narrative or non-fictional media. This highly innovative work offers new perspectives on how to interrelate production discourses, media texts, and reception discourses, and how to select a suitable research corpus for the discussion of characters whose serial appearances stretch across years, decades, or even centuries. Each chapter starts from a different notion of how fictional characters can be considered, tracing character theories and models to approach character representations from perspectives developed in various disciplines and fields. This book will enable graduate students and scholars of transmedia studies, film, television, comics studies, video game studies, popular culture studies, fandom studies, narratology, and creative industries to conduct comprehensive, media-conscious analyses of characters across a variety of media.

This book examines and illustrates the use of design principles, design thinking, and other empathy research techniques in university and public settings, to plan and ethically target socially-concerned transmedia stories and evaluate their success through user experience testing methods. All media industries continue to adjust to a dispersed, diverse, and dilettante mediascape where reaching a large global audience may be easy but communicating with a decisive and engaged public is more difficult. This challenge is arguably toughest for communicators who work to engage a public with reality rather than escape. The chapters in this volume outline the pedagogy and practice of design, empathy research methods for story development, transmedia logics for socially-concerned stories, development of community engagement and the embrace of collective narrative, art and science research collaboration, the role of mixed and virtual reality in prosocial communication, ethical audience targeting, and user experience testing for storytelling campaigns. Each broad topic includes case examples and full case studies of each stage in production. Offering a detailed exploration of a fast-emerging area, this book will be of great relevance to researchers and university teachers of socially-concerned transmedia storytelling in fields such as journalism, documentary filmmaking, education, and activism.

This volume provides engaging accounts with transmedia practices in the long nineteenth century and offers model analyses of Victorian media (e.g., theater, advertising, books, games, newspapers) alongside the technological, economic, and cultural conditions under which they emerged in the Anglophone world. By exploring engagement tactics and forms of audience participation, the book affords insight into the role that social agents – e.g., individual authors, publishing houses, theatre show producers, lithograph companies, toy manufacturers, newspaper syndicates, or advertisers – played in the production, distribution, and consumption of Victorian media. It considers such examples as Sherlock Holmes, Kewpie Dolls, media forms and practices such as cut-outs, popular lectures, telephone conversations or early theater broadcasting, and such authors as Nellie Bly, Mark Twain, and Walter Besant, offering insight into the variety of transmedia practices present in the long nineteenth century. The book brings together methods and theories from comics studies, communication and media studies, English and American studies, narratology and more, and proposes fresh ways to think about transmediality. Though the target audiences are students, teachers, and scholars in the humanities, the book will also resonate with non-academic readers interested in how media contents are produced, disseminated, and consumed, and with what implications.

Tracing the industrial emergence of transmedia storytelling—typically branded a product of the contemporary digital media landscape—this book provides a historicised intervention into understandings of how fictional stories flow across multiple media forms. Through studies of the storyworlds constructed for The Wizard of Oz, Tarzan, and Superman, the book reveals how new developments in advertising, licensing, and governmental policy across the twentieth century enabled historical systems of transmedia storytelling to emerge, thereby providing a valuable contribution to the growing field of transmedia studies as well as to understandings of media convergence, popular culture, and historical media industries.

This book explores transmedia dynamics in various facets of fiction and nonfiction transmedia studies. Moving beyond the presentation/definition of transmediality as a field of study, the authors examine novel advancements in the theory, methodological development, and strategic planning of transmedia storytelling. Drawing upon a theoretical foundation grounded in Peircean semiotics and reflected in the methodological approaches to fiction and nonfiction transmedia projects, the chapters delve into diverse case studies, such as The Handmaid’s Tale and mega sporting events like the Olympics and FIFA World Cup, that illustrate the applications of our own methods and the implications of the logic behind transmedia dynamics. Expanding upon their own scholarship, the authors tackle the relevant topic of transmedia journalism, and present new approaches to transmedia strategic planning around educational initiatives in developing countries. The book is an important reference for scholars and students of media studies, education, journalism and transmedia, and those interested in comprehending theory, methodological development, and strategic planning of transmediality.

Transmediality in Independent Journalism investigates mainstream journalism and its escape routes to independence through transmedia strategies. Within the scope of the latest debates in Turkey, the author argues that the function of transmediality in Turkish journalism is gradually shifting from being only a commercial entity to becoming a political system for social change, a survival mechanism for independent journalists to reach out to diverse audiences, and gain back the public trust. Bringing a fresh perspective to recent studies on cultures of transmediality along with an in-depth analysis of three contemporary Turkish cases, the book: Builds upon questions of whether transmedia storytelling can offer a support system to construct an alternative news media world in a political context such as Turkey’s Examines how transmedia storytelling can reach places the mainstream news media can’t control Explores whether transmedia storytelling can sustain the survival of an independent journalist in Turkey’s political context Looking beyond the case of Turkey, this study will be an important addition to the literature on rethinking journalistic form and practice, teaching transmedia strategies, and social communication. It will be of great benefit to students and scholars of journalism studies, transmedia studies, and media and communication studies.