Transmedia Literacy
Building
Imaginary
Worlds
Harry E. Pence
SUNY Distinguished Teaching
Professor Emeritus
SUNY Oneonta
pencehe@oneonta.edu
Actually, transmedia is just the
newest of the unusual narrative
forms.
The Choose Your Own Adventure series
of children's books were published by
Bantam Books from 1979-1998. The
reader chose what actions the main
character would take.
Michael Joyce's Afternoon, a story,
(1987) is generally considered one of
the first hypertext fictions.
The Cave of Time,
the first Choose
Movies, like Memento (2000) and Sliding
Your Own
Doors (1998), have played with the idea
Adventure book.
of nonlinear time flow.
Many of you can probably list other
examples of this.
Transmedia is a logical outgrowth of:
Fanzines, fan-produced publications that
attempted to fill in the gaps of a commercial
product.
The popularity of alternate reality games (ARG),
like “The Beast (2001)” a promotional tool for
the film A.I.: Artificial Intelligence.
The popularity of Web 2.0 (blogs, wikis, etc.)
The increasing integration of the media
industries.
See “Walt Disney University” by Josh Kim
http://tinyurl.com/382y4de
Christy Dena argues that,
“Transmedia practices are not just the concern
of conglomerates who are horizontally
organized, but also of individuals with limited
resources.”
Behnam Karbassi says, “Kids are already
porting content from one screen to another,
blurring the lines of media.”
According to a 2005 study conducted by the
Pew Internet and American Life project, more
than one-half of all American teens—and 57
percent of teens who use the Internet—could
be considered media creators.
http://tinyurl.com/2b6o47u
http://www.pewInternet.org/PPF/r/166/report_display.asp
Evolution of Transmedia
Multimedia refers to a mix of text, images,
video, and sound within a single platform.
Dana Goodyear writes about the cell-phone
novel, or keitai shosetsu, the first literary
genre to emerge from the cellular age. An
effort to encourage similar works in the U.S.
is called Figment.
http://tinyurl.com/9wcrgw
“Distributed narratives don’t just bring media
together but rather expand the narrative
across media, through the network and
sometimes into the physical spaces that we
live in.” Jill Walker
From Implementation, a sticker
novel by Nick Montfort and Scott
Rettberg.
According to Henry
Jenkins,
The Matrix Franchise is a true Transmedia
Story.
InThe Matrix franchise, information is communicated
through three live action films, a series of animated
shorts, two comic books, and several video games. See
Convergence Culture, Chap 3
http://tinyurl.com/3xfhl27
Henry Jenkins has described the
characteristics of the transmedia aesthetic.
http://tinyurl.com/37u3okq
1. A shift from a focus on individual characters
and their stories towards ever more complex
forms of world building.
2. The expansion of traditional forms of seriality
that disperse story information across multiple
chunks of entertainment content.
3. A focus on layered or multiple forms of
subjectivity where we experience the story
through the perspective of multiple characters,
who often reflect different values or social
situations.
This is a major shift in the way the we experience
media.
Carlos Scolari (University Pompeu
Fabri, Barcelona, Spain) says that
the “reader’ of transmedia must be
accustomed to:
Interactivity
Networks
Screen fragmentation
More rapid presentation
Rapid adaptation to new Interfaces
Intertextuality
Multi-screens
I would add that the responsibility for
making meaning is shared by the author
and the reader.
Karbassi and Thompson describe
three types of transmedia projects:
franchise, marketing, and native.
http://tinyurl.com/22nn6oy
I found it easier to think in terms of who has
control.
Experience transmedia: an individual or group
uses various media platforms to create a
unified experience.
Framework transmedia: an existing world or
brand is adapted by users to create
interlocking but independent visions of that
world. No single author (or group) has control.
Examples of
experience
transmedia.
Majestic (2001) is the classic alternate
reality game (ARG); there is no
separation between the in-game and
out-of-game experiences. It used phone,
instant messages, e-mail, and fax.
Valemont is the MTV transmedia murder
mystery which occurs on TV, blogs,
Facebook, phones, and web sites.
Framework Transmedia requires not just a plot
and characters, but a whole world that is
designed to be incomplete.
This world then interacts socially with a networked
culture to create opportunities for exploration,
interpretation, and expansion.
World without Oil is a massively collaborative vision of
the first 32 weeks of an oil crisis, based on 1,500 blogs,
images, and videos.
What skills will patrons need to participate in a
transmedia world?
Transmedia literacy requires familiarity with a
variety of different platforms.
Flickr
Twitter
Media Sharing
FaceBook Social Networks
SlideShare
LlinkedIn
YouTube
Hulu
Podcasts
My Media
Pandora
Environments
NetVibes
Delicious
Diigo
Aggregators
Virtual Worlds
Second
Life
This diagram should also include both blogs
and online gaming site.
Henry Jenkins has defined an
extensive set of Transmedia Literacy
skills.
http://www.teachstory.org/?p=535
I am thinking of a simpler set of skills:
the ability to search for, remix, and distribute
information on various media platforms,
the ability to create independently within an
integrated vision,
the ability to represent ideas using a combination
of images and text, and
The ability to make effective use of reading from a
screen.
Anne Cranny-Francis says the multimodal
environment implies not only new technologies
but also new cultural practices.
Information storage is no longer just about text.
Web page design is becoming a critical skill (?).
Links define reading differently than footnotes.
It is not either/or, text vs. image literacy, but rather
both, as well as how they interact.
Chap. 6,“Connexions”, Anne Cranny-Francis, (pg 135-174) Cyberlines 2.0:
Languages and Cultures of the Internet, Donna Gibbs and Kerri-Lee
Krause, James Nicholas Publishers, Albert Park, Australia, 2006.
Joshua Kim predicts that
curricular content will be
consumed in shorter
chunks, by more nontraditional students,
across multiple times and
places.
This certainly sounds
like transmedia!
Recently, I heard a rep from Pearson say that in
five years they expect that only ten percent of
their income will come from traditional book
publications.
A host of sites is
available that offer
academic videos and
video articles.
Journals are also moving
toward mixed media,
with video articles.
How will these be
integrated into the
library holdings?
Fluidity of
Knowledge
Transmedia narratives
often seem to provide
incomplete
information.
They can change as we
are looking at them.
The reader must not
only adjust to
fragmented
information space,
but also to
distributed media
spaces.
How does transmedia affect the library?
Concept for Stockholm library
http://tinyurl.com/yd8go22
How can you tie
together these
different platforms
in a catalog?
Many components
of transmedia are
ephemera.
By definition,
transmedia
assumes that
traditionally
separate media
are coequal.
Moving from atoms
to electrons for
information storage
offers new
cataloging options!
Assume
“Everything is
Miscellaneous!”
David Weinberg
Typically, courses in Art or
Communications seem more
likely to integrate transmedia
literacies into the classroom.
Blandy and Fenn have
created a transmedia
course using student
groups. (AAD 450 / 550:
Art and Society). Here is
the syllabus.
http://tinyurl.com/387hzzc
Inanimate Alice is
designed to introduce
teachers and students to
new media literacies.
http://www.inanimatealice.com
/education/
A free pedagogy pack is
available.
Elsevier is already reimagining the journal
article with The Article of the Future project.
http://tinyurl.com/33cb4td
The Elsevier spokesman points out that despite being
online current science articles are still print-based
(though we call it a PDF); still require linear reading,
and don’t change based on the intended use of the
reader.
They are experimenting with Tabs allow the reader to
configure the article to focus on just figures and
data, the experimental results, or just skim,
A Graphical Abstract are already becoming common,
Supplementary data only appears when the reader
chooses to see it.
The nature of links
is changing.
For example, see a free program
called apture
(www.apture.com).
It lets you look up content
without ever leaving a page.
And you can paste the
information into the document.
Imagine what this could
do in a textbook.
With special glasses a book can
become a transmedia object.
A drawing
can spring
from the
page into
3D.
Virtual tabs
“Reading in a whole
new way.” by Kevin
Kelly
http://tinyurl.com/35w4pws
Moving between
transmedia narratives
require real time
mental adjustments!
Will MS Kinect have us
scanning a database
with gestures like a
symphony
conductor?
A closing thought:
“We are definitely at moment
of transition, a moment where
an old media system is dying
and a new media system is
being born.” Henry Jenkins
Thank you for listening.
Are there any questions or
comments?
Some references for those who want to
learn more about transmedia.
Convergence Culture by Henry Jenkins is
still the classic.
“Hyper and Deep Attention: The
Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes”
N. Katherine Hayles, Profession 2007, pp. 187–199
(13)
Christy Dena expands transmedia practices
beyond the commercial franchise model.
http://www.christydena.com/academic-2/phd/
Jill Walkers article on distributed narratives
provides an interesting background to
talk about transmedia. http://tinyurl.com/2fkre6t