Historicising Transmedia Storytelling

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 offers a thorough investigation of the recent surge of webtoons and manga/animation as the sources of transmedia storytelling for popular culture, not only in East Asia but in the wider global context. An international team of experts employ a unique theoretical framework of media convergence supported by transmedia storytelling, alongside historical and textual analyses, to examine the ways in which webtoons and anime become some of the major sources for transmedia storytelling. The book historicizes the evolution of regional popular culture according to the surrounding digital media ecology, driving the change and continuity of the manhwa industry over the past 15 years, and discusses whether cultural products utilizing transmedia storytelling take a major role as the primary local cultural product in the cultural market. Offering new perspectives on current debates surrounding transmedia storytelling in the cultural industries, this book will be of great interest to scholars and students of media studies, East Asian studies and cultural studies.

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.

This book presents new global research on transmedia storytelling as a form of brand communication. It explores the theoretical underpinnings of transmedia storytelling and its practical application through survey and interview data from creatives, marketing, advertising and public relations practitioners. The final section analyzes contemporary campaigns from various countries and proposes a Transmedia Brand Storytelling Model for Practice, based on primary and secondary research data. The book aims to better understand and communicate the real-world opportunities and barriers to producing transmedia brand storytelling campaigns for practitioners.

This guidebook, aimed at those interested in studying media industries, provides direction in ways best suited to collaborative dialogue between media scholars and media professionals. While the study of media industries is a focal point at many universities around the world – promising, as it might, rich dialogues between academia and industry – understandings of the actual methodologies for researching the media industries remain vague. What are the best methods for analysing the workings of media industries – and how does one navigate those methods in light of complex deterrents like copyright and policy, not to mention the difficulty of gaining access to the media industries? Responding to these questions, Industrial Approaches to Media offers practical, theoretical, and ethical principles for the field of media industry studies, providing its first full methodological exploration. It features key scholars such as Henry Jenkins, Michele Hilmes, Paul McDonald and Alisa Perren.

This book confronts the question of why our culture is so fascinated by the apocalypse. It ultimately argues that while many see the post-apocalyptic genre as reflective of contemporary fears, it has actually co-evolved with the transformations in our mediascape to become a perfect vehicle for transmedia storytelling. The post-apocalyptic offers audiences a portal to a fantasy world that is at once strange and familiar, offers a high degree of internal consistency and completeness, and allows for a diversity of stories by different creative teams in the same story world. With case studies of franchises such as The Walking Dead and The Terminator, Transmedia Storytelling and the Apocalypse offers analyses of how shifts in media industries and reception cultures have promoted a new kind of open, world-building narrative across film, television, video games, and print. For transmedia scholars and fans of the genre, this book shows how the end of the world is really just the beginning...

Since the advent of digitization, the conceptual confusion surrounding the semantic galaxy that comprises the media and journalism universes has increased. Journalism across several media platforms provides rapidly expanding content and audience engagement that assist in enhancing the journalistic experience. Exploring Transmedia Journalism in the Digital Age provides emerging research on multimedia journalism across various platforms and formats using digital technologies. While highlighting topics, such as immersive journalism, nonfictional narratives, and design practice, this book explores the theoretical and critical approaches to journalism through the lens of various technologies and media platforms. This book is an important resource for scholars, graduate and undergraduate students, and media professionals seeking current research on media expansion and participatory journalism.

Young adult literature is often referred to as the originating source for film adaptations that turn into large transmedia storyworlds and franchises. This is, however, only one of the transmedia interactions involving young adult literature in modern culture. This Element unfolds these relations focusing on transmedia practices that bridge the dominant public discursive split between print based and digital media. Today print and digital products work together as well as independently in interconnected networks and these practices puncture ideas of a media hierarchy. Specifically, it is demonstrated how literature for young people take part in transmedia storytelling on a macro level but also in so-called cluster works that work as transmedia storytelling on a micro level.