(Re)Framing Transmedial Narratives

The absolute highlight of my time at MLA09 was the night panel on transmedia narratives. I finally got to meet my friend Christy Dena and also catch up with some other friends. Here are my notes:

Marc Ruppel

  • The biggest shift in storytelling has been multiplatform narratives
  • What are they? digital/analog, oral/audio, etc
  • Examples of transmedia narratives: Lost, Buffy The Vampire Slayer series eight comic, etc
  • Connectivity: Edges as transactional spaces
  • Reading paths, instead of just left to right now…(It’s refreshing to hear this; I’ve been saying this for a long time!!!)

Migratory cues:

  • Direct-URLs, books, phone numbers, business cards (the series Heroes was the example for some of these)
  • Intermedial-Direct prescence of one site’s content in anothers
  • Intersectional-One site reflects and approximates momentary events of another
  • Often used in combination
  • Visualize network as a whole

Christy Dena

After this, I just sat and listened to everything Christy was saying. Her work is fascinating and close to what I originally wanted to write about in my Master’s Thesis before sliding to something more “Englishy” (see my first symposium presentation about Distributed Narrative)

I also asked a question to Marc and Christy about the role of canon in fan culture. Specifically, I was curious how they regarded fan fiction and spinoff noncanonical media in regards to their examples of Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Doctor Who. The BTVS series eight comic is pretty established as canonical, but what about Doctor Who where there are numerous comics, Big Finish audios, and other things where their place in the canon is murky at best. Both Marc and Christy said that trying to decipher between all of that just wasn’t worth doing, so they regards everything in the same manner. I can certainly understand that.

Afterwards, while catching up with Christy, we also talked about the defining of new terms which she does in her work. While writing my Master’s Thesis, I had trouble enough with resistance to terms like ergodic, distributed narrative, hypertext, etc. Christy is creating new terms as she goes.

 

Weekly Reader

  1. According to her monthly Web Site column, Jeanette Winterson is creating a children’s show for the BBC.

  2. Veronica Esposito on the role of research in Infinite Jest. Also see the comment section for some discussion from myself and others on the difference between the sort of notes Wallace and Borges created for their imaginary works.

  3. Jacket Copy on John Barth’s The Floating Opera

  4. Henry Jenkins on the role of fan fiction as critical commentary on texts.

  5. The new issue of Open Letters is, as always, worth your time.

Weekly Reader

  • Joseph Tabbi on locating the literary in New Media.
  • Naomi Klein on demanding more from President Obama.
  • The Quarterly Conversation has all of the details for the new UK edition of Cosmicomics which includes seven previously unseen, but seemingly slowly trickling out in a number of periodicals, stories.
  • Forty seven new letters from Benjamin Franklin’s time in London have been found by an academic.
  • Henry Jenkins is interviewing Nick Montfort (who also has a new weblog) and Ian Bogost about their work on Platform Studies.