Transmedia Archaeology

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.

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 examines the mediated shift in the contemporary human condition, focusing on the ways in which we synthesise with media content in daily life, essentially transmediating ourselves into new forms and (re)creating ourselves across media. Across an international roster of essays, this book establishes a transdisciplinary theory for the ‘transmedia self’, exploring how technological ubiquity and digital self-determination combine with themes and disciplines such as celebrity culture, fandom, play, politics, and ultimately broader self-conception and projection to inform the creation of transmedia identities in the twenty-first century. Specifically, the book repositions transmediality as key to understanding the formation of identity in a post-digital media culture and transmedia age, where our lives are interlaced, intermingled, and narrativised across a range of media platforms and interfaces. This book is ideal for scholars and students interested in transmedia storytelling, cultural studies, media studies, sociology, philosophy, and politics.

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.

Around the globe, people now engage with media content across multiple platforms, following stories, characters, worlds, brands and other information across a spectrum of media channels. This transmedia phenomenon has led to the burgeoning of transmedia studies in media, cultural studies and communication departments across the academy. The Routledge Companion to Transmedia Studies is the definitive volume for scholars and students interested in comprehending all the various aspects of transmediality. This collection, which gathers together original articles by a global roster of contributors from a variety of disciplines, sets out to contextualize, problematize and scrutinize the current status and future directions of transmediality, exploring the industries, arts, practices, cultures, and methodologies of studying convergent media across multiple platforms.

This volume offers new perspectives on knowledge production through various forms of togetherness. Via diverse cases of collaboration in media studies, from methodological contemplations to on‐the‐field social practices, the book proposes reflections and inquiries around collective research, media, and action. The collection rethinks how scholarly endeavours feature different ways of doing and being together, identifying new and more diverse communicative spaces, challenging dichotomies, and encouraging critical perspectives. Scholars of a variety of disciplines recontextualise collaboration beyond the very nature of conventional academic approaches, to embrace vast connotations of media studies – from actions building connections across research and practice to transdisciplinary methodologies through analogue and digital realms. This book will be an invaluable resource for scholars and post‐graduate students from various fields of media studies, who carry an interest in collaborative and collective aspects of media as practice and research, as well as those in a variety of social science disciplines, participatory action research, media sociology, audience studies, intercultural communication, qualitative research methods, and participatory communication.

Bringing together 49 chapters from leading experts in media industries research, this major collection offers an authoritative overview of the current state of scholarship while setting out proposals for expanding, re-thinking and innovating the field. Media industries occupy a central place in modern societies, producing, circulating, and presenting the multitude of cultural forms and experiences we encounter in our daily lives. The chapters in this volume begin by outlining key conceptual and critical perspectives while also presenting original interventions to prompt new lines of inquiry. Other chapters then examine the impact of digitalization on the media industries, intersections formed between industries or across geographic territories, and the practices of doing media industries research and teaching. General ideas and arguments are illustrated through specific examples and case studies drawn from a range of media sectors, including advertising, publishing, comics, news, music, film, television, branded entertainment, live cinema experiences, social media, and music video. Making a vital and significant contribution to media research, this volume is essential reading for students and academics seeking to understand and evaluate the work of the media industries. Chapter 10 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com

As a part of an extensive exploration, Reimagining Communication: Action investigates the practical implications of communication as a cultural industry, media ecology, and a complex social activity integral to all domains of life. The Reimagining Communication series develops a new information architecture for the field of communications studies, grounded in its interdisciplinary origins and looking ahead to emerging trends as researchers take into account new media technologies and their impacts on society and culture. The diverse and comprehensive body of contributions in this unique interdisciplinary resource explore communication as a form of action within a mix of social, cultural, political, and economic contexts. They emphasize the continuously expanding horizons of the field by engaging with the latest trends in practical inquiry within communication studies. Reflecting on the truly diverse implications of communicative processes and representations, Reimagining Communication: Action covers key practical developments of concern to the field. It integrates diverse theoretical and practice-based perspectives to emphasize the purpose and significance of communication to human experience at individual and social levels in a uniquely accessible and engaging way. This is an essential introductory text for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, along with scholars of communication, broadcast media, and interactive technologies, with an interdisciplinary focus and an emphasis on the integration of new technologies.

How copyright law and the practice of narrative-based property development influenced each other before 1978