Blog

Transmedia Storytelling & Spreadability

Several researchers have drawn on concepts from Spreadable Media via a study of transmedia storytelling from various angles. See the pieces below:

  • Matthew Freeman’s 2014 International Journal of Cultural Studies piece, entitled “Branding Consumerism: Cross-Media Characters and Story-Worlds at the Turn of the 20th Century,” references both William Uricchio’s essay and Derek Johnson’s essay for the enhanced Spreadable Media book as “further work on the historicisation of cross-media strategies, particularly that which begins to re-interrogate the past as that which grounds and provokes the claims of the present.”
  • Marta Boni’s 2013 online publication for Edizioni Ca’ Foscari’s series Innesti (Crossroads), entitled Romanzo Criminale: Transmedia and Beyond (revised in English  by Craig Lund), draws on Spreadable Media to underscore how media texts are transformed into material to be circulated on sharing platforms.
  • In their 2013 piece in the Spanish journal Historia y Comunicación Social, entitled “Transmedialidad y Ecosistema Digital,” Pilar Carrera Álvarez, Nieves Limón Serrano, Eva Herrero Curiel, and Clara Sainz de Baranda Andújar look at structural features of “transmedia storytelling” and “offer a tentative definition of ‘transmedia storytelling’ from a processual perspective.” Spreadable Media is included among the sources on which they draw for the piece.
  • In her Master’s thesis for Liberty University’s Communication Studies Program, “Lost in Trans’media’: Where the Intersection between Media Convergence and Missions Is Found,” Tabethia Cosner draws on the Spreadable Media book, as well as work from Jason Mittell and Derek Johnson related to the project, to explore whether the concept of transmedia storytelling can be applied to Christian mission work.