Understanding the Media Specificity, Methods of Narrative Flow and Transitions of Media in Portmanteau Transmedia Stories

With technology and platforms for storytelling becoming increasingly more diverse, the potential for novel methods of storytelling has been expanded.

Transmedia storytelling involves telling a story across multiple media and has gained popularity, both in terms of audience interest and research. The problem is that with this new and evolving form of storytelling, potential authors are still trying to understand how they work and what techniques are effective. Potential authors have little background knowledge about how to structure such stories, and how to best portray certain parts of the narrative to the audience in a transmedial way.

This research aims to build on the current understanding of authoring a portmanteau transmedia story by firstly analysing these types of stories, and creating a theoretical toolset to be used by authors. Analysing these stories will help better understand the structure of the stories, the specificity of media being used, the connections between them, how the structure reflects narrative progression and how migratory cues are embedded within the story. The analyses allow the learning of techniques on how to make such stories, and also reveals how common story structures, like the 3-act structure, can be applied to them. The analyses also identify common characteristics between stories which can be used to construct transmedia genres, allowing specific practices to be mapped to a particular genre.
The interviews will help answer the research questions in a number of ways:

- The authors will give reasons to why they used a particular medium for a particular part of the narrative. These reasons can then be mapped to the proposed genre of the story and further improve the formation of that genre, or create new branches of it.
- The interview questions will attempt to find how the authors tailored the narrative to fit a particular medium, and how they used their knowledge of the medium and processes that shape it, to influence the narrative
- The analysis of the author's story will help identify which story structure was used, and why that story structure was chosen. Was it because the narrative required it? How did the authors envision their audience experiencing the narrative?
- Similarly, the analysis will be able to easily identify where migratory cues were placed. This allows questions to be asked about why they were placed where they were, and whether the narrative integrated them. If they did, how did they? If not, why didn't the author integrate them?

These findings will then form the basis of the next part of the research, which include qualitative data acquired from interviews of well-established transmedia authors. The theoretical toolset will then be expanded using the data obtained from the interviews.

Following this, a critical reflection methodology will be invoked to validate the toolset, by identifying desirable practices from the observation of a transmedia story being constructed.

The proposed CDT in Web Science Innovation will have significant economic and societal impact, as it develops a substantial cohort of students equipped to navigate the disruptive transition to a digital economy. The training methods utilised by the CDT are based on a model of intensive industry partnership, thereby situating students directly in contemporary industry contexts and engaging them in a range of communications with industrial partners. This training context will develop important leadership skills, and will contribute to the formation of a better-skilled and more entrepreneurial workforce in the Digital Economy. Graduates will be able to understand the challenges and opportunities of the web from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, and therefore will have impact for a range of local, national and international businesses, within diverse sectors. As the proposed CDT combines both technical and societal approaches to Web Science, they will be able to identify and deploy effective digital solutions that have social traction. This will have considerable social impact creating a workforce capable of a holistic and therefore more effective approach to innovating in the digital economy.

Engagement with government will also allow for impact on a policy level. As interdisciplinary approaches to topical issues are developed through the CDT training, a cohort of graduates who can analyse and synthesise across perspectives will develop, providing cogent expert advice to policy makers. This societal impact will be significant, as key contemporary topics, such as online privacy or internet child pornography, are becoming increasingly complex and significant.

The CDT will also cultivate graduates who are adept at public engagement and outreach, having developed skills by engaging in a range of public activities throughout the course of their training. The ability to communicate broadly and clearly with a range of audiences, and to engage as leaders in a broad economic field, will be at the heart of the training.

The research undertaken by the postgraduate cohort, directed towards Web Science Innovation, and conducted in close co-operation with a network of industry partners, will generate significant new intellectual property within the UK economy. A particular innovation focus for the CDT will be Open Data, which amplifies the opportunities for value creation downstream from the original data creators and publishers. Our students will have the skills and opportunities to develop a range of novel and socially authentic Web services, through partnerships brokered by the Open Data Institute with government organisations, large firms, SMEs and startups.