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Project Summary:

This two-year project explores the possibilities of readerly experience created by multimedia and transmedia texts, those created by children and disseminated on the internet, as well as those created by adults for consumption by children and young people. It considers the possibilities of experience created by textual narratives and by their various digital extensions. Primary texts in the study include digital stories created by children and young people, digital novels such as the_Inanimate Alice_ project, and the multimedia book by Jessica Anthony and Rodrigo Corral, _Chopsticks_, in addition to the latter’s various digital extensions, including a tumblr site, and interactive iPad application.

Project Description:

How do electronic and digital media affect children’s critical and aesthetic literacy and complement or detract from their experiences of the literary? In what ways do young people's experiences with multimedia and transmedia texts constitute radical changes in their reading practices that might evoke equally radical cultural and or social changes? Using as a theoretical framework Marshall McLuhan’s theories concerning media effects (_The Medium is the Massage_), acoustic space, ‘hot’ and ‘cool’ media (_Understanding Media_) and the significance of changing “sense ratios” created by the extension of new technologies “into the social world” (_Gutenberg Galaxy_), my project extends the contributions of recent scholarship in media and literacy studies by considering the innovative potentialities of multimedia texts; how do they go beyond pedagogical utility when literacy meets literary in the contexts of cultural studies and McLuhan’s thought? It is my hypothesis that experiences with these multimedia or transmedia texts invite readers to encounter words, images, music, sound, and video in ways that have the potential to create new or changing “sense ratios” in cultures of the Global North from which they are currently produced; that these have cultural and social implications beyond the individual, and that multimedia texts compel those who participate in their narrative process to be self-reflexive about their involvement in the narrative and meaning-making processes.

Project Type:
Funded

Project Role:
Principal Investigator

Country 1:
Canada

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Funder:
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council

Year Project Started:
2013

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