The Compelling Nature of Transmedia Storytelling: Empowering Twenty First-Century Readers and Writers Through Multimodality

Abstract

Innovations in digital media have created new opportunities to engage young readers—opportunities that can stimulate teachers to use technology in ways that support the skills students need to fully participate in a digital society. However, research shows that today’s literacy educators are still largely focused on print-based literature. Transmedia literature has the potential to challenge this tendency. Specifically, the born-digital novel Inanimate Alice shows promise in empowering twenty first-century readers and writers through multimodal narratives. This paper presents the work in progress from a collaborative research group that was assembled to identify solutions for integrating Inanimate Alice into both formal and informal education. The primary goal of the group is to position Inanimate Alice as an exemplar for a new canon of digital literature, thus legitimating the role of innovative literary forms in supporting twenty first-century literacies. The group has adopted a cross-disciplinary approach to examine the design and usability of the story’s platform as well as explore the relationship between the complexity of its reading experience and the complexity of its medium. This paper offers a discussion of ongoing research findings and emerging understandings of the literacy experiences that underlie young readers’ interactions with Inanimate Alice through a multi-disciplinary perspective.