Gender/Genre (or why I’m about to Hulk out on Moviefone)

We have a new, vile example of the marginalization of fangirls (or the general treatment of women as a surplus audience), courtesy of Moviefone.  I have written about the “Princess Naked” and/or “Dr. Girlfriend” gendered Comic-Con stereotypes forwarded by the popular press on this blog in the past, but articles like this one are part of a more persistent and pervasive trend.  Written by Jessie Heyman, “A Girls’ Guide to The Avengers” (since retitled “One Girl’s Guide to The Avengers,” which makes it all better, except that it doesn’t), begins with “As your boyfriend probably told you, ‘The Avengers’ is hitting theaters this Friday…” and somehow manages to go downhill from there.

In addition to reifying the generic pink ghetto (“But you hate action movies and you’ve never even read a comic book,” followed quickly by a Bridget Jones/romcom reference to make us womenfolk feel more comfortable), and offering swoony heteronormative incentives to attend (both of the “Thor’s hammer” and “feign interest to please your boyfriend” variety), the article offers the following helpful advice:

What NOT to say:
“Do you think Scarlett Johansson is pretty?”
“Oh, so it’s like the ‘New Years Eve’ of superhero movies?”
“Who could concentrate on the story with all those biceps?”
“Boys are so weird.”

What to say:
“Thank GOD someone did the Hulk correctly.”
“I can’t wait for ‘Thor 2.’”
“Joss Whedon is the man.”
“Yeah, you’re definitely Iron Man. If he were buffer.”

Now, I’m not going to quibble with the fact that the author of this article failed to decode the acronym S.H.I.E.L.D. correctly, or mistakenly identified Pepper Potts as Tony Stark’s assistant (that’s *former* assistant, thankyouverymuch).  What I will quibble with is the fact that I read one of these articles almost every damn day.  True, they’re not all as blood-boilingly heinous as this one is, but as a point of comparison, let’s go back to a 2009 article in the Los Angeles Times titled “The Girls’ Guide to Comic-Con.”

Featuring a collection of blurbs from online journalists claiming that SDCC was “not just for nerdy guys anymore,” but rather a “smorgasbord for female fandemonium,” the article details 22 lures for female attendees, based on predictions about SDCC’s then-yet-to-be-released programming schedule.  Of these 22 supposed draws for female attendees, 15 (68%) revolved around the promise of “eye candy” in the form of male celebrities, 3 (14%) focused on historically “feminine” genres such as soap operas and weepies, 3 (14%) focused on television series or films featuring strong female characters, and there was 1 (4%) token example of demographic and gender neutral programming (Toy Story 3).  In the rare instances that the article acknowledged a desire for fangirls to see themselves depicted as strong women by the media industry, this “strength” was defined exclusively in terms of fashion sense (regarding the television reboot of The Witches of Eastwick…remember that?!  Of course you don’t.), and empty celebrations of “girl power” (literally empty, as Echo on Dollhouse was described as “airheady”).

Here are a few choice quotes from that article (and trust me, they’re all deeply offensive, and written by male and female journalists alike):

This is all to say that fangirls (and female audiences generally) deal with this marginalization on a daily basis, the Moviefone article is just one example of a pervasive discursive trend that has accompanied the celebration of fanboys as an emergent power demographic.  Newspaper stories put on gasping/fainting airs when it was revealed that women comprised 48% of the opening weekend audience for The Dark Knight (2008).  The articles that emerged didn’t recognize that fangirls were always already part of the “fanboy” demographic.  Rather, they framed The Dark Knight’s large female audience as an anomaly and attempted to deconstruct the film’s appeal for women.  The film’s executive producer, Thomas Tull, cited the “female appeal” and the acting pedigree of stars Christian Bale and Heath Ledger. Other journalists simply wrote off the large female audience as a manifestation of “rubberneck curiosity” to see Ledger’s posthumous performance as the Joker.  The notion that fangirls had long circulated around Batman as a property was never broached as a potential explanation for the film’s success.

We wouldn’t stand for articles detailing “appropriate” careers for women, and so it’s unsurprising over the outcry over the Moviefone article, which suggests “appropriate” genres for men and women to circulate around.  Derek Johnson has done some excellent work on gendered franchising discourses, a “complex and contradictorily gendered phenomenon in which the feminized narratives of seriality [are] revalued through the economic logics of industrial rationality.”[1]  If franchises aim to position themselves as  “seemingly gender-neutral,”[2] the popular press’ coverage of them is anything but.

When I go see The Avengers this weekend (with a bunch of female friends with varying interests in comics and action films, I should note), even my soda selection at the snack bar has an opinion on whether or not I’m the intended audience:

The Dr. Pepper 10 ads have been (justifiably) criticized to death, but the “intended” audience for Marvel properties is also implicit in the majority of the partnered ads between Marvel films and Dr. Pepper.  Hey, check it out, Black Widow has been reduced to Stan Lee’s hot secretary!

A few more things:

- Go read The Discriminating Fangirl’s excellent response to the Moviefone article debacle.

- Keep getting outraged when these articles appear.  They’re not satirical, they reflect the pervasive and persistent devaluation of female spectators by media industries.  Keep tweeting and blogging and commenting (a big “Excelsior!” those commenting at Moviefone, you are all articulate, hilarious people.) and let the popular press know that this discourse is unacceptable.

- Go buy/support Womanthology, or GeekGirlCon, or go read any number of kickass blogs that deal with fan culture in a thoughtful way (I’m looking at you, The Mary Sue!)

- Congratulations, Moviefone, you’ve just made it into my book revisions (hint, it ain’t gonna be pretty…and I know that will disappoint you, because that’s how you like your ladies, pretty and silent and complacent).  Also, on behalf of female comic book fans everywhere, maybe you should stop telling us what to say and what not to say, and hold yourself accountable for what YOU do and don’t say, and stop hiding behind your crappy cardboard Capt. America shield of “satire.”

---

[1] Derek Johnson, “Devaluing and Revaluing Seriality: The Gendered Discourses of Media Franchising,” Media, Culture, & Society 33.7, 1080.

[2] Ibid., 1091.

“More Cowbell”: My Avengers Remix Video

You know what this toolkit needs?  More explosions.

As I noted in my prior post about Disney/Marvel’s partnership with YouTube to facilitate the creation of Avengers remix videos, it appears the available clips are changing daily, thankfully offering more character-driven clips.  When I made the video below  (full disclosure, I made this in about 5-10 min, not my finest or most contemplative work), a solid 37.5% of the available clips were all explosions, and another 40% featured men doing things to cause explosions and/or attempting to evade said explosions.  It immediately gave me flashbacks to the Battlestar Galactica videomaker toolkit, which also heavily favored things exploding/careening through space:

I’m always interested in how the clips included these “authorized” video remix toolkits suggest appropriate uses/creative directions, or which sorts of fan narratives they pointedly constrict.  My aim with this video was to reflect on those decisions:

I fully intended to go back in and spend some time making a proper video, as opposed to this dashed-off, knee-jerk response.  I hope others do the same, prodding at the boundaries of what can or can’t be created, the argumentative capacity of the toolkit, and which strains of remix culture are encouraged or elided (fan vids? parodies?  slash?  fake trailers? etc.),

To give you a sense of the editing/remixing interface:

I didn’t take full advantage off the capabilities here, as the goal was to create something quick-and-dirty that might still be contemplative about my gut response to this gesture from Marvel and Disney.  The song I selected, “Shake the Ground” by Cherri Bomb, was notably the only offering performed by women, but more importantly it struck the tone that I wanted.  Lyrically, I think it actually works fairly well as a commentary on how these “legit” fan video initiatives have a tendency to leave pre-existing vidding practices unacknowledged, or shift the form’s logics back towards the promotional visual language that the industry is comfortable with. Quoth the chorus:

I won’t do what I’m told

I will wear you break you down, take you down

Shake the ground

Your dark sun leaves me cold

I will burn it out, wear you down

Shake the ground 

The image I kept coming back to, and loop repeatedly at one point, is that of a woman being hurled against a cafe table.  The image is quite clearly about the impact of the explosion on this woman’s body, and I suppose I wanted to ruminate on the “impact” of these video remix outreach efforts on female fans and vidders in particular.  The shots of Black Widow at the end hopefully also speak to this, moving from a look of horror, to fighting back, and ultimately a reclamation of the explosion.

I also wanted to use the toolkit in an unintended or unexpected way (cutting to black before the song concludes, rhythmic repetition of images, and so on).  Given more time, I think that making metavids about the limitations of various remix video toolkits offered by the industry could function as a wonderful running commentary on how these sanctioned initiatives are (or aren’t) slowly beginning to engaging with pre-existing fan video practices and aesthetics.  Likewise, I like the idea of speaking back to those developing these spaces through the form itself.

Finally, I must point everyone to the wonderful current issue of Transformative Works and Cultures, edited by Francesca Coppa and Julie Levin Russo, on Fan/Remix Video.  It’s a great starting point for thinking through these industrial efforts towards authorized forms of remixing.  In particular, I had Kathleen Ann Williams’ article, “Fake and fan film trailers as incarnations of audience anticipation and desire,” in mind while playing around with the Avengers toolkit.  To pull from her conclusion:

“Although trailers are often thought of as advertising an end product, these [fan] trailers function beyond the realm of the advertisement and instead suggest that the trailer lasts beyond the release of the feature, not only as an artifact but as a cultural object that can be integrated into new spaces and as a form in which to enact desires for future texts.”

I’ll be curious to see how I respond to the aural and visual elements of my video when I see the film theatrically this weekend- I somehow doubt I’ll look at that women hitting the cafe table the same way.  The temporal experience of creating the video from promotional materials prior to being granted their narrative context is also interesting, as the videos fans are creating this week are inevitably about the the expectations and desires that have been strategically cultivated by promotional paratexts, inverting the conventional production and reception process for fan vids.

Are you planning on making anything with the Avengers video remix toolkit?  If so, please let me know, I’d be curious to hear about others’ experiences.

The Avengers Remix video toolkit

This week, Variety ran a story about Disney and Marvel’s partnership with YouTube to create a video remix toolkit, including 32 short clips from the film and excerpts of 4 songs from the film’s soundtrack (each track under a minute long), along with clips of dialogue, and a variety of SFX and transition options.  The title of this article?

“Disney, Marvel offer do-it-yourself ’Avengers’ vids: YouTube software allows fans to craft legit remixes from pic”

There are myriad problems with both the toolkit and Variety‘s legitimization discourse that I’d like to get into, but first let me say this: Generally, I love the idea of giving fans HD raw materials to create their own remix videos.  I love that these tools might allow some fans who tend to think of themselves as consumers rather than creators an entry point into other forms of fan production.  I love that these “authorized” remix contests/tools at least begin to acknowledge both the creative and promotional value of fans to the success of media franchises.

Here’s what I don’t love:

- Of the 32 clips provided to me to work with (and they appear to be changing daily), here’s generally how they break down in terms of visual content, with the Misc. category composed of things like the obligatory group shot, Loki looking menacing/sexy, etc.:

Clip content breakdown for Disney/Marvel's Avengers remix video toolkit

I get it.  I do.  They wanted to stick with images from the trailer (hence, no spoilers for fans to get testy about), and the trailer is designed to sell the generic action of a superhero blockbuster.  These are clips of promotional materials from which fan-produced promotional materials are designed to be generated.  As the Variety piece championing the move by Disney and Marvel tellingly notes:

“[This] marketing move is seen as the latest way to make moviegoers, especially younger ones, feel as if they’re part of a film’s campaign.”

Not part of the film, or a community surrounding the film, but part of the campaign.  Thus far, many of the remixes made with this tool are quite impressive in terms of their professional polish and their ability to mimic the aesthetic language of promotional paratexts, but the lack of any character interactions provided as raw material inherently limits what’s produced. More diverse clips would inevitably lead to more diverse creative uses, and while the diversity of explosions offered here is laudable (Jets!  Buildings!  A Cafe!  Taxis!  More Taxis!  And hell, why not make a taxi explosion clip trilogy while we’re at it!), it also feels like a none-too-subtle attempt to overdetermine what “narratives” people use the tool to tell.  At its core, The Avengers is about relationships, but you wouldn’t know it from the range of clips provided.  Save for a pair of nano-second long clips of various male members of the team exchanging blows (not enough to construct anything slashy, trust me, I made a valiant effort), there are virtually no shots where two characters interact, and the limited character shots that are provided tend to be interrupted immediately by those pesky explosions, making it difficult to create a video that ruminates on the relationships between members of the team.

[NOTE: I just checked back on the site and they seem to have swapped out some of yesterday's clips with more character clips, so perhaps some of these complaints can be dialed back depending on which stable of clips you've been given.]

- The obligatory terms of service stranglehold, which as usual forces the remixer to waive all rights to their creation.  To wit, see the load page for the remix interface, and a selection from the terms of service this main pages links out to:

Remixers, ye be warned...

Mickey seems awfully pleased with himself...

My central concern is one that won’t surprise anyone who has read my work, or Julie Levin Russo’s excellent work on Battlestar Galactica‘s videomaker toolkit.  Not only do these “authorized” efforts fail to meaningfully reach out to pre-existing fan vidding communities, they seem to aggressively dissuade the forms of remix that have been historically created by women.  This isn’t to say that many female fans aren’t using (or enjoying using) this new Avengers remix platform, simply that if this is a model towards “legit” fan remix video that implies that this is a potential effort to displace or dissuade those “illegitimate” forms.  Those that stage an argument or a counter-reading, ruminate on the dynamics between characters or queer them, or take the narrative in a new, unexpected (e.g. unsanctioned) direction.

There is also something to be said here about the fallaciously gendered construction of both comic book readers and the audience for franchise films.  In both cases, women continue to be treated as surplus audiences, and perhaps are considered surplus remixers here as well.  Efforts like these from Disney and Marvel are tend to be discursively framed as a decisive break from the industry’s prior prohibitionist response to fan production (commonly manifesting in the form of cease and desist letters and other methods of legal censure), taking a more collaborationist approach to fan culture and fan production.  While this might mark a step in the right direction, we need to continue to be critical of what modes of creative censure come attached to these collaborationist gestures, and which audiences they court.  The big issues here: industrial cooptation of fan labor, ownership/authorship within copyright culture, ideological censure, seem to recur with the release of each new video toolkit, and to my mind mark an ongoing need to consider how prohibitionist efforts evolve, become more covert, or create legitimizing discourses around “sanctioned” modes of fan engagement.

The Avengers video remix toolkit ultimately speaks to the growing popularity of remix culture, and the shifting cultural and technological landscape that is facilitating it, without meaningfully engaging with those communities of practice.

In my next post, I’ll show you what I created with the Avenger Remix video toolkit, and discuss what I hoped to convey…

Spoiler alert: I didn’t skimp on the explosions.

SCMS 2012 Workshops

This year, I participated at two teaching workshops at the annual Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference (still catching up from the week away, but wanted to share my prezis and some quick reflections):

- The Undergraduate Television Paper [Wednesday, 3/21 from 2-3:45pm]

Participants: Ethan Thompson, Suzanne Scott, Daniel Marcus, Derek Kompare, and Ben Aslinger

The wonderful Christine Becker was nice enough to write up this workshop, along with other teaching workshops she attended (which, one among many who constantly complains about programming conflicts, I was grateful for, along with the other coverage by SCMS bloggers this year!).  It was a small group, due to last minute room changes, losing a few panelists, and general Wednesday-ness, but a lively conversation.  In particular, I appreciated the emphasis from Derek Kompare and others about the benefits of autobiographical assignments.  We also had an interesting exchange (I believe at Heather Hendershot’s prompting) about which essays we assign students that model good writing.  Notably, in many cases this wasn’t academic/scholarly writing, and my own 2 cents on this is that I frequently create thematic pairs of thoughtful blog posts/magazine articles and scholarly journal articles to have students reflect on both forum and form, and how effective each is in conveying their argument.

My sample assignment that I shared with the group was the take-home midterm from my freshman writing class at Occidental this past fall (themed around fandom and participatory culture).  Though it wasn’t explicitly assigned as a “flow” assignment, I would certainly assign something similar in an introductory television studies class.  I wanted to pick a show we hadn’t watched in class, procedural series with an network of ancillary content surrounding it, and settled on Castle (ABC).  I had made a decision at the beginning of the semester to design the paper assignment around an episode that aired within a week of students beginning to write, both in terms of accessibility (available on Hulu and network website), and so that they would be engaging with the rhythms and temporalities of broadcasting and the release of ancillary web content alongside other fans of the show.

For those not familiar with the show, Castle is a police procedural focused on a male mystery writer shadowing a female detective, and this particular episode was focused on a masked vigilante who had taken on the identity of a comic book hero, Lone Vengeance.  There were two primary approaches to take with this assignment, which broadly asked them to analyze the intertextual intersections between the episode and various examples of ancillary web content, and then consider fan engagement, or what this ancillary content offered fans:

• First, they could examine what this content said about shifts within the television industry, in terms of transmedia branding and horizontal integration.  Most of my students framed this analysis around the Derrick Storm Graphic Novel (Disney/ABC/Marvel ownership), and its not-so-subtle appearance in the episode.  Also, timed to the release of the episode, selections of the graphic novel were released on the official Castle site, and the full graphic novel was released 2 days after this episode aired.
•  Second approach to this assignment was to consider how television text and paratext inform each other, and what function this relationship serves for audiences through an examination of the blog written by the series’ title character

Though it appears that this is veering into a paper about webcomics, or transmedia storytelling more broadly and abandoning a discussion of television as a result, I think it’s useful to consider the slippages between series and serialized television, and consider what these ancillary texts have to tell us about the valuation of television fans within convergence culture.  These digital extensions also tell us a great deal about shifts within the television industry.

My presentation/provocation was meant to suggest how we might incorporate these new forms of multiplatform flow into our conversations with students about television form history, industry, and audiences.

- Teaching Comics Studies [Friday, 3/23 from 12:15-2pm]

Participants: Drew Morton, Scott Bukatman, Suzanne Scott, Greg Smith, James Thompson, and Matt Yockey

I have to say, I was thrilled with how this workshop went, and honored to be part of such a rich panel.  Having met with the newly-formed Comic Studies SIG the night before, I was thrilled to see a packed house for this panel.  Clearly, comics are being taught across disciplines, and with different emphases, and I thoroughly enjoyed swapping experiences with both the panelists and participants from the audience.

My own contribution to this conversation was to suggest theory/praxis assignments for students, offering some impressive examples created by students in my Comic Book Culture class at UC Santa Cruz (including a comic created to accompany a term paper focusing on the representation of women in comics, and a short film attempting to replicate with comic book aesthetics), sample assignments by other scholars that I would incorporate into future comic classes (with attribution, naturally!), and tools that might help students create their own comics with limited artistic experience.

So, enjoy, and feel free to ask me more detailed questions about either of these workshops, or the ideas contained in these prezi presentations.

SCMS=SDCC?

Here I sit, precisely 48 hours after arriving home from the annual Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference in Boston…scratchy throat, drinking tea and running through kleenex like it’s going out of style.  Con crud has claimed another victim.  It feels an awful lot like late-July…

During Thursday’s “Gendering Fandom” panel, Paul Booth made a passing remark on the Twitter backchannel that got me thinking: Is there really such a difference between SCMS and SDCC?  Where do we draw the line between conference and convention?

We can partially credit the historic Park Place Hotel for allowing this analogy to worm its way into my brain.  After all, anyone who has braved the floor of the Expo Hall at SDCC knew exactly how to navigate those narrow, body-jammed hallways between panels (hint: it’s all about the elbows).  Once I started thinking about it, I noticed some other interesting parallels:

• Panel overflow and “camping” (No Hall H worthy drama here, but my roommate did storm back into our room around 11:05am on Saturday morning complaining that people had camped out through the early panel.  Substitute “that Warhol paper I needed to see” with “the Dr. Who panel” and you see where I’m going with this…)
• Underground information exchanges regarding party locations and access.  Arguably, more people have tried to get into the USC party than Flynn’s Arcade over the past few years.
• Fan art!  (From my workshop on Teaching Comic Studies- thanks, Dan Carino!)

• Passionate, analytical defenses of Indiana Jones 4: Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (courtesy of Janet Staiger)
• Panel envy.  The grass/exclusive footage/Foucault reference is always greener…
• Swag from University Presses (?!)

Nina Huntemann rightly noted to me that it won’t really be Comic-Con until someone creates a stunt to promote a book they’re releasing.  So, if your study of race and representation in zombie horror has a 2013 publication date, just let me know.  I’m fully prepared to collect some likeminded scholars for a zombie walk around Chicago on your behalf.

All joking aside, there’s something to be said about how we navigate SCMS as fans (of particular scholars, media texts, disciplines), approach our own work as fans, and/or perform our fannish investments/detachment in that space.  Chime in on parallels I may have missed…I somehow doubt that cosplay was involved (if only!), but I’d be curious to hear from others who have noticed similarities in terms how we do/don’t perform our identities as media consumers (and “fans,” for those who feel comfortable embracing the designation) in the conference space we populate as media scholars.

[AUTHOR'S NOTE: I love the week after the annual Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference, when all my favorite academics blog eloquently written impressions and analyses (some from the official SCMS conference bloggers are already up).  As always, I left SCMS intellectually invigorated, reconnected with old friends and colleagues and introduced to incredible scholars. A serious post about my takeaways from #scms12 and my workshops will follow...after I get rid of the crud.]

Happy #FemShepFriday, everyone!

Just a quick follow up to my prior post regarding Bioware’s “beauty contest”/marketing fail for their Mass Effect 3 promotional campaign.  Well, the trailer’s finally here, and female gamers everywhere should be breathing a collective sigh of relief:

Of course, just because the trailer isn’t a condescending nightmare doesn’t mean it won’t be analyzed, and I fully intend to collect those posts here.  So, if you come across any commentary (e.g. Why Renegade!Femshep?  What’s the significance of Bioware creating a second round of voting to arrive at this redheaded iteration, after the blonde trumped all in the initial Facebook vote debacle?, etc.), please send it my way in comments. The response on Twitter, which you can follow at  #FemShepFriday, has been overwhelmingly positive, and here are some of the more interesting ones I’ve collected today:

The theme of the majority of the tweets thus far seems to be “My Shep is…,” rather than a response to the trailer, speaking to the fact that ultimately no Shep (be it Fem or Bro) will ever sufficiently capture the game’s best feature:  choice.  I’d be curious to hear if players project their own iteration of Shep onto Bioware’s promotional/marketing materials…

-RESPONSES/ANALYSES-

• Good overview of the events leading up to today’s trailer launch (via Gamezone)
• “She Has Arrived: More Love for Mass Effect 3′s Female Shepard” (via Savegame)
• 2010 analysis of FemShep’s popularity, worth revisiting (via Gamasutra)
  

Contemplating transmedia scholarship

Happy grading season to all you academics, and happy pre-holidays to all you students and surfers who have stumbled across my blog in your internet wanderings!

I’ll be spending a good chunk of my holiday collaborating with Chris Hanson to develop a digital “draft” of a submission to a “book” project that emerged out of Database | Narrative | Archive: An International Symposium on Nonlinear Digital Storytelling.  I’m really excited about it, both because I get to co-author the project with a good friend and brilliant scholar, but also because the project will be constructed in Scalar.  Scalar was developed at USC, through the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture, and I am looking forward to exploring the platform and thinking through the form and function of multimodal scholarship.

The question our contribution will respond to is:

How might scholars explore interactive and digital technologies as forms of ‘procedural scholarship’?

My immediate gut response to this prompt, which you can explore in more detail in the CFP, was to consider how we might adapt the central principles and qualities of transmedia storytelling to discuss and develop instances of transmedia scholarship.  As our own work begins to travel across media platforms, I think further contemplation of Henry Jenkins’ post on Transmedia Education is warranted, in which Jenkins applies the seven “core principles” detailed below to learning environments.

I can think of plenty of wonderful scholars who are attempting to work these properties into their pedagogy, but are we actively attempting to embody them with our scholarship?  Outside of the seven principles Jenkins outlines here, are you thinking about building migratory cues into your scholarship?  What does collective intelligence look like in this model?  Are the transmedia “extensions” of our own work serving a similar promotional function as the majority of industrial transmedia extensions?

I’m hoping to use Scalar as a platform to grapple with the potentialities and limitations of transmediated scholarly arguments and research.  While many have (rightly) championed transmedia storytelling models for being participatory, non-linear, and co-creative enterprises, my own work on industrial transmedia entertainment argues that these models ultimately tend to reify and reward conventional modes of engagement and exploration.  Through a consideration of how these “core principles” might be adapted to conceptualize multimodal scholarship, I hope to examine how theories of transmedia storytelling might broadly help scholars envision their work traversing various media, platforms, and audiences.

So, here’s where you come in.  If you’re an academic, or know an academic, who is either actively creating transmedia scholarship, or attempting to work in some of the principles of transmedia storytelling into their own work or pedagogy, please contact me at suzannelynscott@gmail.com or leave a comment below.  Alternately, if you are a transmedia scholar and/or have opinions on what transmedia scholarship might look like, the potentialities or limitations (for example, what happens when we ask those “reading” our work to become hunters and gatherers?), I’d also like to hear your thoughts.  I’d really love for this project to include some conversations/images/videos with other scholars (or students, for that matter), so consider this a first attempt to exhibit collective intelligence at work.

I’ve also just set up a new twitter account @acatransmedia, and will be using #transmediascholarship to document the project.  Not sure yet what function this twitter “extension” might serve, but please follow if you’re interested.

Thanks in advance for your contributions, or for passing this along to someone who might be interested!