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Students Create Fictional Transmedia Narrative
Department: English
What possibilities do transmedia narratives hold for our understandings of what texts can be? For our expectations of reading and writing experiences? For the distinctions we draw between the real and the virtual and the imagined? Students enrolled in English professor Dr. Shannon Lakanen’s course, Studies in Digital Media: Project 1177 explored the answers to these questions while creating a campus-wide transmedia narrative.

Students worked in small groups to create independent but integrated threads of a fictional transmedia narrative, the premise of which is that a purple bubble has descended to contain the campus of “Nibretto University.” The fictional narrative threads developed by the students will follow characters between the bubble’s descent on Wednesday, Jan. 16 and the resolution of the project on Friday, Jan. 18.

Each narrative is told through multiple media – posters with links to the charaters’ Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook and blog posts; art installations; USB drives left in key locations; excerpts of characters’ private journals reproduced and distributed en masse; artifacts clearly labeled as part of the fictional narrative, etc. – found on Otterbein’s campus.

The campus community can follow along with the narratives by keeping an eye out for artifacts, visiting the links on signs or visiting the course project website at www.project1177.wordpress.com.

The finale event will be held at noon on Friday, Jan. 18 in the Campus Center lobby.