Left to their own devices: Ad hoc genres and the design of transmedia narratives

Elmar Hashimov, Brian McNely

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

1 Scopus citations

Abstract

In this paper, we apply a writing, activity, and genre research (WAGR) framework to explore how research participants designed complex transmedia narratives during a two-semester experiential learning course that was conducted in concert with a major state museum. We focus here on two specific cases from our larger ethnographic study to illustrate participants' self-directed, adaptive development and use of situated genre ecologies to mediate their work. In doing so, we describe how participants navigate among genres and artifacts within a minimum of three overlapping genre assemblages to design transmedia narratives: (1) the course genre assemblage, (2) their discipline-specific assemblage, and (3) their individual genre ecology. We explore individual genre ecologies in detail, describing how participants frequently incorporated ad hoc genres into their workflow as a way of navigating the expectations and genre norms of broader, overlapping assemblages.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationSIGDOC'12 - Proceedings of the 30th ACM International Conference on Design of Communication
Pages251-259
Number of pages9
DOIs
StatePublished - 2012
Event30th ACM International Conference on Design of Communication, SIGDOC 2012 - Seattle, WA, United States
Duration: Oct 3 2012Oct 5 2012

Publication series

NameSIGDOC'12 - Proceedings of the 30th ACM International Conference on Design of Communication

Conference

Conference30th ACM International Conference on Design of Communication, SIGDOC 2012
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CitySeattle, WA
Period10/3/1210/5/12

Keywords

  • Activity theory
  • Genre
  • Mediation
  • Transmedia
  • WAGR

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Networks and Communications

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