A computational model of transmedia ecosystem for story-based contents

Abstract

Story-based contents (e.g., novel, movies, and computer games) have been dynamically transformed into various media. In this environment, the contents are not complete in themselves, but closely connected with each other. Also, they are not simply transformed form a medium to other media, but expanding their stories. It is called as a transmedia storytelling, and a group of contents following it is called as a transmedia ecosystem. Since the contents are highly connected in terms of the story in the transmedia ecosystem, the existing content analysis methods are hard to extract relationships between the contents. Therefore, a proper content analysis method is needed with considering expansions of the story. The aim of this work is to understand how (and why) such contents are transformed by i) defining the main features of the transmedia storytelling and ii) building the taxonomy among the transmedia patterns. More importantly, computational transmedia ecosystem is designed to process a large number of the contents, and to support high understandability of the complex transmedia patterns.