Around the globe, people now engage with media content across multiple platforms, following stories, characters, worlds, brands and other information across a spectrum of media channels. This transmedia phenomenon has led to the burgeoning of transmedia studies in media, cultural studies and communication departments across the academy. The Routledge Companion to Transmedia Studies is the definitive volume for scholars and students interested in comprehending all the various aspects of transmediality. This collection, which gathers together original articles by a global roster of contributors from a variety of disciplines, sets out to contextualize, problematize and scrutinize the current status and future directions of transmediality, exploring the industries, arts, practices, cultures, and methodologies of studying convergent media across multiple platforms.
About the Author: Matthew Freeman is Reader in Multiplatform Media at Bath Spa University, UK. He is Co-Director of Bath Spa's Media Convergence Research Centre and acts as REF Champion for the University's Communication, Culture and Media submission to REF. His research examines cultures of production across the borders of media, industries, cultures and histories, and he is the author of Historicising Transmedia Storytelling: Early Twentieth-Century Transmedia Story Worlds, Industrial Approaches to Media: A Methodological Gateway to Industry Studies, the co-author of Transmedia Archaeology: Storytelling in the Borderlines of Science Fiction, Comics and Pulp Magazines (with Carlos A. Scolari and Paolo Bertetti), and the co-editor of Global Convergence Cultures: Transmedia Earth.
Renira Rampazzo Gambarato is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication Studies at Jönköping University, School of Education and Communication, Sweden. She is co-editor of the books Exploring Transmedia ournalism in the Digital Age (together with Geane Alzamora) and of Kulturdialoge Brasilien-Deutschland-Design, Film, Literatur, Medien [Cultural Dialogue Brazil-Germany-Design, Film, Literature, Media] (together with Geane Alzamora and Simone Malaguti). Her current research revolves around transmedia storytelling analysis and complexity of transmedia experiences. More broadly, her research interests include Peircean semiotics, digital culture, international and intercultural media studies, media education, film analysis, and the design and analysis of multiplatform experiences.