Transmedia Stories is an experiment in multimedia publication and collaboration that explores storytelling-based research methods. With the growth of digital media, narrative is now conveyed through a range of new and ephemeral formats. Beyond entertainment and artistic innovation, networked and digital media have also influenced ways that storytelling can be used to conduct research in fields such as public health and medicine.

This project explores methods that include story circles, digital storytelling, transmedia collage, speculative design, narrative video games, and mixed reality and alternate reality games. Each chapter introduces a key digital media form that can be used for social interventions and supplements it with images, audio files, documentary videos, and curricular materials that make up such interventions. The publication is a highly collaborative venture that presents these methods with the help of case studies drawn from an assemblage of workshops focused on, mostly, minority youth in Chicago that were held between 2012 and 2019 by two interdisciplinary labs at the University of Chicago: Transmedia Story Lab and Game Changer Chicago Design Lab.

The book, made up of six chapters and a coda, is free and accessible online.

Review Quotes

“Putting storytelling, public health, and collaborative research into conversation, this project offers practical applications of the most future-thinking and equity-minded media theory available to us.”

— Lauren S. Berliner, University of Washington, Bothell

“Demonstrating with aplomb what scholarship can do across media and modalities, Transmedia Stories shows us why design matters for questions of justice. This is a must-read for media studies.”

— Jentery Sayers, University of Victoria