Lightning Talk
Elika Ortega
PhD Candidate
CulturePlex Lab.
University of Western Ontario
Abstract
What is an intermedial text? Sharing many characteristics with blog narratives, intermedial narrative texts have the feature of being spread out in different media platforms, digital and analogue. The story – Jenkins’ “flow of content across multiple media platforms” – is thus largely put together by the audience. Aside from the weakened notion of authorship these types of media reveal – a process that has been ongoing for a few decades already – intermedial texts show a strengthening of the role of the readers – not just as it was proposed in phenomenological analysis or cognitive ones – but also as social actors.
In this presentation I will focus on the analysis of the two types of networks – social and textual as a means to propose a set of underlying dynamics going on at the heart of intermedial texts and which differentiate them from blog narratives. As a case study I have relied on the Orsai project. Produced in Spain and Argentina, Orsai is an intermedial text consisting of a print literary magazine, various electronic versions of it, a bar and individual blogs documenting the developments of each component. In its two years, Orsai has enjoyed a large readership and favored the formation of an online/offline community who follows the story where it goes. For this research, a graph database including both the social and textual networks was built and has been subject to extensive analysis on both fronts. The social network analysis of the project provides a means to explore the collaborative and community process of story creation (telling and reading). The textual network analysis shows the dynamics of intermedial storytelling by tracing the flow of a few key episodes of the project’s development through the media on which they are published.