Article

Convergence: The International

Journal of Research into
From subject to collaborator: New Media Technologies
2017, Vol. 23(1) 49–60
Transmedia storytelling ª The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/1354856516675252
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Donna Hancox
Queensland University of Technology, Australia

Abstract
New media technologies and the narrative turn in qualitative research have expanded the methods
through which we gather and share the stories of groups who have traditionally been written about
by others rather than telling their own stories to reveal the complexities of their experiences.
There is a long tradition in community arts, community development and social activism that posits
personal narratives as the building blocks for public understanding of complex social issues. In the
fields of community storytelling, documentary and social activism, it is possible to see an emerging
intersection between the affordances of digital technologies and the recognition of the stories of
marginalized people. This article is particularly interested in the ways storytellers have repurposed
the accepted conventions of transmedia storytelling to create projects that are able to offer a
multiplicity of voices and to create stories that can represent complex issues without privileging a
particular point of view or story form.

Keywords
Collaboration, community projects, digital storytelling, digital technology, narrative research,
participation, social activism, transmedia storytelling

Introduction
The role of narratives, and in particular personal narratives, in the context of social research has
undergone significant change in the past three decades. The narrative turn in the social sciences
deeply influenced the methods through which researchers gather data about communities and
cohorts, and also changed the modes of representing this data. This contributed to the recognition

Corresponding author:
Donna Hancox, Queensland University of Technology – Kelvin Grove Campus, Level 2, Z2, Musk Avenue., Kelvin Grove,
Queensland 4059, Australia.
Email: d.hancox@qut.edu.au
50 Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 23(1)

of stories as important mechanisms for researchers to understand the contexts and nuances of the
environments they are studying. Approaches that are embedded within the lived experiences of
subjects demonstrated a new emphasis on human agency and its relevance to understanding
broader social conditions. The purpose of quantitative research is to reveal dominant trends, while
qualitative stories serve to reveal the individual stories and their potential to extrapolate larger
issues. These stories also enable us to see ‘different and sometimes contradictory layers of
meaning, to bring them into useful dialogue with each other, and to understand more about
individual and social change’ (Andrews et al., 2013: 2). Beyond the academic applications of
narrative-based social research, there is a strong conviction in community activism that personal
narratives represent the building blocks for public understanding (see Davis, 2002; Stivers, 1993)
and that they have an important role to play in changing public opinion about particular issues.
Since the late 1990s, digital technology has provided the means for stories to be created quickly
and shared widely. In the last decade, in particular, a range of open source storytelling software has
provided those considered non-experts or amateurs with the capacity to create stories outside of
organized activities or professionally led workshops. According to Estalella and Sanchez-Criado,
‘there has been intense debate in the social sciences on the transformation that digital technologies
are introducing in the production of social knowledge. Those formerly known as non-experts or lay
are increasingly using tools to extract social data’ (2015:301), and using this data for their own
purposes. The domain of social research as the predominant means through which to gather and
share information about marginalized communities and to agitate, albeit slowly, for change and
social justice has eroded as a result, in part, of new media technologies.
In the suite of innovations in these new media technologies, transmedia storytelling represents
arguably one of the most profound transformations in storytelling. Transmedia storytelling was
first introduced into the mainstream via media theorist Henry Jenkins in 2003. At the time he
identified a pattern of storytelling that made use of emerging media platforms that were readily
available to and being utilized by everyday consumers. Jenkins described rather than defined
transmedia storytelling as a story that ‘unfolds across multiple media platforms with each new text
making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole’ (2003). Since its inception, trans-
media storytelling has continued to develop in important and unexpected ways. Original examples
of transmedia storytelling tended to be tethered to major mainstream creative artefacts (or
‘motherships’) such as a feature film or television series (see Matrix, Lost and Spooks) and the
other elements were deployed as a means of marketing or as extensions of the narrative that were
ultimately extraneous to the central story. However, contemporary transmedia stories are
increasingly a constellation of media, forms and modes of storytelling that create a holistic nar-
rative in which different aspects of the story – time frame, a rich detailed storyworld or multiple
points of view – are told in a way that brings together form and content to create a unique aesthetic.
One of the central philosophies of this type of transmedia is a commitment to a de-centralized
concept of authorship that does not privilege one voice, one part of the story or one platform over
another. These projects incorporate recognizable conventions of transmedia storytelling but also
borrow from other forms of storytelling that predate transmedia such as digital storytelling and
documentary film-making.
This bricolage approach to transmedia has the potential to contribute profoundly to social
research projects that use personal narratives. This article explores the ways in which transmedia
storytelling can contribute to narrative and social research to both create and share personal
narratives that emerge from innovative collaborations with the communities being studied. The
article will explore the role of narrative in social change, and the unique qualities of transmedia
Hancox 51

storytelling that make it especially useful for social researchers will be discussed. A series of
transmedia storytelling as activism projects will also be investigated to provide useful examples of
how to consult, create and collaborate with communities.

Narrative-based research and social change

In Narratives, Health and Healing, Harter et al. (2008: 3) maintained that ‘narrative is a fun-
damental way of giving meaning to experience’. It is also capable of giving voice and meaning to
the experiences of groups and communities who have previously only been represented through
research, in the media or government policy by others rather than determining their own forms of
representation. The belief that stories have an important role to play in social change has an
abiding place in many organizations and social movements. In Australia, storytelling projects
about the Stolen Generation and The Forgotten Australians were instrumental in bringing the
plights of these groups into public consciousness and successfully agitating for official apologies
from the government at the time (see Adkins and Hancox, 2014; Burgess, 2006). In part, the
underlying philosophy behind these kinds of storytelling activities is a belief that having the
opportunity to tell their own stories empowers individuals and communities, and that sustainable
change occurs from within empowered communities. Nevertheless, stories do not exist in a
vacuum and the purpose of many community storytelling or social research projects is to bring
those stories into the public discourse.
Polkinghorne (1988: 18) suggested that ‘narrative is a meaning making structure that organizes
events and human actions into a whole, thereby attributing significance to individual actions and
events according to their effect on the whole’ and, as such, it privileges plot structure as a central
feature. This emphasis is generally considered integral to narrative and suggests a need for a linear
and coherent order of events for a story to be effective in communicating with an audience.
However, stories and narratives have multiple purposes, and in some instances, a story can be
represented through various media and in abstract ways to convey the experiences of the story-
tellers and to engage the audience in a way that ‘stimulates the audience’s creative participation
and identification and invites them to supply what is unspecified yet required’ (Davis, 2002: 16).
Social/narrative research projects often create and analyse a series of individual stories in an
effort to reflect the multiplicity of voices and heterogeneous experiences in any environment.
These kinds of projects require a progressive understanding of research practices. Narrative
research and praxis focuses on ‘more holistic research process while sharing mutual responsi-
bilities to enhance understanding of local phenomenon and explore the transformative possi-
bilities for improving local context’ (Blodgett et al., 2011: 523). Stories used in this way do not
promise widespread understanding and resolution of social issues or inequality simply because a
narrative has been created and shared by those directly affected. Rather, they signal that there is
more to be done and more to be understood, and these changes need to be established from within
those local contexts.
As previously mentioned, the prevalence of non-experts instigating their own storytelling
projects or taking on roles outside that of research subject in research projects due to digital
technology has changed the ways we frame and view personal narratives in these instances. ‘The
elaboration of research methods by non-experts brings into existence forms of social research that
destabilise the expertise and authority of the social sciences . . . social scientists could interpellate
these others as collaborators rather than as research subjects’ (Andrews et al., 2013: 302). The
current confluence of the continued narrative turn in social research, the ubiquity of new media
52 Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 23(1)

technologies and transmedia storytelling specifically has created the space for what might be called
amplified collaborations between researchers and subjects. Estalla and Sanchez-Criado have
identified the fruitful intervention of digital technology into social research, and the possibility it
brings for new approaches to collaboration stating: ‘A collaboration of this kind involves recon-
sidering the role of the social scientists as experts, a risky situation that however offers the
opportunity for renewal in social science’ (2015: 302). Digital technology and new media tech-
nologies in and of themselves are not responsible for the possibilities proposed in this article. It is
the way in which these existing and emerging technologies are repurposed and adapted by users
that creates new narrative-based methodologies.

Transmedia storytelling as a set of hybrid practices

Transmedia storytelling by its very nature is multilayered and dialogic, and as a means of creating
and communicating personal narrative allows for increasingly horizontal modes of authorship and
further dismantling of the concept of the expert researcher and storyteller. Andrews et al. describe
post-structuralist, postmodern, psychoanalytic and deconstructionist approaches to narrative
research as having
assumed that multiple, disunified subjectivities were involved in the production and understanding of
narratives, rather than singular, agentic storytellers and hearers, and it was preoccupied with the social
formations shaping language and subjectivity. In this tradition, the storyteller does not tell the story, so
much as she is told by it (2013: 4).

This is also applicable to some approaches to transmedia storytelling.

Digital storytelling to transmedia storytelling

The most widely understood versions of transmedia storytelling originally emerged out of a
commercial framework that had deployed cross-media methods of creative marketing and audi-
ence engagement; however, ‘these practices take on new visibility in a networked culture’ (Jen-
kins, 2013b: 133). The contemporary complex and hybrid version of transmedia storytelling
discussed in this article has its origins in that history but also maintains strong traces of digital
storytelling, documentary film-making and interactive design. This evolution disrupts the most
common definitions of platforms or mediums, but Ryan (2016: 5) suggests that a medium is best
understood as an inherently polyvalent term whose meaning involves technological, semiotic and
cultural dimensions. This is a useful lens through which to view the form of transmedia storytelling
explored in this article and their attempts to present a diversity of voices and points of view.
In ‘Hybrid Stories’, Tom Abba (2009: 61) states that ‘new media favour a multiplicity of voices
(a digital version of an iteration of Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of multivocality)’ and Jenkins (2009)
discusses the concept stating ‘multiplicity allows fans to take pleasure in alternate retellings’.
Jenkins (2013: 170) adds ‘the concept of multiplicity paves the way for us to think about fan fiction
and other forms of grassroots expression as part of the same transmedia logic’. This acknowl-
edgement of ‘transmedia logic’ rather than a transmedia definition is important and allows for a
broader consideration of the applications for transmedia storytelling. It also encourages change
rather than conformity in the form unlike some of the practices and movements it has grown out of.
One of those practices that have clearly influenced the transmedia projects discussed in this
article is digital storytelling. Much has been and continues to be written about digital storytelling as
Hancox 53

a site for participation within a culture and as a means to improve digital literacy in segments of the
society traditionally under-represented as participants in the digital culture (see Burgess, 2006;
Hartley, 2009; Hartley and McWilliam, 2009; Lundby, 2008; Meadows, 2003). Within this con-
text, the scope and definition of digital storytelling has changed significantly in the past 10 years. A
digital story is generally a two-to-four-minute multimedia story in which photographs, film and
drawings are used to convey a personal story, personally narrated by the storyteller. Digital
storytelling as it has been theorized by scholars such as Hartley, Lundby, Lambert and Couldry is a
workshop-based practice in which individuals and communities are taught by expert facilitators
how to create the audiovisual stories after intensive workshopping of the script via a participatory
story circle and in conjunction with the facilitator. The rise of digital storytelling in the early and
mid-2000s in part mirrored the broad shift towards a more participatory online culture that pri-
vileges user-generated content and ordinary stories over content from official sources. One of the
digital storytelling fills ‘a gap between everyday cultural practice and professional media’
(Hartley, 2009:122).
In 2013, two digital storytelling conferences – the 5th International Digital Storytelling
Conference in Ankara, Turkey, and DS8 Digital Storytelling Festival in Cardiff – attracted the
most influential thinkers and practitioners in the field. Both conferences were concerned with
the question of what can be defined as digital storytelling in a contemporary landscape
with increased ability by ordinary people to create their own stories outside the workshop
framework that had been central to digital storytelling. Another area of discussion was the desire
by many practitioners to be more flexible about their approach to what makes a ‘good story’ and
to be sensitive to the varying audiences and intentions of individual projects to expand the
usefulness of these projects and respond to the changes delivered by new technologies. At the
2013 DS8 Festival in Cardiff, Mandy Rose in her keynote address stated that the ‘edges around
documentary, storytelling, digital storytelling and activism are getting blurred’ and that content
is increasingly coming from a variety of sources from across the web and that the assumed
authority of forms such as digital storytelling and documentary film-making gets called into
question, as does the role of the facilitator or author. ‘In short, he (the author) no longer depends
on himself to convey a particular narrative program’ (Castells, 2010: 72). The shift away from
traditional digital storytelling opened up space for community activists and researchers to
consider new practices for storytelling.

Storyworlds and world building beyond fiction

Digital storytelling offers a limited, though very personal, perspective and environment in which
to locate a personal narrative. Through its use of multiple narrative forms and media, transmedia
storytelling is able to build a much wider and heterogeneous setting for stories. These detailed
and expansive storyworlds are acknowledged as being a crucial element to transmedia story-
telling and are evident in the early, commercial examples of transmedia projects. Being able to
create an environment that can encompass the variety of experiences and points of view that exist
in the real world through different forms of media creates the possibility for the general public to
engage and interact with stories in ways that are situated and therefore contextualized to foster
the potential for greater understanding and empathy. ‘A storyworld is not just the spatial setting
where a story takes place; it is a complex spatio-temporal totality that undergoes global changes’
(Ryan, 2016: 13). In her earlier work on storyworlds across media, Marie-Laure Ryan with Thon
(2014: 1) claims:
54 Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 23(1)

the replacement of narrative with storyworld acknowledges the emergence of the concept of ‘world’
not only in narratology but also on the broader cultural scene. Nowadays we have not only multi-modal
representations of storyworlds that combine various types of signs and virtual online worlds that wait to
be filled with stories by their player citizens but also serial storyworlds that span multiple instalments
and transmedial storyworlds that are deployed simultaneously across multiple media platforms, result-
ing in a media landscape in with creators and fans alike constantly expand, revise and even parody.

By considering storyworlds beyond both a description of setting in a language-based narratol-

ogy context or as a fictional universe created for comic books or feature films, Ryan provides a
‘much-needed centre of convergence and point of comparison to media studies’ (2).
Two projects – Highrise and 18 Days in Egypt – will be discussed in length later to elaborate on
how transmedia storytelling can provide examples for social researchers to consider more inclusive
methodologies and to collaborate with subjects in ways that reimagine the relationship between
researcher and subject through their commitment to co-creation and participation. But at this point,
it is useful to briefly explore other transmedia projects that focus on particular aspects of trans-
media storytelling such as world building, engagement and participation. Welcome to Pinepoint
and Hollow are striking examples of creating dense storyworlds out of real-world environments.
Through video footage, photographs, audio and text, the creators of Welcome to Pinepoint, Paul
Shoebridge and Michael Simons, present the story of a town that no longer exists. Pinepoint was a
community planned around an open-cut mine, and when the mine closed down in 1988, the single
industry town also closed. Shoebridge and Simons manage to capture not just the geographical
details of the town so the audience understands its location and characteristic, they also capture the
social and cultural details of the time and place. The project is designed to resemble a photo album
from the 1980s, and using this nostalgic aesthetic, they manage to convey a mood and a spirit that
is necessary to truly understand the cast of characters who share their experiences of growing up in
Pinepoint and their feelings about its eventual demolition. The details of the town are the key to the
universality of this story and to the connection created with audiences. This is a story not only
about place and memory but is also a larger story about the macroeconomics that influence lives
and how individual fates are tied to corporate decisions. When a town closes down or loses an
influential industry, the everyday stories about the lives affected and the struggle to continue are
often lost. The storyworld created in Welcome to Pinepoint shows that storyworlds are larger than
what is directly shown in the text, larger than the narrative ‘here’ and ‘now’ (Ryan, 2016: 4).
Welcome to Pinepoint reveals what existed before the town died, so that audience can connect with
the real lives and dreams that lived and died in that town.

I think we just told the story how we thought we could tell it. We think it’s more part memoir for people
growing up at that time and feeling things about what memory was to us, what tangible objects meant to
us, and how memory gets flaky but interesting and romantic. Sometimes concrete and sometimes
evocative (Macaulay, 2012).

The director of Hollow, Elaine McMillion, echoes this sentiment when she discusses her
decision not to make a linear documentary with an observational approach about McDowell
County. McMillion stated in 2013 in Filmmaker that when she arrived at McDowell County, she
found ‘really phenomenal stories of pride and hope’ and realized that ‘she wasn’t comfortable
editing those into 75-minute form and putting a title slide saying ‘‘The End’’’. This shift to more
interactive modes and multi-authored stories is more than the inevitable use of technology; it is
also a conscious decision to radicalize the nature of the form. Hollow is a ‘community
Hancox 55

participatory’ project and interactive documentary that explores the social and economic devasta-
tion of rural towns in America through the story of McDowell County in West Virginia. It brings
together personal digital stories, photography, sound, interactive data and grass-roots mapping on a
HTML5 website that was designed to explore the many stereotypes associated with the area,
population loss and potential for the future.
At the centre of the project are around 30 stories made about and by the residents of McDowell
using video, stills, text and voice-over that are reminiscent of traditional digital stories. In a 2013
interview in Filmmaker, McMillion claims that ‘the stories are encountered within this landscape
so that the people featured emerge from a context of place and community. We were really
avoiding database storytelling, where you simply sort the videos and watch what you’re interested
in’. Hollow is interesting in a number of respects, as a finished product, it looks and feels like the
very conscious combination of digital storytelling, documentary film-making and transmedia
storytelling. The intentions of the creators are also explicit, with McMillion stating:
I believe it is time that we let the community take control of their identity and allow them to amplify
their own voices and ideas. Our hope is that through storytelling and the creation of multidimensional
images, the community members will begin to see their environments and neighbors in a new way and
begin to work together to preserve the history and make positive contributions to their communities.

In both these projects, the multiple methods deployed to create the environments in which they
are set as examples of not only the impact that attention to storyworld can have on non-fiction
projects but also the consideration of how particular media and platforms can be utilized to best
portray particular aspects of the world.

Transmedia activism, participation and engagement

Transmedia activism as defined by Lina Srivastava (2009) on her blog linasrivastava.com allows
for the audience to experience an issue through multiple perspectives, and in turn, to build a deeper
understanding due to the ability of transmedia to present a number of points of view, and to
authentically depict or represent complex ecologies and complex issues. In the same ways,
transmedia storytelling can be understood as philosophy of storytelling and an ecology of media
tools that can be utilized in various forms depending on the needs of the project (such as who and
where are the audiences; what forms might amplify the voices of the storytellers; how can each
form be used to their best potential to work with certain parts of the story). The two previous
projects discussed were clearly focused on world building and immersive environments to create a
space for audiences to experience the stories in a situated way. Other projects are concerned with
avenues through which audiences can engage and participate deeply with the content and issues.
These projects involve the kind of fan engagement Jenkins identifies first in Convergence Culture
and explores further in Spreadable Media. Brough and Shresthova claim ‘what is most relevant
here however, if that fan communities often form around content worlds, that may not be explicitly
political in nature, but can offer resources or spaces for political engagement’ (2012: n.p.). This
form of activism appeals to fans who feel an affinity with the characters or broad themes of a film/
book/television series and the use of the content world serves to encourage fans to either participate
directly through events or fundraising promoted explicitly by the creators or to find their own ways
to engage with the ideas.
It is difficult to discuss transmedia activism without mentioning KONY2012. KONY2012 was
not associated with a mainstream feature film (though the documentary uploaded to YouTube was
56 Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 23(1)

the entry point for most participants – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v¼Y4MnpzG5Sqc) and

was led by a not-for-profit organization called Invisible Children. It had the explicit primary
purpose of moving from awareness to action that would result in the capture of the leader of the
Lord’s Resistance Army, Joseph Kony, by the end of 2012. The phenomenon of KONY2012 is still
being understood and analysed, both for its extraordinary appeal and its failure to achieve its
ultimate aim. It also came under a great deal of criticism from a range of sectors within days of the
video being uploaded. As a transmedia project, KONY2012 is a textbook example making use of a
documentary film, graphic novel, music video, t-shirts, posters and real-world events. Jenkins has
defended criticisms of the KONY2012 project as being a gimmick by pointing out that it was not
borne out of an online documentary that ‘went viral’, rather its ‘circulation depended on the
hundreds of thousands of young people who already felt connected to the organization and to this
cause through their participation in school-based clubs and grassroots campaigns over almost a
decade’ (Jenkins, 2013: n.p.), though in 2013, Jenkins reassessed KONY2012 and Invisible
Children, in terms of their success, stating: ‘Invisible Children was too centralised, not sufficiently
participatory and knowledge was not adequately dispersed across the network’ (2013: 274).
KONY2012 would seem to have features in common with the concept of amplified activism;
however, unlike 18 Days in Egypt, Highrise (to be discussed in the next section) or Hollow
KONY2012 does not present the experiences of those affected by Kony in their own words for the
audience to understand and respond to, or even to raise awareness of the plight of child soldiers in
Uganda. Despite its multiple ways of disseminating information, it presents a centralized voice that
tells the audience what to think. ‘The campaign Invisible Children offers an extremely simple
narrative: Kony is a uniquely bad actor, a horrific human being whose capture will end suffering
for the people of Northern Uganda’ (http:/www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2012/unpacking-kony-
2012), and his capture could only happen through the military and political intervention of Western
countries, namely the United States. This positing of an uncomplicated scenario with a clear
solution is the antithesis of the amplified activism.
Activism is commonly seen as a resistant practice and most excursions into any form of online
activism can be understood as part of a series of disruptive exercises such as culture jamming.
However, back in 2006, Jenkins questioned whether ‘the old concept of culture jamming has
outlived its usefulness. The old rhetoric of opposition and co-option assumed a world where
consumers had little direct power to shape the media’ (2006: 225–226) and ‘resistance becomes
an end in and of itself rather than a tool to ensure cultural diversity and corporate responsibility’
(259). The kind of activism illustrated in projects such as 18 Days in Egypt, Highrise and Hollow
are inclusive in their approach rather than combative. They are also focused on illuminating
hitherto unexamined aspects of an issue, particularly the experiences of the people involved to
‘create alternative media representations and express alternative political imaginaries based on
an emerging network ideal’ (Juris, 2004: 98). This approach echoes Castell’s theory of net-
worked power ‘the re-programming of communication networks, so becoming able to convey
messages that introduce new values to the minds of people and inspire hope for political change’
(Castells, 2009). If activism such as culture jamming used imagination and appropriation to draw
attention to problems, these projects attempt to draw attention to potential for change from
within the communities, which is an important distinction from the examples of transmedia
activism previously discussed.
Carpentier stresses the distance between participation and interaction in relation to digital media
projects, whereby participation requires input into decision-making and interaction is associated
with sociocommunicative relations (2013: 275). He also presents two modes of participation: in
Hancox 57

and through the media. It would seem that these are not oppositional avenues of participation, but
his definition offers further insight into the multitude of ways individuals are able to participate.
While participation in the media can be clearly understood, as the ability to make decisions about
the media products while

participation through media opens up another field of the participatory process, in other areas of
decision making, which have more to do with how people can enter public spaces and use media to
enter into societal debates, dialogue and deliberations (2013: 274).

Highrise and 18 Days in Egypt are examples of projects created from within communities and
make use of media in innovative ways to uncover new understandings of environments and cohorts
and events. Thumin (2012: 7–8) has pointed out that so-called self-representations in digital media
are often representations of a set of people made by another set of people. These two projects strive
to facilitate the authentic self-representation of the groups involved and have documented the
experiences and the hopes for the future of the participants.
Highrise is described as ‘a multi-year and many-media collaborative documentary experiment
at the National Film Board of Canada’ (http://highrise.nfb.ca, accessed 10 August 2013). The
online project comprises two main components – Out my Window and The One Millionth Tower.
The aim is to ‘see how the documentary process can drive and participate in social innovation
rather than just to document it’ (http://highrise.nfb.ca, accessed 10 August 2015). Katerina Cizek,
director of Out my Window, describes the stories as coming from relationships built through the
early research into highrise living across the world. These initial research subjects and sources of
information developed into creators of the stories for Out my Window. Cizek did not travel to each
of the countries represented on the site and instead created a

twenty-five page technical and creative brief that had all the details on how to gather materials for the
project: equipment to use, minimum resolution for photos, how to send materials to us. Even more
importantly, we gave information on how to develop the stories and on looking for objects that could
serve as trigger points for the stories (http://colabradio.mit.edu/qa-highrise-documentary-filmmaker-
katerina-cizek/, accessed 18 May 2016).

This process seems startlingly similar to the ways in which traditional digital storytelling
projects are developed; however, in this instance, the participants are provided with the informa-
tion to create stories about their own homes without the presence of a facilitator or researcher
present. While the aesthetic and philosophical approaches of the project were presented for the
participants to adhere to the content, and the core of the stories was less controlled than digital
storytelling or documentary film-making.
The One Millionth Tower (http://highrise.nfb.ca/onemillionthtower/1mt_no_webgl.php?
alternate¼fail&bandwidth¼high) was released in August 2012 and tells the story of one
Canadian highrise in a 3-D immersive documentary powered entirely by HTML5, WebGL and
other open-source JavaScript libraries. The residents of the crumbling tower block collaborated
with a group of architects, animators and web developers to create the three-dimensional doc-
umentary. The first stage was for the residents and architects to survey the space around the
buildings, and to reimagine the space together. Following this consultation, architects and ani-
mators brought the images to life for residents to review and approve the rough cut. Then,
animators and residents shot live action footage and the web developers turned the film into
virtual space. After the film was released, residents won a grant to build a new playground; in
58 Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 23(1)

part, this is attributed to the work they had done during The One Millionth Tower project in
reimagining the space and consequently their ability to move quickly in making it a reality. It is
in this spirit of cooperation and sharing of knowledge and expertise to create a new future for and
by the residents that captures the possibilities of transmedia storytelling for researchers and
activists working together in communities.
18 Days in Egypt is a group storytelling project that encourages a dynamic and dialogic method
of storytelling via the use of many contemporary storytelling techniques such as tweets, Facebook
updates and mobile phone footage and uploading them to the purpose-built 18 Days in Egypt site.
Egyptians were encouraged to contribute any stories they had from Tahrir Square and then invite
family and friends to contribute to the story uploaded by adding their own perspective on the
events. This has resulted in a multifaceted, multiperspective, multivocal version of each particular
story. The only explicit interference from the producers/creators may be to request contextualizing
information such as what day did the events occur on or in what location.
Despite the open and inclusive nature of 18 Days in Egypt, the creators – Yasmin Elayat, an
interactive designer, and Jigar Mehta, a video journalist and digital entrepreneur – decided to also
involve ‘fellows’ to be responsible for ‘gathering media, conducting interviews and serving as a
bridge between the online community and the offline world’ (www.pbs.org/pov/blog/2012/05/18-
days-in-egypt-co-creator-jigar-mehta/#.UhLVnak4TPk). Subsequently, the site is a combination
of entirely user-generated content and other stories that have been co-created with the fellows.
When discussing the future for 18 Days in Egypt, Eleyat says
we haven’t actually settled on what the final experience will be yet of these stories but we do know
what we want is to have any audience coming to our site to feel empathy for the characters. By showing
you many many stories, and having the users decide who to keep following, we think that’s a strong
way of building empathy with a character and getting that insight.

The stories themselves cover many different topics from ‘The picture that almost got me killed’,
‘The Motorcycle Heroes’ to interviews with rural farmers conducted by the fellows to ‘One Year
Later’ and ‘Morsi’s Moment in Time’. Just as the Egyptian political landscape is evolving, this
project is evolving. This is an important project to discuss as it utilizes many of the features of
innovative and open collaboration, and a creative use of stories and platforms but it is also a
difficult one to evaluate because of the ongoing upheaval in Egypt. 18 Days in Egypt explicitly
deals with the days leading up to the 2011 Egyptian revolution, and reflects the excitement and
hope evident in the change; however, the mood in Egypt currently would seem quite different. But
it would seem that the overarching aim of 18 Days in Egypt was to capture this moment, and it
undoubtedly has done that. In the process, it has also demonstrated the impossibility of ever really
writing a history, even from within that history.

Conclusion
The ongoing role for researchers in narrative-based social research is in question. As communities
and individuals can increasingly create and disseminate their own stories to agitate for recognition
and change, it rests with researchers to consider their role in this relationship rather than auto-
matically assuming their own authority or even their necessity in the process. The intersection of
the narrative turn and the affordances of transmedia storytelling present researchers with the
opportunity to reconsider the frameworks in which they conduct situated research and how they
consider the politics of collaboration in these instances.
Hancox 59

Its starting point is an invocation for the dismantling of the monolithic distinction between experts and
non-experts; under these circumstances, the conventions of our methods treat others as informants or
research subjects have to be suspended, and the social researcher is forced to explore how to articulate
his/her knowledge production anew (Andrews et al., 2013: 3–4).

The projects discussed in this article represent emerging approaches to agitating for social
change that is interdisciplinary by nature and utilizes digital technology for its creation as well
as dissemination. Our ability to gain knowledge and insight into experiences outside our own is
greater than ever before, and with it comes a responsibility to acknowledge the experience of others
and to consider how collaboration and participation are enacted. Nico Carpentier believes that
currently the effectiveness of participation is linked to the ‘need to revert to the microanalytics of
power, looking at how specific participatory practices are characterized by specific power balances
and struggles at different levels, moments, and locations’ (Jenkins, 2013: 267). If the aim of
narrative-based social research is, at least partly, to recognize and amplify the voices of margin-
alized groups and to present person-centred investigations of the world, then the intervention of
transmedia storytelling into this tradition can allow for more equitable and diffuse power relation-
ships between researcher and collaborators.

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Author biography
Donna Hancox is Director of Research Quality for the Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University
of Technology. She has published extensively about narrative innovation in transmedia storytelling and its
potential for marginalized voices. Her research projects include community storytelling projects utilizing
digital technology with under represented groups.