Followers of this blog will have noticed recent posts about multimodality – about what it means, and about how ‘literature’ and ‘modality’ are being framed in the draft Australian Curriculum.
This post is part sharing with you, and part bookmarking for myself. My explorations of multimodal theory have lead me to looking further into TRANSLITERACY and TRANSMEDIA.
Kate Pullinger put me onto this term initially, inviting me to take a look at the website for the Transliteracy Research Group. The group proposes this working definition for transliteracy:
Transliteracy is the ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media from signing and orality through handwriting, print, TV, radio and film, to digital social networks.
As well as the TRG material, Christy Dena’s PhD thesis Transmedia Practice: Theorising the Practice of Expressing a Fictional World across Distinct Media and Environments is another source that I will be looking into further:
“In the past few years there have been a number of theories emerge in media, film,television, narrative and game studies that detail the rise of what has been variously described as transmedia, cross-media and distributed phenomena. Fundamentally, the phenomenon involves the employment of multiple media platforms for expressing a fictional world.” (Dena, 2009: Abstract)
With my PhD coming to a close, these tangled notions of literacy and textuality are interesting me more and more…much reading to be done!
Kelli McGraw 
#1 by Kate Tracy on June 22, 2010 - 1:33 pm
Hi
I really enjoy reading your posts Kelli – always great food for thought. It’s a huge area – one we need to spend a lot of time thinking and learning about. It would be good if it had a higher profile around the traps. I’ve also found some of the Kalantzis and Cope materials interesting – book is called New Learning. Easy website with interesting materials.