von Elisabeth Birk und Mark Halawa

By Jakob Krebs | Literal literacy can be used as a vantage point for the reconstruction of intricate relations between three further kinds of literacy. Pictorial literacy can be contrasted with literal literacy at least in phenomenological and epistemological regards. This contrast helps to separate different modes of representation as issues of information literacy. Information literacy relies on a productive concurrence of different types of literacies, while visual literacy is neither restricted to the search for information nor to pictorial signs.

Von Andreas Osterroth | Das Ziel des vorliegenden Beitrages ist die Vorstellung verschiedener Möglichkeiten, Internet-Memes aus linguistischer Sicht zu betrachten. Hierfür ist ein kurzer Überblick über die Bildlinguistik nötig und der sogenannte pictorial turn muss bewertet werden. Ausdrücke verschiedener führender Linguisten, wie Sprache-Bild-Text, Sehflächen und andere, müssen vor der Analyse betrachtet werden.

Von Andreas Josef Vater | The bible-compilation Geistliche Herzens-Einbildungen in zweihundertund-fünfzig biblischen Figur-Sprüchen angedeutet was first published by Melchior Mattsperger in 1684. The work’s most notable feature are figures substituting words. Today they are mainly considered as an educational instrument for children to improve their language- and reading-skills. In my paper I am questioning this point of view by taking a closer look at the figures and by investigating the reasons for such a misguided interpretation. I will demonstrate that Mattsperger’s book was originally intended as an intellectual game. Furthermore, I will argue that such a reevaluation requires a fundamental shift in the so far one-sided linguistical perception of figures of substitution.

By Axel Roderich Werner | According to art historian James Elkins, the very term of ›visual literacy‹ is to be assessed as an at least »slightly dubious expression« (ELKINS 2008: 8) if not, in its linking of the scriptural to the pictorial or the discoursive to the non-discoursive, as an outright »self-defeating paradox« (ELKINS 2008: 5). In much of the same sense, William Mitchell views this arguably problematic though historically quite successful term as »a strong and seemingly unavoidable metaphor« (MITCHELL 2008a: 11) in which, though not mutually exclusive, the term of ›reading‹ serving as the vehicle and the term of ›vision‹ as the tenor thus are establishing a kind of hierarchy by apparently privileging the former over the latter in a kind of catachresis (in which the metaphor fills the gap of the lack of a literal or ›proper‹ designation)—literacy explains visuality just as texts explain pictures. […]

By Sascha Demarmels, Ursula Stalder und Sonja Kolberg | Storytelling as a means to raise the motivation of recipients to process information and to support the comprehension of marketing texts written for products that are in need of an explanation. Recent studies on marketing for sustainable energy products have shown that comprehensibility for complex goods often fails because of the low motivation of the recipients to read and process information. We therefore ask how texts have to be shaped in order to reach consumers. Today ›texts‹ are no longer considered to consist only of verbal material but of different codes—they are multimodal. The question is, then, how to increase motivation by enacting the content, by ›staging it‹. Dual processing theories and the strategy of storytelling may prove to be helpful, as some outstanding examples in current marketing practice for sustainable energy have shown.

By Kathryn M. Hudson and John S. Henderson | Orthodox analytical approaches to analyses of Maya stelae—monuments that celebrate Maya kings visually and in hieroglyphic texts (see fig. 1)—proceed as though each contains two distinct and only vaguely related elements: the text and the accompanying imagery. These features are most often conceptualized, analyzed, and interpreted separately in a methodological framework that has created a widely shared perspective in which text and context have become thoroughly divorced from each other but reified as distinct constituent elements. […]

Von Tobias Schöttler

Von Christa Sütterlin

Von Martina Dobbe

By David Magnus | The term visual literacy has been used in numerous fields of research for almost half a century. Despite its ›interdisciplinary career‹ the different approaches share a pedagogical tendency which has somewhat informed this notion since the Rochester Conference in 1969 at which it was first discussed. The present paper, however, will leave aside the educational aspect in order to give way to an inquiry from the perspective of contemporary writing theories that set their focus on the iconic potential of notations. A reconstruction of the main aspects of Nelson Goodman’s theory of notation, which has been enthusiastically adopted by several contemporary authors will be followed by an account of the epistemological understanding of what has been lately described as notational iconicity. This approach shall be enriched by a terminological supplement capable to meet the requirements of pictorially designed notations. The term proposed in this paper is aesthetical operativity and its explanation will be based on the pictorial music notation of the Austrian-Greek composer Anestis Logothetis.

By Jan-Noël Thon

By Tobias Steiner | The paradigms of media change and convergence in relation to the so-called ›new media‹ have kept scholars occupied for more than two decades. In the US and the UK, the switch from analogue to digital television comprises just the most recent step of technological developments offering an unprecedented variety of ways in which national, transnational, and global audiences are able to access television content. This article’s aim is to offer a macroscopic review of these changing ways within the US television market during the past decade.

By Amelie Zimmermann | New technological innovations offer a range of possibilities not only to tell a story via a single medium, but also to expand the diegetic world of the story via diverse devices. This leads to an expanded story universe (i.e., hyperdiegesis), not only confronting the recipients when they use the story’s core medium but also accompanying them in their daily life when using social networks or reading newspapers. This article takes into account the existing definitions of transmedia phenomena and their structures in order to suggest a theoretical approach that uses semiotic and structuralist models applicable not only to individual texts but also to their interdependent constructions.

By Robert Baumgartner | Warhammer 40,000 (or Warhammer 40k) is a science fantasy tabletop war game set in a dystopian vision of the 41st millennium, with a xenophobic and fascist galaxy-spanning ›Imperium of Man‹ fighting in numerous neverending wars against various inhuman opponents, among them transdimensional demons, ancient robots and swarms of planet-eating bugs. Since its release in 1987, the game has become one of the most successful tabletop brands and has given birth to numerous spinoffs in the form of (more than 120) novels, pen-and-paper role-playing games, comics, and video games. This article acts as an introduction to the complex structure of this particular transmedial franchise, but also explores the consequences of a ludic ›mother ship‹ for further transmedial extensions: as players experience the world by simulative means, they gain a unique ›empirical‹ approach to the facts of the world, which will influence their further dealings with other elements of the storyworld, be it a game, a novel, or a comic.

By Nieves Rosendo | Building on Henry Jenkins’ definition of transmedia storytelling as »the art of worldmaking« (JENKINS 2006: 114), which puts the world at the center of storytelling, this article focuses on two tools for the apprehension of a transmedial world from a perspective which takes into account the specificity of media and production: the transmedial ›bible‹ and the ›canon‹. For this purpose, I use as an example the entertainment franchise Halo (343i), which originated in the videogame Halo. Combat Evolved (2001).

By Felix Schröter | Video games have not only become an integral part of most transmedial entertainment franchises but also influenced the narrative and aesthetic conventions of other media, especially film. One consequence of this is the growing prominence of ›game-like‹ narratives (and storyworlds) that subordinate characters and storytelling to more abstract principles of narrative organization. In this article, it is argued that this ›game logic‹ leads to some transmedial storyworlds being especially well-suited for an adaptation as a video game, and that the novel-based transmedial world of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire is such a world.

By Krzysztof M. Maj | There is no denying that transmedia storytelling has been gaining increasing attention in recent media, literature, and game studies. Introduced in Henry Jenkins’ famous (though not aspiring to be groundbreaking) book Convergence Culture (cf. JENKINS 2006), the term has already appeared—to recall the most notable contributions—in media (cf. DENA 2009; SCOLARI 2009), game (cf. KLASTRUP/TOSCA 2004; THON 2009), literature (cf. WOLF 2012), television (cf. EVANS 2011) and, last but not least, narrative studies (cf. RYAN 2001; 2004; 2006; 2014), becoming, therefore, a hallmark of contemporary participatory culture. This instinctive association of transmedia studies with everything labeled ›new media storytelling‹ may be, however, one of the term’s few disadvantages. […]