How to organise information about transmedia?

CHAPTER 4

How to organise information about transmedia?

4.1 IFLA LRM 4.1.1 A basic history In the 1990s library cataloguing seemed to face an identity crisis. The crisis was mostly triggered by the rapid rise of digital technologies and online publishing activities that introduced new rules and players into the field of information organisation. The basic objectives of the catalogue e as defined by Cutter back in the 19th century e did retain their relevance in the new environment, but what had profoundly changed was the whole context around them, including the meanings of the words author, edition and, last but not least, the phrase what the library has. Hybrid and digital libraries, distributed information systems, full-text indexing and subject gateways were the talk of the day. Librarians seemed perplexed about how to catalogue the Web using traditional tools such as classification schemes. The uniformity of bibliographic data envisaged by the standardisation efforts carried out during the 1960s and heavily promoted by the Programme of Universal Bibliographic Control was not achieved on the planned scale. The fitness of MARC-based records for the online environment was questioned in the light of the emergence of new encoding standards such as XML. In summary, libraries began to view cataloguing as a complicated and vastly expensive service that needed to be reexamined in terms of sufficiency and rationality. The early 1990s were largely marked by the attempts of library community to agree upon a minimal set of data elements that should be included in a bibliographic record for the purpose of shared cataloguing and international data exchange. The need to define a basic level of cataloguing was not caused solely by the impact of the Web: it mainly emerged out of the growing rate of automation and shared cataloguing programmes during the 1980s. However, new technological context certainly added to this selfreflexivity. Metadata for Transmedia Resources ISBN 978-0-08-101293-2 https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-101293-2.00004-5

Copyright © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

103

104

Metadata for Transmedia Resources

At the 1990 Stockholm Seminar on Bibliographic Records, sponsored by the IFLA Universal Bibliographic Control and International MARC Programme and the IFLA Division of Bibliographic Control, a resolution was adopted to commission a study that would identify basic functions performed by the bibliographic record with respect to various media, applications and user needs (IFLA, 1998, p. 2). The original aim of the study was to recommend basic data requirements for records created by national bibliographic agencies, in order to reduce cataloguing costs without failing to provide essential information that fulfils basic user needs. In 1992 members of the study group were appointed by the IFLA Cataloguing Section and Classification and Indexing Section. The efforts of the study group eventually resulted in the document entitled Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records: Final Report, which came to be widely known by the acronym FRBR. FRBR isolated fundamental user tasks (find, identify, select and obtain) and aligned them with individual data elements using the methodology of entity-relationship modelling, commonly employed for data modelling in relational databases. As previously explained, the function of a data model is to provide an overview of the domain represented in an information system. An entity-relationship model fulfils this task by defining key objects of users’ interest (entities), data that essentially describe instances of these entities (attributes) and relationships between the entities. Although the FRBR study aimed to define a core set of bibliographic data elements, in the end it did not produce a universally adopted specification. Instead it resulted in something that would prove extremely consequential in the long run. As ironic as it may seem for a document with a word record in the title, for the first time in decades FRBR offered an analysis of bibliographic data from a fresh, format-neutral point of view that broke away with a deeply entrenched notion of a fixed, static catalogue record: The study makes no a priori assumptions about the bibliographic record itself, either in terms of content or structure. It takes a user-focused approach to analyzing data requirements insofar as it endeavours to define in a systematic way what it is that the user expects to find information about in a bibliographic record and how that information is used. IFLA (1998, pp. 3e4)

One of the major novelties in the FRBR was a disaggregation of the concept of a resource into four discrete aspects that run from the most abstract to the most concrete: work, expression, manifestation and item. This group of entities came to be known as WEMI stack.

How to organise information about transmedia?

105

Work in FRBR is defined as a distinct intellectual or artistic creation. Basically it is an abstract idea in the mind of a creator, which becomes realised through expression e a sequence of alpha-numeric, musical, or choreographic notation, sound, image, or any other type of signs or a combination of sign systems. Expression is still abstract and needs to be conveyed by manifestation e a physical object such as a book, a poster, a video tape etc. Sometimes an expression of a work is manifested in a single unique object, as in the case of a manuscript or an oil painting, while in other cases a manifestation consists of a set of multiple copies (e.g. an entire edition). If the latter is the case, manifestation is exemplified by an item, a single physical exemplar that in practice represents a main source for description of the other three entities. Admittedly this was far from the first time that observations about multifaceted nature of resources appeared in bibliographic theory. Ambiguity of the word book is already implicitly recognised in Cutter’s objectives of the catalogue which, as is well-known, should assist the user in the choice of a book as to its edition (i.e. manifestation) as well as to its literary or topical character (subject or genre, i.e. data pertaining to work). Early book catalogues were actually organised in a way that strongly reminds of the WEMI structure, with translations and editions collocated under the title of the work. This principle was discontinued in card catalogues. As much as the card catalogue was more flexible and practical compared to published volumes, it did not have the capacity to describe all aspects of a resource on equal terms. Its building blocks were standardised cards that contained bibliographic description and were filed under the main entry. The main entry meant that one aspect of a resource had to be chosen as the focus of description. The choice does not make much difference in the majority of cases where a physical unit coincides with the work contained in it, e.g. when a printed volume accommodates a single novel, especially if the work did not generate any new editions, translations etc. But when a single volume contains three novels by different authors, or a single work is published in three volumes, the question whether the catalogue should primarily describe works or manifestations becomes essential. This question was extensively discussed by Seymour Lubetzky and Eva Verona during the first International Conference on Cataloguing Principles in Paris in 1961, but without an agreement: whereas Verona gave preference to the physical item (Verona, 1959), Lubetzky was in favour of the work. Eventually both perspectives were included in the Statement of Principles (also known as the Paris Principles), a document published as an outcome of the Conference

106

Metadata for Transmedia Resources

and intended to serve as a guidance in the development of national cataloguing rules. According to the Principles, the catalogue should answer both which works by a particular author and which editions of a particular work are available in the library (IFLA, 1971, p. xiii). In practice, however, manifestation won out: due to practical reasons such as shelving and circulation, as well as historical ones (cataloguing originated from bibliography, a discipline that addressed books as physical objects, while their content was traditionally a matter of interest to other disciplines, such as literary history), the catalogue remained focused on the physical item. Whereas information about manifestations was considered mandatory by a majority of standards and rules (Clarke, 2014), information about works, in spite of their undoubted importance, was provided reluctantly and unevenly. Studies report scarce presence of uniform titles e i.e. titles of works e in library catalogues (Peponakis, Sfakakis, & Kapidakis, 2011; Willer, Sauperl, & Petek, 2011). It is also worth noting that the IFLA Classification and Indexing Section (more recently known as the Subject Analysis and Access Section), which by definition is concerned with works, was not established until 1977: for the record, the Cataloguing Section has been existing since 1935. However, the question of different layers of description that correspond to different aspects of a resource continued to arouse interest of the leading 20th-century theorists. For example, in his major work Two Kinds of Power, Patrick Wilson distinguishes work, text and exemplar as three interdependent dimensions of a resource: The three descriptions are not independent, for [the author] could have produced no work without producing some text, and could have produced no text without producing some permanent or transitory exemplar of that text. But the descriptions are by no means equivalent, for the work produced is not the text produced, nor is the text produced the exemplar produced. The three descriptions mentioned items of quite distinct varieties. Wilson (1978, p. 6)

Wilson’s three descriptions are analogous to FRBR’s work, expression and manifestation. Leazer and Smiraglia (1999) also explore multidimensional nature of information resources as a starting point for their study of derivative bibliographic relationships: Each bibliographic entity has both physical and intellectual properties. The physical property e the item e is represented in the catalog by a transcribed record of its inherent bibliographic characteristics (the item’s dimensions, its details of publication etc.). The intellectual property e the work e is the actual knowledge recorded. Leazer and Smiraglia (1999, p. 192)

How to organise information about transmedia?

107

However, even though FRBR was not the first to identify multiple facets of an information resource or explore their interrelations, never before have these facets been included in a requirement analysis of bibliographic information systems. One of the major advantages of the WEMI structure lies in the prominence given to identification and description of the intellectual aspect, i.e. content of a resource. Another advantage is that WEMI represents a potential solution to current weaknesses of online catalogues, such as limited navigation or return of search results in the form of long linear lists (Yee, 2005). In a WEMI-based information tool, all expressions of the same work (i.e. translations, arrangements etc.) could be displayed under the corresponding work, while all manifestations of the same expression (e.g. editions, reproductions etc.) could be collocated around the corresponding expression etc. The WEMI model also allows for a greater precision in the definition of relationships between a resource and other entities: thus a creator will be associated with work, a translator with expression, a publisher or manufacturer with manifestation, an owner with item etc. In summary, the conceptualisation proposed by FRBR is that of a multidimensional description with a variety of access points. It is a model that promises to take full advantage of a networked information environment. However, although it claimed to cover bibliographic records in the broadest sense, including subject cataloguing and authority control, in reality FRBR was prevalently focused on formal cataloguing. For this reason, in the following decade, it was complemented by another two models, both developed under the auspices of IFLA: Functional Requirements for Authority Data (FRAD) that modelled name authority data and Functional Requirements for Subject Authority Data (FRSAD) that addressed the functionalities of authorised subject data (note the word data replacing records in both models). A group of the three models was commonly referred to as the FR-family. Considering its reputation of a milestone in the cataloguing theory in the late 20th century, as well as the enormous corpus of literature built around it, it comes as another ironic twist of fate that FRBR has never been fully operationalised on any scale larger than individual, mostly experimental projects (Hyewon & Ziyoung, 2012; OCLC, 2009; Peponakis et al., 2011; Rajapatirana & Missingham, 2005; Riley, 2010; Tokita et al., 2012). There are several explanations for this. First, considering that the FRBR claimed to be agnostic to the structure of a bibliographic record, there was a lack of uniform understanding of how to take it to a technical level,

108

Metadata for Transmedia Resources

especially in smaller libraries that do not own many copies, editions or translations of the same work. The model did afford a new perspective that challenged the fixity of the bibliographic record, but being a conceptual model, it did not specify any new formats or schemes that would replace existing practices. Actual encoding formats and library management systems did not permit the creation of separate records for each of the WEMI entities (although eventually some of them did develop certain functionalities), and linked open data standards and technologies that would allow for FRBR to be implemented in RDF triples rather than in traditional records were only beginning to pervade library community. Second, cataloguing rules were not aligned with FRBR e at least not until the release of Regole italiane di catalogazione (REICAT) in 2009 and RDA in 2010. As a consequence, data essential for FRBRisation of library systems was absent from catalogues. As already mentioned, many projects that attempted to extract and aggregate data about works from existing bibliographic records faced serious difficulties due to uneven presence of uniform titles in catalogues. Another barrier to a wider adoption of FRBR may have been the fact that the three models were not mutually consistent. Although in all the cases the modelling methodology was the same, there were differences in the outcomes, not least because a different working group was involved in the development of each model. The elements introduced in the newer models were sometimes intended to supersede FRBR, sometimes supplemented it and at times contradicted it (Riva, 2018, p. 8): one such example is provided by overlapping, yet not identical entities nomen (in FRSAD) and name (in FRAD). Therefore in 2013, Consolidation Editorial Group was appointed by the FRBR Review Group, IFLA’s working body responsible for the maintenance and development of the models, and charged with the task of consolidating the whole FR-family into a single coherent model (IFLA, 2017, p. 6). The result, presented in draft at the IFLA World Library and Information Congress in Cape Town in 2016, and finally approved by the IFLA Committee on Standards in 2017, was the IFLA LRM model. For a short period of time, the new model was called FRBR Library Reference Model, in an attempt to keep an acronym that had already been strongly recognised in library community (Riva, 2018, p. 10). However, renaming was inevitable considering that LRM was not merely a consolidated version of the previous models, but indeed a new model with a scope that went beyond functional requirements for specific types of information systems (in the case of FRBR, a relational database).

How to organise information about transmedia?

109

Compared to the FR-family, IFLA LRM adopted a higher level of abstraction, which was reflected in a reduced number of entities, attributes and relationships. The definitions of entities were refined, and the formal language of the model was improved by the employment of so-called enhanced entity-relationship modelling which allowed for the introduction of hierarchical structure, i.e. sub-entities and types. For example, where FRAD had defined three entities (person, family and corporate body), IFLA LRM had only one entity (agent) with two sub-entities (person and collective agent), but provided the possibility of further sub-typing (e.g. corporate body and family as types of collective agent). This feature, known as inheritance, is ‘borrowed’ from object-oriented modelling and allows for a model to be streamlined and avoid unnecessary repetitions of attributes and relationships, while providing an efficient mechanism for extensions required by an actual implementation. Library cataloguing community had become familiar with objectoriented modelling mostly through the joint project of harmonisation of FR models with CIDOC CRM, object-oriented ontology for museum information. CIDOC CRM was also developed in the 1990s and adopted as international standard ISO 21127 in 2006 (IFLA, 2015, p. 12). The idea that both communities might benefit from harmonising their conceptual models was first expressed in 2000 at the European Library Automation Group’s 24th Library Systems Seminar in Paris, leading up to the formation of the International Working Group on FRBR and CIDOC CRM Harmonization three years later (IFLA, 2015, p. 12). The final outcome of this collaboration was FRBRoo e the FR-family of models expressed in object-oriented framework as an extension of CIDOC CRM for library material (IFLA, 2015; LeBoeuf, 2012). Through the development of FRBRoo, CIDOC CRM informed some ideas behind IFLA LRM, notably the introduction of entity hierarchies. However, the influence went both ways, with CIDOC CRM adopting the entity expression and introducing product type to enable a more detailed modelling of mass-produced  umer, 2018). objects (Riva & Z I do not attempt to go into further details about data modelling techniques or history and structure of particular models. The main purpose of this brief historical overview is to point out how IFLA LRM integrates some fundamental thinking about the objectives of bibliographic description and how over the course of the last two decades, the scope of the modelling of bibliographic information changed in parallel with a wider information environment. As XML- and RDF-based standards became

110

Metadata for Transmedia Resources

more and more accepted, the scope of requirement analyses of bibliographic systems evolved from defining a set of core data elements for minimal-level cataloguing to developing a high-level model that would provide a common semantics for a variety of practices in the cultural heritage sector. To implement such a model in the development of a cataloguing standard or design of an information system means to accommodate local policies and practices into a general semantic structure that ensures interoperability with other information on the Web.

4.1.2 An outline of the model IFLA LRM aims to explicate general principles governing the logical structure of bibliographic information, without making presuppositions about how these data might be stored in any particular system or application (IFLA, 2017, p. 9). Similar to FRBR, the model starts with an analysis of user needs. It identifies five general user tasks, which represent basic aspects of information seeking: finding, identifying, selecting, obtaining and exploring (IFLA, 2017, p. 15). This does not imply that all the tasks necessarily take place in every information-seeking process, nor that they follow in a fixed order. They simply cover basic information needs to which bibliographic data should respond. Although users are recognised as a heterogeneous population made up of readers, students or researchers as well as of information professionals such as librarians, publishers, distributers etc., the focus of the model is maintained on end-users. Interestingly, computer programs and applications are not counted among users, even though cataloguing and metadata procedures are increasingly oriented towards serving the requirements of machine-processing. This may be in line with the general attitude expressed by IFLA LRM that only people who program machines, and not machines themselves, can be taken as agents responsible for their actions (IFLA, 2017, p. 29). Finding is defined in LRM as bringing together information about one or more resources of interest by searching on any relevant criteria, e.g. title, medium, language, script, duration, place of creation etc. To identify means to understand the nature of the resources found and to distinguish between resources with similar characteristics, e.g. between two or more works that bear the same title. To select means to determine the suitability of the resources found, i.e. to decide which resource, if any, corresponds to the user’s information needs. To obtain means to access the selected resource or

How to organise information about transmedia?

111

its content, to which end the information system needs to provide location information, or links to online information, as well as information on any possible restrictions on access. Finally, exploring is the most open-ended of the user tasks and implies using the relationships established between resources to find a particular resource or to place it in a context (IFLA, 2017, p. 16). IFLA LRM generally views all the user tasks as equally important. In the context of transmedia the tasks of particular relevance are exploring, identifying and selecting. Of the three, exploring will be given the most space in the book, because it makes a large and significant part of how transmedia content is consumed, and in many cases represents an essential preliminary step for finding, identifying and selecting. The decision to include exploring in the model is particularly significant because it strongly supports discovery and contextualisation, moving forward from what Smiraglia (2007b, p. 74) has lucidly called the ‘let-them-eat-cake’ syndrome of library information systems, alluding to their capacity to show good results with known-item searches, but much less efficiency at providing paths for navigation. IFLA LRM proceeds to identify 11 bibliographic entities relevant to user tasks. The top entity, called res (Latin for ‘thing’), comprises all entities considered to be relevant to the bibliographic universe, whether or not they are specifically defined in the model (IFLA, 2017, p. 20). It is usual for a conceptual model or ontology to declare a superclass that, through the principle of inheritance, can accommodate any other entity deemed of interest to users.1 As pointed out above, this permits the extension of the model to a specific level of granularity required by a particular implementation, while the main logical structure remains preserved. In the following sections I will seek to demonstrate how to apply this mechanism to description of transmedia. Work, expression, manifestation and item, four entities that form the backbone of the model, have already been discussed in the previous section. Agent is an entity with the potential of performing intentional actions that have impact on other entities, especially those of the WEMI stack. These actions may include creation, manufacture, modification, destruction, ownership, exercise of intellectual rights etc. Sub-entities of agent are person, an individual human being, and collective agent, a gathering or organisation of persons bearing a particular name and acting as a unit (IFLA, 2017, pp. 1

CIDOC CRM and RDA also have declared top entities.

112

Metadata for Transmedia Resources

28e29). It is important to note that agent is defined as an entity capable of deliberate actions and of being held accountable for its actions, which excludes imaginary beings such as deities, alter egos and fictional characters, as well as pieces of software programmed to generate content, e.g. virtual musicians. In other words, humans are the only beings that are to be considered agents. Nomen (Latin for name) is an association between an entity and its appellation, such as a name, title, term or identifier (IFLA, 2017, p. 31). In a semantic Web environment it is essential to distinguish between concepts and their signifiers in order to enable computers to understand the meaning of information, e.g. to deduce that a searched concept is known by different terms and that all the terms denote the same concept. SKOS, a W3C standard intended for representation of thesauri, classification schemes and other types of controlled vocabularies on the Web, is based on this distinction. Place in IFLA LRM is a geographic area or extent of space that can be contemporary or historical, on Earth or extra-terrestrial, but does not include fictional or legendary places (IFLA, 2017, p. 35). Finally, time-span is a temporal extent that has a beginning, a duration, and an end (IFLA, 2017, p. 36). The main function of these two entities is to represent data about time and space relevant to the bibliographic universe, such as the place of publishing of a manifestation, or dates of birth and death of a person. With the significant entities in the bibliographic domain singled out, IFLA LRM proceeds to define their attributes and relationships. As for their operationalisation in the linked data environment, it is worth noting that in RDF-based implementations both attributes and relationships are rendered as properties, with the difference that a property derived from a relationship always has an identified entity as its object, whereas the object of a property derived from an attribute can be a lexical string readable only to humans. For reasons of space, I will not present here all the attributes and relationships declared in the model. (An overview of entities and their relationships is shown in Fig. 4.1.) Those relevant for description of transmedia will be considered in more detail in the next pages. However, I will briefly consider one attribute I view as paradigmatic for the new perspective brought by the model: manifestation statement. Manifestation statement is, obviously, an attribute of manifestation and is defined as ‘a statement appearing in exemplars of the manifestation and deemed to be significant for users to understand how the resource represents itself’ (IFLA, 2017, p. 49). Manifestation statement comprises data

How to organise information about transmedia?

113

Fig. 4.1 An overview of IFLA LRM entities and relationships (IFLA, 2017, p. 86).

normally transcribed from a resource, such as title statement, edition statement etc. The major part of ISBD, with the exception of content form and media type, physical description and notes, is concerned with data elements belonging to manifestation statement. But whereas FRBR listed all of these elements as attributes, LRM summarises them in one single attribute, limiting itself to declare that in most implementations, this statement would likely be typed at a level of granularity considered appropriate for user needs, and that transcription conventions are codified by each implementation (IFLA, 2017, p. 49). In other words, what was once viewed as a nucleus of cataloguing, now is regarded as only one, perhaps not even the crucial part of bibliographic information. This is in line with views expressed in the previous chapter that call for a simplification of transcription rules and more attention paid to content. Transmedia resources are not the main reason behind this paradigm shift, but might greatly benefit from it.

4.2 IFLA LRM and transmedia 4.2.1 Transmedia and bibliographic universe IFLA LRM claims to cover bibliographic information in the broadest sense. As well as the FR-family from which it originated, it is sometimes referred to as the model of the bibliographic universe (IFLA, 2017, p. 5; Pisanski &

114

Metadata for Transmedia Resources

 umer, 2010a, 2010b; Riva, 2018, p. 8). This phrase seems sufficiently Z extensive to embrace the whole dynamics of transmedia resources, although admittedly there is no explicit definition of bibliographic universe anywhere in the model. Wilson defined bibliographic(al) universe somewhat tautologically as ‘the totality of things over which bibliographical control is or might be exercised’ (Wilson, 1978, p. 6). He went on to explain that this totality consists of ‘writings and recorded sayings’, i.e. recordings of verbal expressions. According to Wilson, music and fine arts are not to be considered part of bibliographic universe because they produce meaning in a completely different manner from linguistic objects such as written text or spoken word: There is, that is to say, no sharp boundary between the universe of writings and sayings, and the universe of pictorial and musical works. But there is a good reason for distinguishing these universes, even though the distinction is not a sharp one. About any text we can ask ‘What does it mean, what language is it in, what is it about, what does it say?’ and expect that, however hard it is to answer the questions, the questions surely have answers. But though we may ask the same questions about a picture or a piece of music, it is not clear that they can be literally answered. Wilson (1978, p. 14)

What Wilson refers to is, in fact, the difficulty to distinguish between an intellectual idea e or work e and its embodiments in the case of artistic objects. Wilson’s observations are rooted in etymological interpretation of the word bibliography (from the Greek biblίon for book), which indeed has been developed as the systematic description of textual resources. They also stem from the inherent nature of textual resources that permits easy distinction between ideas and their realisations in a particular language or physical form. Therefore, according to Wilson, bibliographical universe encompasses only information resources that are expressed by means of language e not language in semiotic sense, where it denotes any kind of sign system, but language as a method of spoken or written communication. However, as libraries grew more interested in other media besides written text, the word bibliographic has come to cover much more than books or textual documents. In practice, bibliographic control is exercised over all types of resources that are present in libraries, which, as we have seen, include not only music and art, but many other forms of content as well. This is moreover clearly affirmed by the standards that display the word bibliographic in the title: the consolidated edition of ISBD lists eight different content forms beside text that can be objects of bibliographic

How to organise information about transmedia?

115

description e image, sound, music, movement, spoken word, objects, datasets and computer programs (IFLA, 2011b, pp. 35e36). Besides, the applicability of the WEMI structure to a wide range of content forms, including music and art, has been investigated and affirmed in a substantial body of literature about the FRBR model. Therefore, until a more appropriate term is found, bibliographic universe in practice refers to everything that is or may be of interest to libraries. The same interpretation can be deduced from IFLA LRM, as it claims to consider ‘bibliographic information pertinent to all types of resources generally of interest to libraries’ and seeks to reveal their underlying commonalities (IFLA, 2017, p. 9). The fact that IFLA LRM proposes to model the whole universe of bibliographic information, which is a domain that transcends boundaries of an individual library catalogue, is also highly relevant for transmedia. Since transmedia resources are seldom available in total from a single library, with the possible exception of very large or highly specialised libraries, they can be fully described and accessed only in networked systems. And even though IFLA LRM pertains to bibliographic information in general, which includes information contained in individual catalogues of libraries of various types and sizes, its true strength lies in its capacity to impose a clear semantic structure to information that is shared in large networks.

4.2.2 Transmedia and WEMI Transmedia is a dispersion of intellectual or artistic content across different media (sign systems, content forms) and delivery platforms (carriers). By definition, transmedia resources are works with many expressions and manifestations. This framework seems to be intuitively clear to anyone involved in the creation or interpretation of transmedia. It is remarkable how the language used by transmedia theorists and practitioners resembles the IFLA LRM nomenclature. For example, Christy Dena writes about expression of a fictional world across distinct media (Dena, 2009, pp. 57, 134), and her line of thinking about conceptual and material aspects of a transmedia creation bears a striking similarity with the IFLA LRM discourse: Whereas for some [creations] the material boundary of a work is somewhat analogous to the abstract boundary of the work (a story begins and ends in a book for instance), this is not the case with transmedia projects. It is therefore not appropriate to label a transmedia entity a film, book or television show, because the work (the story for instance) may be expressed across all of these. Dena (2009, p. 103)

116

Metadata for Transmedia Resources

Dena uses similar discourse when citing Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain as an example of a single story with multiple realisations. She explains how the author published his original film script as a graphic novel and then created another version of the script that would eventually be made into a feature film: The story was first conceived as a film only, but very early in pre-production Aronofsky secured the graphic novel rights ‘to make sure all the work we do somehow finds an audience.’ [.] ‘If Hollywood gives me a problem,’ Aronofsky explained, ‘I’ll make a comic book out of it.’ [.] While it would be incorrect to say that Aronofsky views the two expressions as equal (the film is his most developed artistic voice and the ‘ultimate director’s cut’), there is a privileging of an overarching concept, a parent seed, that exists beyond its expression. Dena (2009, p. 159)

The question of relationships between larger fictional worlds or production plans and individual stories accommodated within them, seen through a lens of the IFLA LRM concept of work, will be discussed later. What is important here is to note that in transmedia resources, WEMI is not only fairly explicit, but also indispensable for description: without it, it would be almost impossible to provide a clear representation of transmedia in a bibliographic information system. Consider the example shown in Fig. 4.2: As shown in the figure, one of the stories of The Matrix universe, Bits and Pieces of Information, is a work realised through a graphic novel (expression) and published in two different platforms (manifestations): a printed book and the Web. Each entity is associated with corresponding agents: the work was created by the Wachowski Brothers and the artist Geoff Darrow and

Fig. 4.2 Works, expressions and manifestations in the Matrix franchise.

How to organise information about transmedia?

117

embodied in a printed collection of comics (aggregate manifestation) published by Burlyman Entertainment Inc. This manifestation embodies the aggregation work originally conceived by the Wachowski Brothers and realised through a series of comics (expression) on the Web (manifestation), which was eventually amplified (a new expression) and published in the printed form (manifestation of a new expression). On the other hand, the story of Bits and Pieces was continued in another work, The Second Renaissance Part II, which was realised through a short animated film (expression) etc. Within a complex structure of interrelated works, where each work can generate different versions, each of which can have different editions etc., IFLA LRM provides both the precision needed for finding, identifying and selecting a particular resource and a larger context needed for attaching a particular meaning to it. Moreover, this kind of analytical structure is essential for machine-reasoning applications that are envisaged to increasingly provide services for end-users.

4.2.3 Transmedia and users One of the most frequent criticisms of the WEMI conceptualisation is aimed at the lack of user testing (Coyle, 2016). In general, bibliographic models and standards are seldom based on empirical user studies, which comes as no surprise considering the immense diversity of both information resources and specific contexts of user needs. While it may be feasible to study the usage of a local information system or needs of a particular user group, it is far less realistic to expect that any kind of empirical research would result in a plausible set of bibliographic metadata elements that cover the needs of a generic user. Seen from this perspective, the failure of the library community to produce a universally accepted minimal-level cataloguing standard seems understandable. However, several studies were conducted with the aim to verify the compatibility of the WEMI model to users’ general perception of the bibliographic universe. These studies confirmed the correspondence of the WEMI structure to mental models of both end-users and library cat umer, 2015; Pisanski & Z  umer, 2010a, aloguers (Pauman Budanovic & Z 2010b, 2012). The conclusion can be transferred to transmedia consumers as a specific group of end-users, especially if we consider the abovediscussed correspondence of the WEMI entities to the inherent structure of transmedia narratives. However, the attempt to propose a LRM-based model for the description of transmedia calls for a more detailed insight

118

Metadata for Transmedia Resources

into types of information preferred by transmedia users. It has been suggested, and also confirmed by studies (Branch et al., 2017; Kiryakos & Sugimoto, 2019), that consumers of transmedia franchises look for a greater amount and granularity of content-related information than the one normally provided by library systems. It has also been suggested that transmedia consumers will highly value the existence of relationships because it allows them to explore, identify and select parts of a story before finding and obtaining a particular manifestation. But exactly which data elements meet these demands and how do they fit into the IFLA LRM model? In the following paragraphs I will describe a study conducted with the aim to gain a better insight into users’ understanding of transmedia narratives independently from any existing bibliographic context (Vukadin, 2017). In the study, six participants were asked to draw a concept map of a transmedia story by their choice. They were instructed to include in the map all the information they considered important for engaging with the story. The only condition was that the story had been told through at least three different media, at least one of which brought a new sequence of events or introduced a new perspective of the fictional world. Although transmediality is not determined by the number of media involved, establishing a minimal number of three was seen as an opportunity to collect more information. While mappings of the same story would have provided results that can be more easily compared, it was assumed the participants would be able to express their perspective of the story in a clear and authentic way only if they were completely familiar with it. Since following a story across multiple media may require serious commitment in terms of time and finances, transmedia consumers are usually fans who tend to engage with a smaller number of stories. Therefore, finding a storyworld that is equally well-known to all the participants might be difficult. On the other hand, if participants were recruited from the same fan community and were all fans of the same story, mappings of the same narrative would probably have resulted in similar concepts and organisation patterns, whereas the goal of the study was to capture as much diverse information as possible. This is the reason why a qualitative research with a limited number of participants was chosen instead of a quantitative research that would lend itself to statistical analyses, but would require a larger number of participants working with the same material. Furthermore, the goal was to analyse the semantics of information and compare it to IFLA LRM, which also entails a qualitative method applied to a smaller data sample.

How to organise information about transmedia?

119

Six participants were recruited by the snowball method based on their engagement in fan activities such as fan fiction and LARPing. The demographics did not play any significant role in their conceptualisations. The participants were not aware that the study was conducted within the field of bibliographic information organisation. Prior to the task they were shown two examples of concept maps without any relation to transmedia fiction. After having completed the task, each participant was asked to explain their decisions and describe the feelings and thoughts experienced during the task in a semi-structured interview. Of the stories chosen by participants, five were intercompositional e The Labyrinth, The Blade Runner, The Game of Thrones, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Harry Potter e and one was intracompositional e a local LARP event. Conceptualisations of the stories were notably diverse. This was mainly expected, not only because each participant portrayed a different narrative world, but also because the consumption and interpretation of transmedia content is largely guided by personal interests and preferences. For example, the participant who described The Labyrinth put a strong emphasis on authorship and canonicity (including visual canon), whereas another participant, describing The Game of Thrones, focused almost entirely on subject information such as themes, motives, fictional places, characters and their mutual relationships. Other mappings focused on questions of difference between an adaptation and a new work (The Blade Runner,) or suitability of a particular medium for conveying key ideas of the story (Harry Potter). However, despite demonstrating interest in different aspects of transmedia fiction, all the participants showed consistency in the following areas: • All the participants were primarily focused on content, i.e. work- and expression-related information, even though they did not make clear distinction between works, expressions and manifestations. This is in line with observations made by other authors about fan-created information being focused on content, while institutional metadata is more oriented towards carriers (Kiryakos & Sugimoto, 2019). Individual creations were mainly identified by medium, e.g. film sequels, video game, or animated series, which is expression-level information. However, in many cases the context provided by the rest of the map (e.g. relations established between individual creations and their creators, subjects, adaptations etc.) allowed to infer that what the participants really had in mind were works. A possible reason why they chose to identify them by medium rather than title is discussed below. Moreover, it seems

120

Metadata for Transmedia Resources

that even rare cases of providing manifestation-level information were actually included with the purpose to identify a work or expression when the participants were not able to remember the exact title of a work or expression, which prompted them to use any information they could remember, e.g. the name of the publisher (the Telltale Game), the place of production (the Chinese card game) or the publishing platform (YouTube, C64). Referring to one of the WEMI entities while actually thinking of another is common in daily conversation both in and outside the library context: The user may not include in her conceptual level that there are variations like translations, annotated editions or works about Moby Dick if those are not of interest to her, or not relevant to her immediate context. Coyle (2016, p. 18)

Reducing works and expressions to a single conceptual level is particularly common due to the fact that both come into being simultaneously: the existence of a work cannot be ascertained without at least one existing expression of the work. This is recognised by IFLA LRM (IFLA, 2017, pp. 41e42), but also supported by narrative theories that distinguish between the fabula and the sujet, that is, the story (work) and its discourse (expression): just like a work comes into being simultaneously with its first expression, the story cannot exist without a discourse. It is precisely because of this ambiguity that bibliographic theory continuously seeks to disaggregate these concepts into separate entities: to introduce logical order into systems for information retrieval. When the user types a title into a search box, they may not have in mind the distinction between works, translations and editions. However, the system needs to distinguish between them in order to return results in a clear, structured and unambiguous way that will allow the user to identify and select precisely what they want. Therefore, the lack of distinction between the WEMI entities in the participants’ maps might be explained as the lack of need for such analytical approach because the participants were mostly or entirely focused on the work-level information, even though they identified the works using any attribute that first came to their minds. However, although the participants were e expectedly e focused on works, these findings also indicate the importance of including all the applicable WEMI entities in the description of a transmedia resource because users will likely try to identify an entity using attributes of another entity.

How to organise information about transmedia?

•

121

All the mappings contained a high-level concept that represented the original story or fictional world as a whole, or a central concept (e.g. the most popular work) that served as a starting point for the mapping. These concepts were usually clearly distinguished, e.g. placed in the middle or at the top of the map, written in larger letters or graphically decorated. In their study of non-experts’ conceptualisations of derivative bibliographic relationships, Tallerås, Dahl, and Pharo (2018) asked participants to depict conceptual maps of adaptations and media editions of Peer Gynt and Romeo and Juliet. The authors report that relationships were generally mapped in two main ways: by relating the concepts directly or via a central high-level collocation node. A majority of the participants (more than 63%) used the latter method, either connecting all the adaptations and editions to a central node or using the central node as a point of departure and combining it with direct connections between different adaptations and editions. The present study showed similar findings. Two participants assigned a title to the whole map (The Game of Thrones and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), thereby recognising the narrative world as a high-level concept that encompasses all the other concepts and their relationships. One participant connected all the works of the fictional universe to the central node (The Blade Runner), which was the most popular work. One participant combined a central node with direct relationships between works (The Labyrinth), the node being the original work. One participant organised the map around the central character (Harry Potter). In the case of LARP, which is intracompositional transmedia, the central concept was the name of the event. • With the exception of the titles referring to the storyworld or a central work within it, titles were conspicuously absent from the maps. As pointed out above, resources were mostly referred to as novel, film sequels, video game etc. The absence of titles could be explained by the fact that the participants were not explicitly asked to name the creations included in the maps. In addition, the examples of maps they had been shown included only general concepts, not named instances. However, this could also indicate that transmedia consumers, compared to library professionals, give less importance to titles, and recognise objects of their interest by other properties, especially if they belong to a larger (and already named) bibliographic context. Tallerås, Dahl and Pharo (2018) also report that users whose conceptualisations contained the title of a central work

122

Metadata for Transmedia Resources

generally used fewer titles and preferred to identify individual creations using terms for media types or carriers. This is probably due to the fact that the work aspect is already recognised and named at the level of a central creation (e.g. the original work) or the narrative world, while all the other individual creations are regarded as its versions or realisations. This demonstrates that perhaps more attention should be paid to a high-level device that would collocate all the individual members of intercompositional transmedia and allow for them to be identified collectively. I will discuss it in more detail later. • Subject information was given a prominent role in the maps. The Game of Thrones can be singled out as a map exclusively focused on subject information. It completely inverted traditional principles of bibliographic organisation by bringing forth subjects and their relationships across media, while treating individual works as attributes of subjects. (Each topic identified in the map, e.g. intrigue, honour, diplomacy etc., was accompanied by an abbreviation indicating where it can be found: in the novels, television series or graphic novels.) Other maps retained a more traditional approach, but generally included a large number of subject information such as themes, motives, characters and settings. The total number of concepts representing themes and fictional entities was 33; for comparison’s sake, the total number of nonfictional entities found in the maps was 26, and mostly regarded creators, intellectual property owners, genres and types of audience. However, the total number of fictional characters surpassed the overall number of real people such as authors or producers. The maps did not contain any real place, but included one imaginary and one fictionalised place (Westeros from The Game of Thrones and Los Angeles from The Blade Runner). A considerable part of relationships denoted associations between works and characters, or between characters and settings. Themes mostly included general plot drivers such as love, friendship, war, utopia or intrigue, although some participants delved into more extensive textual descriptions, e.g. ‘the conflict between good and evil helps him understand his mission more clearly’ (Harry Potter) or ‘he kills all the replicants and is then retired’ (The Blade Runner), which required additional analysis and extraction of key concepts. This indicates that transmedia users appreciate broader and deeper subject information compared to what is currently provided by institutional bibliographic systems.

How to organise information about transmedia?

•

123

The most frequent attribute (besides media type) was genre, e.g. manga, cyberpunk or adventure game. Other significant attributes included duration and intended audience. This, again, points to the critical importance of work- and expressionrelated information for transmedial engagement. • The most frequent relationships (besides subject relationships) were work transformations (adaptations, parodies, reboots etc.), followed by information about accompanying or complementary works. The fact that the mappings also comprise transformations, which are not typical for ‘pure’ or ‘ideal’ transmedia storytelling, demonstrates that creators and producers use a variety of strategies to achieve transmediality. For example, adaptations, reboots and other variations may be used to introduce a new entry that will generate a new instantiation across media. By including these relationships into the diagrams, the participants showed that their exploration of a story or fictional universe is not exclusively guided by the criteria of continuity. As suggested earlier, an information organisation system that seeks to provide information about transmedia needs to accommodate various consuming patterns. In summary, for accessing and understanding transmedia narratives it is essential to record and organise information about the content. Users clearly distinguish between an overarching concept (story or fictional world) and its realisations in different media. They also tend to identify a central (original or the most popular) work. Their interest is focused on the flow of the story arc across media, although they do use a variety of attributes belonging to the different WEMI entities (medium, genre, publisher, carrier etc.) to identify a particular instalment. In the following pages I will analyse these findings, as well as insights gained from other studies, against the IFLA LRM model. I will address particular attention to the following questions: • How to model intercompositional transmedia stories/fictional worlds as a whole? Are they self-standing entities (meta-works), and if yes, how should they be identified and defined? • Which criteria determine whether an individual work should or should not be considered part of a transmedia meta-work? • How to model responsibility for transmedia creations and realisations? • How to model transient phenomena such as games and performances, or experiences gained during these events? • How to provide detailed subject information?

124

Metadata for Transmedia Resources

4.3 Works, superworks and networks As we have seen, the concept of WEMI emerged from over a half century of continuous efforts to theoretically explain and operationalise multifaceted nature of information resources. This nature was synthesised in dichotomous or trichotomous conceptualisations of literary unitbibliographic unit, or work-text-exemplar, or work-item. Work is defined by the LRM model as an intellectual or artistic content of a distinct creation (IFLA, 2017, p. 21). The boundaries of a work are determined by several key criteria, among which are commonality of factual or thematic content between and among various expressions (e.g. if the director’s cut and the original release of a film share most of the content, they are regarded as expressions of the same work), a plan for the selection, assembly and ordering of the expressions (e.g. compiling an anthology can be regarded as a work in its own right) and last but not least, independent intellectual or artistic effort involved in the creation (e.g. a game designer who transforms a film into a game has created a new work). However, the most important criterion seems to be user perception: Bibliographic and cultural conventions play a crucial role in determining the exact boundaries between similar instances of works. User needs are the basis for determining whether instances of expression are considered to belong to the same instance of work. When the majority of users, for most general purposes, would regard the expression instances as being intellectually equivalent, then these expressions are considered to be expressions of the same work. IFLA (2017, p. 22)

In the case of intracompositional transmedia, an expression of a work is fragmented into different media realisations. A distinct effort may be involved in the creation of each component, but they are still clearly parts of the same expression of the same work (based on the continuity of thematic content), and the work is experienced in total only when all of its components have been consumed. For example, a hybrid tabletop game cannot be finished without players having used both physical and digital components. Usually there is a primary author or authorial team credited with the work (e.g. a game designer), while the creators of individual parts (e.g. artists, animators or programmers) are viewed as contributors, similarly to films and other works of mixed responsibility. Intercompositional transmedia is more complex because it is made up of independent parts. Although each part adds to the experience, not all of them are essential for understanding the story. Bits and Pieces of Information and

How to organise information about transmedia?

125

The Second Renaissance Part II tell different, albeit logically connected stories. The overall plot was developed by the Wachowski Brothers, but each work involved a different creative responsibility that could be considered primary: the graphic novel was designed and drawn by Geoff Darrow, and the animated film was directed by Mahiro Maeda. Most importantly, The Matrix film trilogy can be watched and enjoyed without these two stories, even though the overall experience may result impoverished by their absence. It is clear, therefore, that each part of an intercompositional transmedia is a distinct work capable of producing its own hierarchy of expressions, manifestations and items. However, as reported above, users often mentally organise groups of interrelated works using some kind of central concept or common denominator. Tallerås, Dahl and Pharo (2018) explicitly called for more attention to be paid to original works and fictional worlds as collocation mechanisms. Considering the paramount role of user needs in IFLA LRM, we should consider whether a high-level entity (a meta-work) should be introduced in the description for the purpose of collocation.

4.3.1 Bibliographic families and superworks In bibliographic theory the question of a meta-work is not new. In his investigation of relationships that operate between works and texts e works and expressions in the IFLA LRM vocabulary e Wilson argues that each work is a group or family of texts, some of which may be translations or different versions by the same author, while others may be ‘a perfect swarm of parasites of different sorts’: paraphrases, abridgements, critical editions, commentaries etc. (Wilson, 1978, pp. 9e10). This idea was further elaborated by Leazer and Smiraglia (1999), who introduced the notion of a bibliographic family. As reported earlier, the authors argue that every information resource has two inherent aspects: work (content) and item (physical form). Work also has two properties: ideational content (which corresponds to the IFLA LRM work) and linguistic content (which corresponds to expression). A bibliographic family is a set of interrelated works and items descended from the same original work via modifications of ideational content (mutations) or linguistic content (derivations). Basically, it is seen as one large work that continuously grows over time, i. e. each time a new occurrence or instantiation is added to it (Smiraglia, 2005). The boundaries of a bibliographic family are, therefore, wider and more flexible in comparison to the IFLA LRM entity work and more in line with Smiraglia’s notion of a work as a segment of the ever-evolving universe of human knowledge.

126

Metadata for Transmedia Resources

Svenonius expresses similar ideas using the term superwork: A superwork may contain any number of works as subsets, the members of which while not sharing essentially the same information content are nevertheless similar by virtue of emanating from the same ur-work. Organizing a Hamlet superwork would have the effect of collocating the original text, motion pictures, sound recordings of readings, analyses of the play, commentaries, playbills, derivative works like Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are Dead and so on. Though members of the same superwork, they are nevertheless not members of the same work. The concept of superwork is interesting in itself as an object of literary study and in retrieval as an effective means for furthering the navigation objective. Svenonius (2000, p. 38)

Can intercompositional transmedia regarded as a type of bibliographic family? It is worth noting that bibliographic families and superworks are clearly defined as groups of bibliographic entities emerged around a common ancestor, which raises the question of whether these concepts are applicable when such starting point does not exist. For example, the music album Year Zero by Nine Inch Nails and the eponymous alternate reality game were conceived and released as companions. While it may be argued that the game was created as a promotional tool and therefore had an ancillary role in this combination, it was definitely not a derivation or mutation of an original work. In some cases an extensive bibliographic research may be required to ascertain whether a work was derived from another work or the two works instantiated simultaneously. For example, while the parts of the Matrix world were gradually released following the 1999 feature film (Fig. 1.1), the creators made clear that all of them were originally conceived as a unique story. Moreover, the most popular work that usually triggers a transmedial expansion is not necessarily the one that came first chronologically. The world of The Blade Runner, represented in a series of films, novels and computer games, was created around the eponymous feature film (1982) directed by Ridley Scott, although the film itself was an adaptation of the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick. Evidently, intercompositional transmedia does not necessarily develop from a progenitor work nor is the pattern of its development always clear and straightforward.

4.3.2 Diachronic works As discussed earlier, transmediality emerges either as the extension of some original work that has proven to be culturally and commercially significant

How to organise information about transmedia?

127

(soft transmedia) or as a result of the design that initially fragments the content of a story into multiple parts (hard transmedia) e although the combinations of the two (‘chewy’ transmedia) are also frequent. According to IFLA LRM, a unique plan of realisation is an important criteria for determining the boundaries of a work. The inclusion of this criterion was influenced by PRESSoo, the formal ontology for the description of continuing resources, developed in 2013 by the ISSN International Centre and the National Library of France as an extension of FRBRoo, and endorsed as an official IFLA standard (LeBoeuf & Oury, 2018). The reason behind PRESSoo was the fact that FRBR was primarily concerned with static publishing products and did not offer satisfactory solutions regarding the description of serials, while FRBRoo provided an event-based framework that was adequate for modelling the dynamic nature of this type of resources. Building on these premises, RDA proposes the concept of diachronic work or a work planned to be embodied over limited or indefinite time period. The content of a diachronic work is issued in a sequence of single acts (Dunsire, Fritz, & Iseminger, 2017). A diachronic work may be intended to be realised during an indeterminate period of time in one single expression that gets periodically updated (integrating work), or in multiple distinct expressions (serial work). A diachronic work is not complete until its last instalment is released. Therefore, what is actually being described is the extension plan for the work. At first glance, the definition of serial work may seem in accordance with transmedia works, which indeed cannot be considered complete until the last part has been released. This is particularly true for hard transmedia, which is designed to be realised over time in multiple distinct expressions. However, RDA defines the concept of serial work primarily for the purpose of the description of ‘proper’ serial resources such as newspapers and journals. The definition also comprises other types of serially released works such as television series, but it does not seem to be intended to be transferred much further beyond this context. This is actually in line with IFLA LRM, where the existence of the concept or plan for selection, ordering etc. of the content is explicitly associated with serials and aggregations (IFLA, 2017, p. 21). Transmedia is not a serial resource, although it shares some of its characteristics, and it is definitely not an aggregating resource because aggregation is a ‘post-production’ act of assembling the already existing content (e.g. the creation of anthologies, musical compilations etc.), while in transmedia content is brought together in the ‘preproduction’ phase, at the level of creation.

128

Metadata for Transmedia Resources

RDA further specifies that the essence of a diachronic work is a plan for the change of content. Any changes to the initial plan result in a new work. Changes to the plan include changes in language, frequency, media type etc. This is understandable when applied e.g. to the starting of a new regional edition of the Elle magazine, but what is it supposed to mean in the context of transmedia? Is the plan changed whenever a creative team changes? Is change determined by the appearance of a non-canonical extension? What is non-canonical? Is an extension out of canon when it diverges from the logical continuity of a story, or when it has not been officially sanctioned by the intellectual property holder, or both? While canonicity may be highly valued by some users, we have seen that there is no univocal definition of canon. There can be no agreement on the criteria that would determine what is regarded as a deviation from canon and hence modification of the original plan. Furthermore, RDA states that because a serial work is the plan for how a serial will be expressed and manifested, it may only have one expression and one manifestation. This is referred to as the WEM lock (Dunsire, Fritz & Iseminger, 2017). However, if each regional edition of Elle is a distinct WEM lock, i.e. a distinct work with its own expression and manifestation, there should also be a conceptualisation of Elle as a whole, represented by all of its distinct WEM locks. Here we can observe an analogy with transmedia. RDA proposes to solve this problem by introducing the concept of work cluster (Dunsire, Fritz & Iseminger, 2017). However, work cluster is explicitly defined as a group of closely related serial works. It is therefore clear that the conceptualisation of diachronic work set forth by RDA cannot be adequately transferred to transmedia. Besides, we should not forget that different parts of transmedia content can also be created and released simultaneously and not diachronically.

4.3.3 Transmedia networks While the question of a meta-work has been repeatedly e and variously e addressed in bibliographic theory and practice, what is needed in the case of transmedia is a synthesis of these different conceptualisations. Such synthesis should be able to accommodate a variety of situations encompassed by the operational definition of transmedia that was proposed in the second chapter, namely: • the notion of a group of interrelated works derived over time from an original work (soft and ‘chewy’ intercompositional transmedia), e.g. the

How to organise information about transmedia?

129

majority of entertainment franchises such as The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter or Buffy the Vampire Slayer • the notion of a group of interrelated works conceived in parallel and realised sequentially according to a plan (hard intercompositional transmedia), e.g. The Matrix • the notion of a group of interrelated works conceived and realised in parallel (hard intercompositional transmedia), e.g. Year Zero. The first case is partly covered by the notion of bibliographic family as defined by Leazer and Smiraglia (1999), i.e. the notion of a set of works that originate from a common ancestor and deliberately share ideational and semantic content with it to some extent. However, works without a common progenitor seem to be outside the scope of the theory of bibliographic families, as well as of Svenonius’ notion of a superwork. If these concepts are to be used as theoretical and methodological tools for modelling the description of intercompositional transmedia, their meaning should be extended. On the other hand, the RDA concept of work cluster is specifically intended to collocate groups of different editions of serials and does not lend itself to other contexts of use. Therefore, neither of these concepts provides a definition that would be satisfactory in the context of transmedia. Making definitions more inclusive implies taking a step back to a higher level of abstraction. As much as intercompositional transmedia narratives may differ in respect to the methods of creation and production, they can still be counted as works as defined by IFLA LRM. The work consists of the intellectual or artistic creation that lies behind all the various expressions of the work. As a result, the content identified with an instance of work can evolve as new expressions of it are created. IFLA (2017, pp. 21e22)

In addition, IFLA LRM declares a relationship has part/is a part of between two works, wherein the content of one is a component of the other: This applies when the component-to-whole relationship is an inherent aspect of the works and holds for all the expressions and manifestations of the larger work and of its component works, whether the expression or manifestation comprises the full larger work or just one or more (but not all) of the component works. IFLA (2017, p. 72)

An inherent aspect of each single work in a fictional universe is that it is a constitutive component e i.e. part e of that universe, seen as a total work.

130

Metadata for Transmedia Resources

Each expression of a total work can be seen as a fragment of its total transmedial expression. Each manifestation can be viewed as a part of a set of platforms needed to convey a total expression. This falls in line with the fundamental definition of transmedia, which is determined by dispersion of unique intellectual or artistic content both across media (expression level) and delivery platforms (manifestation level). The parts of the total expression may be created sequentially or in parallel, or by combination of both methods. The same applies for the release of manifestations. Diachronicity of a total work can be recorded by relating each occurrence of a single work with a corresponding time-span. Based on this information, a total work can be recognised as soft, hard or ‘chewy’, according to Long’s categorisation (Long, 2007). At a modelling level, a meta-work does not need to be identified or defined as a new entity or sub-entity because it does not possess any features that would substantially differentiate it from work. It can simply be viewed as a larger work that comprises a number of distinct, self-contained works. Depending on the design method, a larger work can be a product of a single author or authorial team, or a result of contributions made by many authors, all of whom, however, operate within the same ideational framework, set up by common elements of the story or fictional world such as topos, mythos and ethos. Its components are related by commonality of content, which however includes not only expansion along the same narrative line, but also other forms of transfictionality. Individual works can be expansions, modifications or transpositions of other individual works constituting a meta-work. These relationships will be addressed in the next section. All these properties of a meta-work were covered by the class Complex Work in the FRBRoo model. Complex Work comprised ‘works that have other works as members. The members of a Complex Work may constitute alternatives to, derivatives of or self-contained components of other members of the same Complex Work’. (IFLA, 2015, p. 63). In LRMoo, which assumes a more abstract and streamlined structure of LRM, the class Complex Work has been deprecated, since it has been decided that it did not have any specific features essentially distinguishing it from a more general concept of Work. However, if need be, any LRM-based transmedia storytelling ontology may declare complex work or individual work as sub-entities of work. The next question is how this complex meta-work should be identified and described in a bibliographic information system: explicitly, under its own title and with its own attributes, or implicitly, by setting up linkage

How to organise information about transmedia?

131

between single works? As reported above, user conceptualisations of transmedia generally start from a central or encompassing concept, but employ different methods of organisation. These are schematically depicted in Fig. 4.3: The first diagram (above left) is an example of conceptualisation where one work serves as a central node for other works. In the study described above, this method was employed by one user (The Blade Runner). In the second case (above right), one central concept (work or character) serves as a central node for some concepts, while others are linked directly to other, ‘low-level’ concepts. This method was employed by two users (The Labyrinth, Harry Potter). Finally, the third diagram (below) shows the case where all the concepts are encompassed by a high-level entity e the narrative world or franchise. This method was also employed by two users (The Game of Thrones, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles). Since different methods were used almost evenly, we need to further analyse their comparative advantages and drawbacks. For this purpose, the two former cases can be considered as one method characterised by the presence of a central node as the main organisational device. The solution represented by the third diagram was advocated during the 1990s, when it was proposed that a superwork should be represented in the library catalogue by a ‘super-record’, i.e. a cluster record that would reconciliate the finding and collocation functions of the catalogue by grouping all the adaptations, selections, translations etc. under the uniform title of a work (Fattahi, 1996). An advantage of this solution is that it not only provides an efficient collocating device, but also allows for a meta-work to be independently described as a higher-level logical unit. Information associated

Fig. 4.3 Users’ conceptualisations of transmedia compositions.

132

Metadata for Transmedia Resources

with the work at this level may include genre, subjects, settings, characters and other narrative elements continuously repeated through the majority of instalments, as well as the names of the creators responsible for the overall story or fictional world (including roles such as ‘story architects’). For the users who attach great importance to authorship as a guarantee of conceptual integrity, this might be a valuable piece of information that would allow them to select individual works based on a certain authorial presence. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a universe created by Joss Whedon, and if he happens not to be involved in the creation or production of a specific part of the universe, perhaps that part is apocryphal and best avoided by those whose consumption choices are guided by the loyalty to the author. In many cases, information about the holder of intellectual property rights can also be related to a high-level work, e.g. in the case of Marvel or Star Wars universe. Furthermore, the concept mappings have shown that users tend to identify a story or narrative world as a whole, using the title of the original or most widely known work. It leads to the conclusion that every story or fictional world has its own representative work that best reflects its thematic and aesthetic preoccupations and should therefore be taken as a basis for the title of the whole. This is almost a paraphrase of the IFLA LRM notion of ‘representative expression’ (IFLA, 2017, pp. 41e42, 91). ‘Representative expression’ is based  umer (2010a, pp. 656e657; 2010b, p. 678) on the findings by Pisanski and Z showing that end-users often consider a particular expression as the one that best represents the intention of the creators of the work (e.g. a novel in the original language). This expression best reflects certain characteristics inherent in the work, and hence its title (i.e. the title of the manifestation embodying it) serves as the basis for the preferred title of the work. However, none of the participants in the present study attempted to distinguish general information pertaining to the whole from the specific information pertaining to the parts. This prompts us to reconsider the usefulness of cluster records. Technically, the notion of a super-record is still anchored in the idea of records and main entries as basic organisational units of an information system. A new paradigm confers the collocating function to data display generated as an answer to a particular user query: e.g. if a user searches for The Matrix, they should retrieve not only information about the eponymous film (preferably distinguished from information about algebra textbooks), but also links to sequels, prequels and other related works within the same franchise, regardless of medium of expression. This is, in fact, the solution depicted in the first two diagrams, where a meta-work is not identified as a stand-alone unit with its own title and description, but

How to organise information about transmedia?

133

rather as a network of individual works, searchable and navigable via various paths. This method also helps avoid a major pitfall of a super-record: which individual works should be included in it? Should the umbrella title serve to bring together only canonical works? This takes us back to the shaky ground of predicting users’ preferences about canon. It has already been pointed out that users employ different criteria e consistency, authorship, characters, settings, media etc. e to select a path through a transmedia story or narrative world and to make meaning out of it (Beddows, 2012). Moreover, the very notion of consistency cannot be unequivocally defined. For example, in his analysis of the Labyrinth storyworld, Long (2007, pp. 118, 123) complains that the content of the book The Goblins of the Labyrinth faltered as a transmedia extension because it failed to fill in the gaps left by the film and fractured the sense of continuity. The participant who depicted the concept map of The Labyrinth also disliked the way the stories of The Goblins added to the fictional world of the film, but liked the illustrations and considered them canonical, claiming that ‘some things fell out of canon in one aspect, but remained canonical in another’. The preference given by the participant to visual over narrative canon is bolstered by the fact that Brian Froud, who is responsible for The Goblins illustrations, was also an originator of The Labyrinth world and the concept designer on the film. The participant further demonstrated his preference to visual canon by recording the name of another graphic artist and including fan art in the concept map. It has already been reported that many users show interest in fan-created content or at least tolerate it, even though they consider it secondary or inferior to officially released material (Beddows, 2012, pp. 196, 198). Only one of the participants in the present study included fan-generated content in the map (The Labyrinth). However, in the interviews, when explicitly asked about fan fiction, the participants generally expressed tolerance and support, e.g.: • ‘Personally I think it’s low quality, but it’s nice that people are doing it’ • ‘I don’t make difference between the official story and fan stories because they are all about the same subject’ • ‘I don’t care because I follow my personal canon anyway’ • ‘I expect the works by the same author to be consistent, but I think that interpretations by other authors need to offer something new, even if it comes at the price of sacrificing coherence. Each medium is a story for itself, and their interconnection adds to the fun’.

134

Metadata for Transmedia Resources

Furthermore, the distinction between ‘consistent’ official canon and ‘inconsistent’ fan work is far from being clear cut. For example, Long (2007, pp. 151e155) cites Hellboy as a franchise that has deliberately maintained separate continuities for each of its individual media forms. It is worth noting that the user concept mappings are concerned with the question of coherence or ‘sameness’ of the work as a whole even if distinction between canonical and apocryphal content is not explicitly addressed. Thus the map of The Blade Runner world problematises plot differences between the novel, film and video game (e.g. the question of whether the main character is a replicant is answered negatively in the novel and left ambiguous in the film, while in the game it depends on the player’s decisions). Similarly, the maps of Harry Potter and The Game of Thrones focus on the continuity of fundamental subjects (e.g. battle of good and evil or intrigue over power) across different media realisations. These findings support the argument that bibliographic information tools should not make any presumptions about what users might want to include in their consuming patterns of transmedia. An intercompositional transmedia creation as a whole has many inherent characteristics that allow it to be seen as a work in its own right; however, its boundaries are usually too fuzzy for a precise outline. This seems to be close to what Coyle refers to as the cognitive view on work: ‘Have you read Harry Potter?’ can mean any or all of the books in that ‘arc’ or series. [.] In this cognitive model, there is no one definition for ‘work’. It will have meaning within a context and that meaning will often be shared, but not always. The basic level of categorization within that context will vary depending on who is participating in the communication. Coyle (2016, p. 19)

It is worth noting that CIDOC CRM contains the class named propositional object that comprises ‘sets of propositions about real or imaginary things [.] that are documented as single units or serve as topic of discourse’, e.g. the common ideas of the plots of the film The Seven Samurai by Akira Kurosawa and its remake The Magnificent Seven by John Sturges or the variants of the character Little Red Riding Hood that appear in different works, from the tales of the Grimm brothers and other oral fairy tales to the film Hoodwinked (ICOM, 2017, p. 40). This is a wider concept with respect to work, since it encompasses narrative elements that can be encapsulated in more than one work, and that more or less firmly join

How to organise information about transmedia?

135

distinct works into a common conceptual unit. In other words, propositional object can be interpreted as a transfictional framework. Although it is possible to identify this framework as an independent unit and describe it as a separate object, it is more neutral, but also more practical, to infer it from a cluster of interconnected individual works. The paradigm of the card catalogue, where each object of description was encapsulated in its own record and identified by the main entry, is substituted for a perspective that sees an object of description as a networked graph of data. In other words, description of any given object of interest can be contained in more than one record, provided that links are established between records. As Green explains: Whatever we consider to be the most basic elements of reality, we deem to be things or, more formally, entities. After that, it’s all relationships. Relationships are involved as we combine simple entities to form more complex entities [.]. Indeed, many things that we might initially regard as basic and elemental are revealed upon further examination to involve internal structure, or in other words, internal relationships. Green (2001, p. 3)

Kent also points out that the distinction between entities and relationships is a modelling decision: It is often a matter of choice whether a piece of information is to be treated as a category, an attribute, or a relationship. (Which raises the question of how fundamental such a distinction really is.) This corresponds to the equivalence between ‘that is a parent’ (the entities are parents), ‘that person has children’ (the entities are people, with the attribute of having children), and ‘that person is the parent of those children’ (the entities are people and children, related by parentage). Kent (2012, p. 48)

Each work is, in fact, a network of expressions sharing intellectual or artistic content. Whether they should all be collocated under the title of a work or linked mutually is a modelling decision guided mostly by practical reasons (e.g. it is more economical, and better corresponds to common searching habits, to categorise all the individual expressions under one work than to connect them mutually by links of equivalence). However, in the case of transmedia mutual relationships between the members of the same storyworld are far more varied and complex than mutual relationships between expressions of the same work, which are simply equivalent to one another. Therefore, representing a story arc or narrative world as a network of interrelated individual works seems to be an economical and flexible

136

Metadata for Transmedia Resources

approach that leaves the user full freedom to set their own itinerary through the story. In this context it is critical that each individual work be clearly and consistently identified using an authorised preferred title. This may seem self-evident, but we should be reminded that the lack of preferred titles for works in library catalogues was one of major obstacles to successful implementation of the FRBR model. While recording preferred titles for works is important whenever a work is realised or manifested in more than one sign system or physical form, in the case of transmedia this becomes absolutely indispensable because titles for works serve as nodes that guide to other works within the same storyworld. In addition, it would be highly recommendable to construct controlled access points for individual works so that they include medium (film, video game etc.) and the year of creation, even when this information is not critical for the distinction of two identical forms of titles. The year documents diachronic aspect of the storyworld, whereas the medium enables the user to choose an itinerary based on their preference for a particular expressive form. This is supported by the findings of the present study where users identified parts of the storyworld primarily by the medium of expression. Strictly spoken, this information does not pertain to the work entity, since a work is a purely conceptual object that has not yet been expressed in any medium. However, what is revealed as useful here is the IFLA LRM notion of a ‘representative expression’ that grants its properties to the work. The term for a medium can be taken from a controlled vocabulary such as lists of content forms provided by ISBD or RDA. In this way users will be able to retrieve information about the whole whenever searching for a part, as well as to retrieve information about the parts when searching by the title associated with the whole. For example, the search for The Matrix (which may refer both to the individual work and the whole franchise) will display results similarly to the following scheme: The Matrix (film) (1999) See also: Sequel: The Matrix Reloaded (film) (2003) Interquel: The Final Flight of the Osiris (animated film) (2003) If the user decides to follow the links, each link will reveal another part of the graph: The Final Flight of Osiris (animated film) (2003) See also: Sequel: Enter the Matrix (video game) (2003)

How to organise information about transmedia?

137

Sequel: The Matrix Reloaded (film) (2003) Prequel: The Matrix (film) (1999) It is worth noting that a structure based on internal relationships lends itself well to graph visualisation techniques (e.g. similar to Fig. 4.2) that potentially facilitate user navigation and promote exploration. Therefore, from bibliographic point of view, in order to avoid dilemmas about the boundaries of a transmedia meta-work, it is best to define intercompositional transmedia as a set of interrelated individual works. Relationships operating between these works are transfictional. Below I will investigate how they are approached by IFLA LRM.

4.4 Work-to-work relationships in transmedia networks Transfictional relations operate between works at the level of the fictional world and generally take three forms: expansion, displacement (or modification) and transposition (Dolezel, 1998a). Expansion is the only form of transfictionality that maintains the integrity and continuity of the world, which is why many definitions of transmedia storytelling (Jenkins, 2003; Long, 2007) strongly rely on it. As a technique aimed at expanding the story through different media and platforms, transmedia is usually defined in opposition to adaptation. In practice, however, things are rarely that simple. Dena (2009, p. 157) was among the first to point out that adaptation can be considered a transmedia technique if it adds to the overall experience and if it is envisaged from the outset as a gateway to extensions of the work in other media. Scenes from the Hollywood action blockbusters often look like scenes from video games because writers, directors and producers already have one eye on extending the narrative universe through games. Knowledge and skills involved in transmedia world-building include use of different media environments in different ways, one of which is adaptation. This perspective was also adopted by Jenkins in his later writings on transmedia storytelling: Any adaptation represents an interpretation of the work in question and not simply a reproduction, so all adaptions to some degree add to the range of meanings attached to a story. And as Dena notes, the shifts between media mean that we have new experiences and learn new things. [.] It might be better to think of adaptation and extension as part of a continuum in which both poles are only theoretical possibilities and most of the action takes place somewhere in the middle. Jenkins (2011)

138

Metadata for Transmedia Resources

Jenkins further explains his idea of a continuum by introducing the concept of ‘additive comprehension’ to denote the degree to which each new text adds to the understanding of the story as a whole. Additive comprehension encompasses a variety of relations between media. This is supported by the findings of the present study where, as observed above, concept maps of transmedia narratives included a whole range of relationships: whole-part, sequels, extensions, complements and side products, but also adaptations, partial adaptations, reboots, inspirations and influences. IFLA LRM identifies five work-to-work relationships: whole-part, sequentiality, accompanying or complementing work, inspiration and transformation. Below we will look more closely at how each of these relations applies to the context of transmedia.

4.4.1 Whole-part relation This relationship, expressed as work has part/is part of work (IFLA, 2017, p. 72), has already been touched upon as a device for relating individual works to a larger narrative context. Although the importance of the link between a fictional world and its component is fully recognised, it has been argued that in a bibliographic system it would be better to record it implicitly, through identification of relationships between component works. However, if we move from a particular system to a wider context of the Web, at some point it might be useful to link library metadata about an individual work directly to a larger context, e.g. when linking to external sources where a franchise has already been identified and described as a whole. In this case the relationship work has part/is part of work could be used. IFLA LRM stresses out that a work is a part of another work when this relationship is inherent to both works regardless of a particular expression or manifestation. As shown in the previous section, in the case of transmedia meta-works and their components, this holds true. If a more precise semantics is required, the whole-part relationship can be refined by a sub-property or subtype such as membership or constituency. However, taxonomy of whole-part relations is a complex ontological subject, studied by a specialised field of philosophy and mathematical logic, and discussion about it is out of the scope of this book. Nevertheless, it should be remarked that by declaring individual works as ‘members’ of a larger entity, the semantics of this entity shifts towards the notion of a collection. As we know, a collection can be assembled according to any common characteristic shared by its members, which may or may not be based on an initial authorial vision or design. Thus the semantic

How to organise information about transmedia?

139

moves from a meta-work determined by the original authorial intention (‘would A. A. Milne, the author of the Winnie the Pooh stories, approve of a feature film sequel that portrays Christopher Robin as an adult?’) to a collection of works assembled according to usage preferences (‘am I interested to see what happens when Christopher Robin has grown up?’). Criteria for determining commonality of content are left to the eye of the beholder, which opens up many possible pathways through the fictional world. Collection-member relation is therefore closer to user-centred approach than to the perspectives that value design process as a key feature of transmedia. From this vantage point, a fictional world may be seen an aggregating work created by an individual consumer. This is another argument in favour of representing fictional worlds as networks of interrelated works rather than pre-defined stand-alone units.

4.4.2 Sequential relation The IFLA LRM relationship work precedes/succeeds work concerns logical continuation of the content, and not the time of creation (IFLA, 2017, p. 72). Thus The Star Wars: Episode IV e A New Hope succeeds The Star Wars: Episode I e The Phantom Menace, although it was filmed more than twenty years earlier. Sequentiality is a type of expansion, and probably the most important of all the expansive techniques employed by transmedia storytelling, since it has an essential role in the advancement of the narrative. It encompasses all kinds of pre-histories and post-histories and, in a specialised context, can be refined as interquel, circumquel, inquel etc. (e.g. The Final Flight of Osiris is an interquel between The Matrix and The Matrix Reloaded). It may be surprising to find out that the total occurrence of this relationship in user concept maps was no more than three: a film succeeded by graphic novels (The Labyrinth), novels and TV series preceded by graphic novels (The Game of Thrones) and film sequels (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles). Complementing works and transformations were included in the maps twice as often. This finding supports the claim that transmedia is rarely a pure expansion of a story across media and more often employs a number of different techniques in order to relate all the components into a unique experience.

4.4.3 Accompanying or complementing work The relationship work accompanies/complements/is accompanied/complemented by work is interesting because of its specific role in the development of a

140

Metadata for Transmedia Resources

transmedia narrative. At a general level, the IFLA LRM definition of it as ‘the relationship between two works which are independent, but can also be used in conjunction with each other as complements or companions’ (IFLA, 2017, p. 73) can be applied to all relations within intercompositional transmedia, because each work in intercompositional transmedia is autonomous, and becomes interdependent only when viewed in conjunction with other works. However, in a narrower sense, this relationship is understood as a particular type of expansion aimed at expanding the story in various directions, often with the purpose of preparing the ground for sequential expansions. For example, a complementary work can offer an insight into a story from a different perspective or enhance the experience of a fictional world by providing information about its geography, history and traditions. Sometimes it portrays events that occur at the same time as in another story within the same universe (sidequel). In hard transmedia, characterised by the absence of a parent work, a majority of relationships can be categorised as accompanying or complementary. The difference between the two, as defined by IFLA LRM, lies in symmetry: if two works are independent, but add value to each other, they are complementary (e.g. the TV series The Game of Thrones and the series of novels A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms by George R. R. Martin), but if one work loses most of its meaning when consumed independently from the other, it is considered accompanying (e.g. the website purportedly run by Sherlock Holmes). However, the exact level of autonomy of a work is not easily ascertained and may be subject to interpretation, which in turn is determined by cultural practices. For example, a cultural status of particular media changes over time: during the previous decade, video games were commonly developed as a form of content marketing for feature films, whereas now films are being created to expand the worlds of widely popular video games such as Warcraft or The Assassin’s Creed. In the users’ maps, these relationships were variously labelled as ‘side product of’, ‘parallel with’, ‘extend’ and ‘complement’. Interestingly, music scores for films and video games were mentioned four times in three different maps. A particularly interesting case was the Blade Runner map, because it emphasised the fact that both the film and the game used the same music theme by Vangelis, thereby assigning it a canonical function. In addition to narrative and visual elements, it seems that music can also be a determining factor of canon. The maps also indicate that users distinguish between accompanying and complementary works. For example, the map of The Labyrinth distinguishes

How to organise information about transmedia?

141

between ‘side product’ (a work that accompanies another work) and ‘parallel’ (a work that complements another work). Music score by David Bowie is a side product to the film because ‘it was created simultaneously, and it was a necessary part for the realisation of the film’. On the other hand, the novel, published in the year of the film’s release, was labelled as a parallel work, although the participant’s original intention was to categorise it as an adaptation. However, since both appeared approximately at the same time, he was not sure whether the term ‘adaptation’ was adequate, so instead decided to establish a relationship that indicated parallel act of publication of a manifestation. Note that ‘parallel’ in this case refers to the date of creation, not the timeline of the story (the novel depicts the same events as the film). These comments lead to several conclusions. First, complementarity is useful as a high-level relationship when a more nuanced transfictional relation cannot be ascertained. Second, a work is basically considered accompanying when it results from the same (joint) creative process as the primary work, otherwise is more generally recognised as complementary. Finally, in the description of transmedia resources, attention should be paid to clearly differentiate between parallel events in the story and parallel acts of creation of the story. The former is expressed by establishing the relation of complementarity, which can be subdivided into more refined concepts such as spin-off, sidequel etc. The latter, as previously discussed, is recorded by including the year of creation in the controlled access point for a work.

4.4.4 Transformations and inspirations As discussed above, ‘additive comprehension’ in transmedia is achieved by using a range of different narrative techniques, some of which may involve adaptation, modification or transposition of the original content. Although modification and transposition are commonly associated with fan-created works, they are also part of corporate franchises such as Hellboy or Iron Man because different continuities support the branching of a story in a wide variety of (transmedial) directions. Adaptation can also be a ‘transitory’ step towards ‘real’ transmediality, as exemplified by the TV series The Game of Thrones which started as an adaptation of an unfinished series of fantasy novels by George R. R. Martin, but eventually continued where the novels have left off, turning into the dominant medium of the story. All of these cases fall in the category of transformations or inspirations, and were, by and large, the most frequent type of work-to-work relationships recorded in the user concept maps.

142

Metadata for Transmedia Resources

IFLA LRM differentiates between transformations and inspirations, explaining that work is a transformation of/was transformed into work when a new work is created by changing the genre, literary form, target audience or style of a previous work, whereas work is inspiration for/is inspired by work when the content of one work served as the source of ideas for another (IFLA, 2017, p. 73). However, the model recognises that the boundaries between these two situations can be blurry (IFLA, 2017, p. 73). In the users’ concept maps, these relationships appeared under a variety of names, such as ‘based on’, ‘influenced by’, ‘reboot’, ‘partial adaptation’, ‘parody’, ‘inspired by’ and ‘variant’. Note that differences between adaptations, inspirations, influences and parallel expansions are not always intuitively clear. For example, the Blade Runner video game has a similar narrative line as the film, but the protagonist is different, so in the concept map, the game is represented generally as ‘influenced by’ the film. (A more precise determination would be a sidequel.) However, different users analyse a story at different levels of subtlety and are not necessarily familiar with neologism terms that denote a vast array of possible relationships between various narrative lines. This does not mean they would not benefit from a precise indication of relationship types. However, the level of granularity will always depend on the assessment of user expectations in the actual context, and the terms that have not been widely accepted may result confusing. One of the perpetual questions concerning the work entity has been concerned with determining when the degree of changes made to a work was sufficient to produce a new work, and not merely a new variation (or expression) of the existing work. IFLA LRM points out to bibliographic and cultural conventions, among which we may also include different narrative theories. The model nevertheless provides some practical guidance by stating that paraphrases, rewritings, adaptations for children, parodies and adaptations of a work from one literary or art form to another represent new works (IFLA, 2017, p. 22), presumably because they all involve a significant degree of independent intellectual effort. In one way or another, a majority of user concept mappings touched upon the question of the ‘sameness’ of the work. Thus in the map depicting The Labyrinth, board games and a video game represent ‘partial adaptations’ of the film because ‘many things are the same, but the characters appear in different order, and the ending can be different’. This brings forth an interesting question of whether each course of a non-linear interaction such as a game represents a new work. As pointed out by one of the participants,

How to organise information about transmedia?

143

the Harry Potter Trading Card Game not only provides a direct experience of the basic subject of the story (the conflict between good and evil), but also allows the player to choose a side and thus change the outcome of the story. The Blade Runner video game has 12 possible endings, in some of which the protagonist turns out to be a replicant, while in others he does not. This means that a set of ideas that constitute the storyline changes depending on the player’s actions in the game. Should we conclude then that the item obtained by the player in fact carries not one, but 12 different works, and what are the implications of this conclusion for bibliographic description? As always, the answer must be guided by pragmatic reasons. The IFLA LRM model is designed as a pragmatic tool for imposing a certain degree of order to the complexity of bibliographic universe for the purpose of enabling users to find, identify, select and obtain information resources of their interest. As pointed out by Coyle (2016, p. 88), the WEMI entities are not ‘a philosophic or theoretical declaration of a bibliographic ideal’, but a tool grounded in bibliographic practices. Its main scope is to cover actual user information needs, but taking into account their diversity and providing a common framework that can be extended or reduced in accordance with specific requirements (IFLA, 2017, p. 10). If a game is documented for the purpose of research or preservation, all of its parts will probably be thoroughly described, including the versions of the code that determine how certain player’s decisions affect the course of the game. Moreover, there is a high probability that software and hardware needed to run the game will also be preserved and documented, thereby enabling the reconstruction of all the possible courses taken by the player. On the other hand, a public library catalogue will not need to go into such details, and will probably focus on recording available editions on various media platforms, leaving it to the user to explore the nuances of the content. However, the fact that users have paid notable attention to how specific narrative elements are repeated or transformed across different media realisations (the Labyrinth video game can have different beginning or ending from the film; the biotech corporation that develops replicants is called Tyrell Corporation in The Blade Runner and Rosen Association in the original novel; the main character is married in the novel, but not in the film; the Harry Potter collectible card game enhances the experience of the dominant theme introduced by the novels; the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles animated series is more adjusted to children compared to the original comic version etc.) indicates that they are, in fact, interested in more

144

Metadata for Transmedia Resources

extensive subject information. Subject information provides a basis upon which they will be able to decide if a work falls into their personal canon. Simple indications such as ‘is a transformation of’ or ‘was inspired by’ are not sufficient for a full grasp of differences and similarities between two stories. For this purpose, these relationships would need to be significantly refined (e.g. ‘has a different ending from’, ‘has a different setting from’ etc.). However, a more feasible solution would be simply to include more detailed subject information.

4.5 Subject information Despite the fact that subject access has long been recognised as an important part of bibliographic information organisation (Cutter, 1904), bibliographic description and subject analysis are still commonly seen as separate, independent processes. This is not completely unfounded: whereas cataloguing has predominantly been concerned with physical aspects of a resource, subject indexing and classification sought to capture knowledge stored in the resource. While metadata resulting from both activities should be regarded as two sides of the same coin e for example, Hjørland (1997, pp. 25, 33) writes about implicit subject data such as titles or citations which helps users in subject retrieval although it was not directly produced with this purpose in mind e this holistic perspective did not seem so practical in the age of the card catalogue. The author catalogue, with records filed under the names of authors, was often physically separated from the subject catalogue, in which records were filed under subject headings. References between the two may had required the user to go to another cabinet, if not to another room. (It was as a consequence of these constraints that the author catalogue incorporated some hybrid solutions that were at conceptual odds with its very nature, such as formal headings.) However, in online environment, where descriptive and subject metadata are displayed in a single record, one click away from one another, there is no reason not to view them as complementary parts of a whole, even if, for practical reasons, descriptive and subject cataloguing still may be organised into separate business processes and assigned to different departments within a library. IFLA LRM also takes a holistic approach in this matter, with the full awareness that no model of bibliographic universe that does not address subject access can be considered functional. The model, however, does not go into details concerning principles and practices of subject analysis and indexing. As a high-level conceptual model,

How to organise information about transmedia?

145

its scope is limited to providing a basic framework for any scheme or vocabulary that may support subject access. Thus the model declares a top entity (res) that can be refined into any concept identified as subject matter of a work. It also declares a general relationship work has as subject res/res is subject of work, which is the logical connection between any work and a related subject entity. Any relation between subjects can be expressed as a refinement of the recursive top-level relationship res is associated with res. Within this framework, it is possible to develop a system that would provide extensive subject access to transmedia fiction. Subject access to works of fiction is one of the most underused elements of bibliographic information organisation. This appears all the more paradoxical considering that fiction makes up a substantial portion of library material budgets and circulation. According to the Library Journal annual survey of the U.S. public libraries, in 2016 fiction claimed 65% of print book budgets and about 81% of e-book budgets and circulation, with general demand for fiction ranging from 55% of checked-out books in the largest libraries up to 84% in smaller libraries (Hoffert, 2017). Svenonius (2000, pp. 46e50) explains the lack of subject access to imaginative works by pointing out that the language used in art and literature is not referential. Whereas Wilson (1978, p. 14) argued that music and fine arts cannot be ‘about something’, because they are primarily intended to produce emotional experiences, Svenonius extends this assertion to fiction, poetry and films. Even when a theme of an imaginative work can be identified, it is not necessarily translatable into a clear and concise term: It makes sense to say that Moby Dick is about something, but this something is more than just a whale; however it is characterized, it cannot be neatly packaged into a word or short phrase. [.] This makes subject indexing difficult and, in fact, often no attempt is made to do it for works that, wholly or in part, have subjects that cannot be named. Many fictional works and works in audio or visual form fall into this category. Instead, such works are often described using subject-like attributes, such as genre. Svenonius (2000, p. 49)

However, various models and schemes for subject access to fictional works have been repeatedly proposed alongside with claims about critical importance of this information for researchers in the humanities, especially in the course of the last decades of the 20th century. Miller (2003) observes these tendencies through the lens of the postmodern interest in narratives, interdisciplinarity, microhistory and everyday life, which helped turn literary texts and other forms of fiction into objects of academic interest

146

Metadata for Transmedia Resources

outside the domain of literary scholarship. Whereas the subject of a fictional work is seldom explicitly stated and therefore notoriously difficult to determine e particularly if we take the epistemological view held by Wilson (1978) and Hjørland (1997), who consider subject to be informative potential operating at the intersection of a work, the author and the user rather than an inherent, straightforward relationship between a work and its topic e we should be reminded that subject information encompasses both ‘aboutness’ and ‘ofness’. The former reveals what information a work  umer, Zeng, & conveys, while the latter indicates what a work depicts (Z Salaba, 2012, p. 7). ‘Ofness’ has often been advocated as an important, perhaps even the most adequate approach to fictional works (Berman, 1982; Pejtersen et al., 1996), not least because, in addition to conveying information of interest to users, it concerns clearly nameable concepts such as characters, places or events: Subject matter analysis should seek to identify the subject, in terms of the situation of the main character(s), the event(s) and the additional subject elements and their relationship. Pejtersen et al. (1996, p. 25)

Branch et al. (2017) propose a transmedia storytelling ontology based on extraction of such concepts from fictional worlds. Based on the content analysis of four widely popular narrative universes e Marvel, Harry Potter, The Star Wars, and The Lord of the Rings e the authors present a relationship-oriented model that is focused on retrieving information about characters (including their family trees, histories, motivations etc.), objects (vehicles, weapons and magical items), events (e.g. metamorphosis of a character), fictional and fictionalised settings, and general lore about a storyworld, from its legal system to languages and technological advancements. Users’ concept mappings of transmedia narratives showed the predominance of subject information among concepts associated with the works, with one map e The Game of Thrones e organised entirely around subjects. While the total number of non-fictional entities associated with works (e.g. authors, producers, genres etc.) was 26, the total number of fictional entities amounted to 33. Among these, 15 represented named entities such as fictional persons, organisations and places, e.g. Rick Deckard, Ray McCoy, Tyrell Corporation, Harry Potter, the Lannister family, Daenerys Targaryen, Westeros etc. The remaining 18 represented general concepts, almost all of which were main plot-driving elements labelled by simple terms, e.g. magic,

How to organise information about transmedia?

147

love, war, mutiny, dragons, honour, diplomacy, intrigue, opportunism or military power. Out of the total of recorded relationships (between a work and another work, a work and its subject, a work and its creator etc.), relationships between fictional entities e e.g. ‘The Wall is a part of Westeros’, ‘The Wall is the defence from the White Walkers’ or ‘replicants are produced by Tyrell Corporation’ e accounted for approximately one-fifth. These findings clearly speak in favour of a transmedia storytelling subject ontology based on ‘ofness’, such as the model proposed by Branch et al. (2017). However, despite current advancements in named entity extraction and automated indexing, to capture this kind of information still means to involve in an in-depth intellectual analysis that requires a fair degree of familiarity with the content. As stated before, the best way to compensate for the lack of specialised knowledge is to take information from external funds of knowledge such as fan-created sources. The difficulty with this approach is that fan-created information is usually stored in the form of unstructured texts in wikis, blogs etc. Branch et al. (2017, p. 2772) report that searches performed within ontology-based search engines failed to find any structured information about fictional elements such as e.g. SpiderMan’s age or how he obtained his superpowers, although this type of information is highly useful for understanding transmedia worlds. This puts an even stronger focus on the need for structuring subject information, both in and outside library context. It also confirms the need for an ontology that would enable subjects from a variety of relevant sources, from institutional bibliographic systems to user-generated websites, to be brought together in the form suitable for semantic-based organisation and searches. The ontology should be based on characters, events, items, places, periods and other concepts extractable from transmedia fictional worlds. Since a majority of intercompositional transmedia storyworlds belong to the genre of speculative fiction, narrative tropes associated with this genre (e.g. the opposition of good and evil, fictitious countries and nations, the existence of magical items and creatures, the existence of aliens etc.) can be useful in the process of content analysis and knowledge extraction. Further investigation into other genres would still be needed to provide a more complete overview of narrative elements that should be included in the ontology (Branch et al., 2017, p. 2780). However, regardless of the details concerning its internal structure, since any fictional element can be defined as a subentity of res, and their mutual relationships declared as sub-properties of the top-level relationship res is associated with res, such an ontology could easily be accommodated as an extension to the IFLA LRM model.

148

Metadata for Transmedia Resources

It should also be noted that the strategy aimed at leveraging fan community knowledge fits well into the current perspective on sharing subject data, which is based on adding up rather than integration. Whereas formal description is focussing on matching and merging metadata from various sources, subject description is oriented towards aggregating metadata and displaying it together, with the goal of providing a multifaceted understanding of the subject: The Web, and now the Semantic Web, enables global sharing of our data. For those resources that can be used by different communities, providing the bibliographic descriptions from the perspectives of different cataloguers and indexers worldwide increases the access opportunities by displaying alternative terms that may be used to following pathways to further information on the Web. Tillett (2015, p. 28)

If metadata created by professional cataloguers and indexers are united with the information provided by user communities e which is already implemented to some extent through user tagging options in library information systems e this might offer a more complete picture of a dialectic subject approach where pluralism of perspectives and interpretations is seen as an added value, provided its underlying logical structure is clear and consistent.

4.6 Modelling of games, performances and interactive fiction So far we have addressed the modelling issues related to intercompositional transmedia creations. We have identified these creations as networks made up of autonomous individual works. Intracompositional transmedia seems to be less challenging to define because it is clearly an individual work, albeit with parts of the expression realised in different media, and hence with the manifestation dispersed across multiple platforms. However, since the category of intracompositional transmedia often includes games, or multimodal creations with elements of performance and interaction, it raises a different set of questions, aimed at modelling interactive, transient, dynamic cultural phenomena. Even when they are not conveyed across multiple media, interactive creations represent excellent starting points for the development of transmedia due to their inherently ramified structure that allows for easy and almost seamless expansion.

How to organise information about transmedia?

149

4.6.1 Performances and role-playing games An example of dynamic intracompositional transmedia is described in one of the user concept maps in the present study. It is the LARP event called Astra, that took place in 2014 in Zagreb, Croatia, with the main goal of promoting and popularising the works of three canonical Croatian authors of the late 19th and early 20th century e Marija Juric Zagorka, Antun Branko Simic and Ivana Brlic Mazuranic. Players assumed the roles of the candidates for a job in a mysterious detective agency and were assigned various tasks as part of the selection process. Certain tasks could be fulfilled only by consulting the works of the three writers. As is frequent in LARP, the event included elements of ARG, theatre and performance (e.g. book-reading flash mobs), but at the same time, in the manner of nesting dolls, incorporated existing literary works and other media forms that were either used to set up the game or resulted as the outcome of the event. The former category included diegetic objects that simultaneously existed in-game and off-game, such as a website for the detective agency or a blog purportedly written by one of the agents, as well as extra-diegetic objects with the exclusive role of setting up the event, e.g. a website for the event or a file with game instructions. The outputs of the game included photographs, video recordings, sculptures, short prose pieces and other objects resulting from players’ in-game activities. Note that these objects are works in their own right, but their meaning almost entirely depends on the context provided by the event. CIDOC CRM, an event-based model, defines this context as an activity, a class that comprises intentional actions carried out by actors (agents) and resulting in changes of state in the cultural, social or physical systems documented (ICOM, 2017, p. 6). On the other hand, IFLA LRM is concerned with the conceptual modelling of static objects and therefore does not declare activities or processes as entities. According to Wilson (1978, p. 6), bibliographic universe consists of recordings, which are outcomes of creative or productive processes. Consequently, bibliographic information organisation is concerned with results, not processes. Libraries collect, describe, store and provide access to fixed objects, and not activities. Nevertheless, as demonstrated earlier in a number of examples, a clearcut line between objects of interest to libraries and those of interest to other heritage communities is increasingly fading away. Digital technologies have largely contributed to this amalgamation by introducing dynamics to the once fixed and static notions such as books and collections, and transmedia practices seem to be efficiently completing the job.

150

Metadata for Transmedia Resources

IFLA LRM provides the basis for three modelling scenarios regarding LARP and similar media forms. These forms may include various types of educational, art and entertainment events, from ARGs and flash mobs (large public gatherings at which people perform an unusual or seemingly random act and then disperse) to historical reenactments, happenings and art performances. Note that, even though the function and context of these phenomena may notably differ, they all share the essential quality of being an organised action carried out by a group of persons over an extent of time. In this respect, they present similar challenges for documentation (Stenros & Montola, 2011, p. 3). The choice of a modelling option depends on the perspective taken, i.e. the context within which an event is to be documented and the purpose of the documentation. One possibility is to look at events as gatherings of persons, or collective agents. In IFLA LRM, a collective agent is ‘a gathering or organisation of persons bearing a particular name and capable of acting as a unit’ (IFLA, 2017, p. 29). It includes instances of groups that are ‘constituted as meetings, conferences, congresses, expeditions, exhibitions, festivals, fairs etc., as long as they are identified by a particular name and act as a unit’ (IFLA, 2017, p. 30). Happenings, performances and organised game events also meet another condition defined in the model, namely, that a gathering of people is considered a collective agent only when it is capable of agency with respect to instances of entities of bibliographic interest. As seen above, people gathered at game events may generate a variety of objects of bibliographic interest, from websites to video recordings. However, this modelling option is underpinned by a typical bibliographic perspective that approaches dynamic entities as stable, persistent artefacts and reduces the notion of the event to a collection of its tangible outcomes. It allows for expressing relations between an object and a group of persons whose organised action brought the object into existence, but does not provide much relevant context for the action itself. For example, attributes of collective agent such as general category, field of activity or language do not provide much insight into how, where, when, why or by whom the event was planned and realised. Yet it is precisely the understanding of the context that is essential for documentation of this type of resource, since it is usually described for the purpose of research, preservation, or reenactment, or all of the above. A better option would be to model an event as work. Organised events have many characteristics that encourage us to think of them as distinct intellectual or artistic creations. Their conception and preparation are

How to organise information about transmedia?

151

associated with agents, places and dates; they can be semantically related to other works (for example, the LARP Astra was accompanied by two websites and inspired by pieces of modern Croatian literature), they can have a narrative form (including a plot and characters) and they can be realised and embodied in various expressions and manifestations. Every restage or reenactment of a scripted or directed event e possibly in different location or with different participants e represents a new expression of the work. On the other hand, in the case of the events based on loose scripts and relying on improvisation, every new enactment is a new work. Stenros and Montola (2011) point out that all forms of role-playing, from the LARP events to massive multiplayer online role-playing games, are intersubjective and co-creative, which means that players’ actions shape other players’ responses and determine the unfolding of the events. The work is thus created at the intersection of unique contributions made by each of the participants. Even if repeated, the course and experience of the event will likely be different with each new realisation, and the original intentions of game designers may take a different turn. The same applies for performance art that relies on participation from the audience. For example, the famous performance artist Marina Abramovic has developed a set of methods aimed at documenting and preserving performance art, including techniques for training other artists to reperform her pieces. However, since the course and outcome of a piece of performance art is shaped by many nuances, not least important among which are reactions from the audience, these methods have a function of referencing and paying homage to the earlier events that would otherwise be lost, rather than presenting different realisations of the same event. Within the art world, Abramovic’s methods also provoked a fair amount of criticism aimed at the questionable purpose of reenacting something that is by nature ephemeral and unique. However, when events e both scripted and improvised e are modelled as works, we should be careful not to confuse them with works they incorporate or use as the basis. For example, a flash mob poetry reading is not an expression of a work of poetry being read, no less than a staging of Hamlet is an expression of the Shakespeare’s play. They are self-contained works that incorporate original poems, plays and other literary or musical creations, integrating them with staging directions, choreography instructions, game rules and other contributions made by creators of the event e directors, choreographers, game masters etc. In FRBRoo, this was expressed through the class performance work. Performance work is realised through a specific type of expression called performance plan, i.e. a set of

152

Metadata for Transmedia Resources

instructions that may incorporate musical scores, translations of drama texts and other expressions of distinct, independent works (IFLA, 2015, pp. 67, 71). At the time of writing, it is not yet clear whether these classes will be retained in LRMoo, but even if for the sake of the clarity of the model they are deprecated, they can be reinstalled e if needed e in a specific implementation. Finally, the third option would be to introduce the entity event and/or activity as the extension of IFLA LRM. Note again that any concept that is not explicitly defined in the model can be declared as a sub-entity of res. This method can be used to create an extension that is specifically concerned with interactive time-based entities, utilising parts of the CIDOC CRM hierarchies and properties. For example, activity is a sub-entity of event, an entity that comprises intentional or unintentional ‘changes of states in cultural, social or physical systems [.] brought about by a series or group of coherent physical, cultural, technological or legal phenomena’, such as World War II or the birth of Cleopatra (ICOM, 2017, p. 5). In bibliographic information organisation, this entity may also be useful as a subject category. An event can have agents as participants, which in CIDOC CRM is defined as the relationship had participant/participated in, with event and agent as domain and range. As a sub-entity of event, the entity activity inherits this property, in addition of having its own set of properties that provide a means to record e.g. who carried it out, what influenced it, which material or immaterial objects (including instructions, props etc.) were created for it or used during its course, what was its purpose and whether it was continued or preceded by another activity (ICOM, 2017, p. 6). Temporal extent of instances of events and activities can be defined by time-span (ICOM, 2017, p. 25; IFLA, 2017, p. 36). If activity plan is modelled as work (with respective expression and manifestation), this can serve as a bridge connecting the activity with a set of precisely defined responsibility roles involved in its conception and realisation: creators, performers, funders etc. Other possible relationships between activity and WEMI may include: an activity incorporating a work or expression (e.g. a poem read as a part of a LARP or a website for a fictional in-game entity), an activity using a manifestation (e.g. a book used as a prop), an activity being influenced by a work or expression (the LARP influenced by works of modern Croatian authors) and an activity resulting in a work, expression or manifestation (in the Astra LARP, the participants had to make sculptures or take photographs). However, while this modelling option has many advantages, it excludes the possibility of describing the subject, plot, characters and other narrative

How to organise information about transmedia?

153

elements, which makes it more suitable for non-narrative pieces such as performance art than for role-playing forms that usually have a narrative structure, however rudimentary. When modelling relationships, it is also worth noting that e as much as we try to capture a transient, time-based nature of an event, whether regarded as an activity, a work or something else e ultimately any technique used to document its course will consist of a set of classic, persistent bibliographic objects, written, sound and video recordings, expressions of works in their own right. In museums, this kind of material is considered primary documentation that contains all the information arising during the research, preservation and communication of the museum object (Maroevic, 1998, p. 257). Cataloging Cultural Objects (CCO), the Visual Resources Association standard for describing cultural works, emphasises the distinction between a work and its image: whereas a work is a distinct intellectual or artistic creation, an image is its visual representation conveyed on a slide, photograph, in a digital file etc. (VRA, 2006, pp. 4e5). The cataloguer should record work and image information in appropriate places, i.e. designate a record as being a record for the work or for the image. Consequently, a link between two related works has different semantics in respect to a link between a work and its image. However, these categories are not sharply delineated, and an object can be treated as a work of art or an image of a work of art, depending on aesthetic or historical value attributed to it within a certain context (VRA, 2006, p. 5). IFLA LRM does not distinguish between ‘primary’ and ‘documentary’ objects and approaches both categories through the same WEMI framework. However, it provides a means to express a relationship between an event and a work documenting it as the subject relationship (work has as subject res/res is subject of work). What is particularly interesting with respect to documentation of interactive and transitory phenomena is that it itself can be transmedia. Games, performances, works of interactive fiction and similar media forms need to be documented from a variety of angles if their intersubjective, unique, openended nature is to be preserved. When discussing strategies of LARP documentation, Stenros and Montola (2011, p. 6) propose ‘to capture instances of play instead of formal structure’ by documenting not only the game design, but also the outputs of the game such as players’ experiences and meanings attributed to the play. They recommend to record form, game mechanics, names of the creators, course of the events, rules, location, date, number of participants, duration and budget. (Note that most of these

154

Metadata for Transmedia Resources

elements can be modelled as properties of both work/expression and activity.) The authors’ interest in LARP documentation is primarily guided by the need to systematise the research of LARP within the field of game studies, but their observations can also be transferred to descriptive practices in heritage institutions. One of the central documentation strategies proposed by the authors is the employment of ‘differing angles of representation’, i.e. use of as many sources of information as possible, from game materials to video recordings and photographs, including character portraits, pictures of props, pictures of actual play etc. (Stenros & Montola, 2011, p. 7). The whole picture is formed only when all the pieces of documentation conveyed via different media are taken together.

4.6.2 Interactive digital resources Documentation of interactive digital resources can turn out to be quite complex even when it regards a single computer game or piece of digital fiction, let alone the cases when these are included into larger transmedia networks. Some of the complexities, extensively analysed by McDonough et al. (2010), include the cases when the story or game play remains the same while the underlying code is changed, or the code remains unchanged, but different compilers interpret it differently, or the same code is translated from one programming language to another, or changes in a larger software environment (e.g. the display interface or the disk drives), however subtle, affect the user’s experience. In addition, an original video game can generate numerous variations that range from multiple official editions intended for different platforms to user modes, i.e. alterations made by players that affect one or more aspects of the game (e.g. introduce additional objects). In an IFLA LRM-based implementation, it could be difficult to decide whether the extent of alterations, or intellectual effort involved in them, is significant enough to result in a new work or expression. As pointed out earlier, in addressing these questions, we should bear in mind that the answer will be largely shaped by the context and purpose of description. A public library will probably consider the boundaries of work and expression from the perspective of the end-user, focussing primarily on the changes that directly affect the course of the game play, in addition to more formal criteria prescribed by bibliographic standards, such as a change of responsibility. On the other hand, digital humanities research databases are likely to go into a fine level of technical detail when distinguishing and describing different variations. However, it is critical to find a point of balance between the need to

How to organise information about transmedia?

155

straightforwardly point the user to a resource and the extensive documentation needed for research and preservation, especially considering that the latter can easily grow into a pervasive web of resources in their own right. Long-term preservation of digital content commonly conforms to the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) reference model which, aside from the preservation of the ‘primary’ digital content, also requires the maintenance of so-called representation information, i.e. all the hardware and software necessary to interpret digital content and make it accessible, such as operating systems, apps, compilers, third party libraries etc. (McDonough, 2011; McDonough et al., 2010). Within an IFLA LRM framework, some of these can be viewed as accompanying works. The fact that digital content is so deeply embedded in its wider environment turns its preservation e of which description is a critical part e into a seriously complex and time-consuming task, especially in the case of ephemeral gaming material. A particular challenge is presented by complex, open-ended virtual worlds which are shaped almost entirely by players’ interactions, such as massive multiplayer online role-playing games (World of Warcraft, EVE Online), collaborative virtual environments (Second Life, Age of Empires) or augmented reality geocaching games (Pokémon Go). The complexity only multiplies when relations with other works within a transmedia network come into play. However, it should be noted that requirements of digital preservation are not prescribed by the bibliographic model, and that the model simply provides tools for information organisation. In fact, it is precisely the WEMI framework provided by IFLA LRM that allows for all these intricacies to be structured into a neat, wellstructured network. This is why an alignment of the OAIS reference model and FRBR (now IFLA LRM) has been proposed as a feasible solution for preservation of video games, since it provides both the precision in identification and description of resources, and the set of relationships supporting contextualisation and long-term access (McDonough, 2011). Similarly to the methods of documenting live events such as LARP, McDonough (2011, p. 177) points out that documentation of video games requires the use of various sources of information, such as monographic and journal literature about games, the recordings of actual game play (often accessible from fan websites or video channels) and information about the hardware and software needed to access the content. Again, documentation itself is transmedial, since only by taking various points of view can we gain insight into all the segments of complex phenomena such as interactive digital environments.

156

Metadata for Transmedia Resources

4.7 Authorship and authority As discussed earlier, for many users, the name of the author constitutes an important basis for assessing canonicity of a work within a transmedia storyworld. However, stories that unfold across multiple media bring into question the notion of authorship as generally understood in library cataloguing standards. In the card catalogue, it was essential to determine whose name will be used as the main access point, or heading of the main entry. In the cases of joint authorship, one name was picked as the heading, often following formal criteria such as the order of appearance of the names in the prescribed source of information on the resource, although added entries could be made under the names of other authors (but usually only up to three). In the cases of collaborative works, the main responsibility is determined in accordance to established cultural conventions (e.g. the director is a primary author of a film), even though, as seen in the second chapter, these conventions are by no means fixed and permanent. Other agents involved are regarded as contributors responsible for specific parts of a work, but a precise designation of their roles is not always recorded. Despite the fact that the advent of online catalogues opened the possibility of recording as many names as seen fit to serve as access points, MARC 21 still retains the concepts of the main entry and added entries. Therefore in library catalogues, it is still common to view creative contributions to a work through simple categories of primary and secondary responsibility. Even though relator codes specifying types of responsibility have been long existed both in MARC 21 and UNIMARC, they are used unevenly. However, the structure of the card catalogue is not the only or even main reason behind the conceptualisation of authorship that evolves around a single prominent authorial figure. The organisation of the catalogue merely followed the notion that has been deeply embedded in the Western culture for centuries. With collaborative practices brought forth by the Internet, this paradigm has been shaken to some degree, but authorial credit continues to occupy a central place in our cultural patterns as a guarantee of originality and consistency of ideas. Transmedia stories and storyworlds are built through collaboration of professionals from various creative professions, as well as through user participation. Those responsible for the consistency of the whole storyworld are not necessarily those whose creative participation is traditionally regarded as principal. The artist Geoff Darrow is credited with authorship of the graphic novel Bits and Pieces of Information, while the director Mahiro

How to organise information about transmedia?

157

Maeda is responsible for the Second Renaissance II anime. Both pieces were written by the Wachowski Brothers, but their contribution as writers is generally considered to be second to the creative role assumed by the artist or director. Yet it was the Wachowski Brothers who conceived, coordinated and supervised the realisation of all the components of The Matrix transmedia universe, and the whole universe is primarily associated with their names, regardless of a specific role they played in particular instalments. As observed by the participant who created the concept map of The Labyrinth in the present study: ‘I’ve recorded Jim Henson [as the director of the film], but the story is not his. I didn’t record the author of the story because I don’t know the name, but I think that he is the one who really matters. Why would the director always be the most important?’ Moreover, as we have seen, canonicity is a multifaceted concept. Depending on the nature of a work, iconographic coherence can be more important to users than narrative consistency, and therefore from the user perspective, the authorial role of the concept designer or graphic artist can be deemed more important than that of the writer or director. What matters in transmedia is often not authorship, but authority: who guarantees the stability of thematic and aesthetic choices? Sometimes it is not the creator e whatever his or her specific role may be e but the owner of intellectual property. In all probability, the name Marvel has a stronger association with certain plots, characters and visual images than the names of directors or writers of individual films set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. In the user map of the Labyrinth world, The Jim Henson Studio and Lucasfilm Games were labelled as ‘collaborators’ on several games. When asked to clarify the nature of their contribution, the participant responded that it was probably not a creative collaboration, but an approval for the franchise; however, it implied that the game designers and publishers had to satisfy certain criteria which also affected the creative aspect. There is therefore a strong argument for explicating, as clearly as possible, responsibility roles of agents related with transmedia resources. Since different groups of transmedia consumers may be interested in different aspects of a storyworld, this is the most efficient way to enable them to follow the content in accordance with their own criteria. The existing lists for relator terms and codes can fit into the IFLA LRM model either as sub-properties of the relationships work was created by agent/agent created work and expression was created by agent/agent created expression or as types of the agent entity. In practice, the choice of designators will depend on a particular form of content, but it can be assumed with high probability

158

Metadata for Transmedia Resources

that the roles of writers, right holders and artists responsible for visual recognisability will be those considered significant by transmedia users. It would also be advisable to consider adding the roles such as experience designers or story architects.

4.7.1 Fictitious creators Strategies that use fictional character identities as a diegetic tool for merging fiction and reality e e.g. by crediting them with authorship for works existing in the real world e can generate entangled webs of real and imaginary entities interrelated at many different levels. The assumptions of reality in fictional works are determined by the rules of a complex game set at the level of cultural referents. In its most basic form, this game is an indispensable condition for immersion in any creative work: without agreeing to its system, it is impossible to understand and enjoy novels, films, video games or theatrical plays. Deciding whether and to what extent to separate what is real from what is not is a skill that largely depends upon one’s cultural background and takes into consideration a specific context in which a message is conveyed. In other words, not many people will believe that Professor Dumbledore actually wrote a preface to a book or that Sherlock Holmes runs a personal website e but their choice to pretend that it is true is a powerful tool that enables them to construct the meaning of the story. In these cases, metadata should provide both factual and fictional information and leave the interpretation to the user. It is precisely by making these makebelieve techniques as transparent as possible that bibliographic information organisation supports the development of media literacy. However, this is not a simple task. Almost 30 years ago, Yee and Soto (1991) reported that users of library catalogues were confused whether to search for fictional characters in the index of personal names or subject index, given that they really do not fall into any of the two categories. Thirty years later, the nature of fictitious entities in bibliographic theory is still disputed, and characters credited as creators add another layer of complexity to the already tricky question of whether they should be treated as persons or as general concepts. It may no longer be a technical problem because today’s catalogues have many functionalities that enable efficient answers to this type of query, from keyword searches running through all the indexed fields to the fact that name and subject authority files are usually merged into a single database. It should also be noted that UNIMARC has introduced a special field for recording the names of

How to organise information about transmedia?

159

fictional characters. However, the ontological status of fictional entities affects the semantics in bibliographic information systems. Different sets of elements are used for describing persons and general concepts, and different types of relationships relate them to other entities. FRAD, a bibliographic conceptual model for authority data that preceded IFLA LRM, did not distinguish between real and fictitious persons. The entity person in FRAD included both real individuals and identities established or adopted through the use of pseudonyms, as well as literary and legendary figures, divinities and named animals as characters or performers (IFLA, 2009, p. 8). It is worth noting that such a broad meaning of the concept of person is also encountered in the Friend of a Friend (FOAF) schema, one of the most frequently used RDF-based ontologies for describing people on the Web. The person class in FOAF is defined as a class representing people, regardless of whether they are alive, dead, real or imaginary (Brickley & Miller, 2014). However, conceptual models of museum and archival communities e CIDOC CRM and RiC, respectively e have taken up a different view, defining agents or persons exclusively as real human beings responsible for actions taken and their effects (ICA, 2016, p. 14; ICOM, 2017, pp. 13, 20). Whether to conform better with semantics adopted by other heritage communities, or as the result of a more thorough logical analysis, IFLA LRM has changed the definition of a person to include only instances of individual human beings who live or are generally assumed to have lived (IFLA, 2017, p. 29). Fictional, literary or legendary persons are explicitly excluded from the definition. Person is a sub-entity of agent, and agent is ‘an entity capable of deliberate actions, of being granted rights and of being held accountable for its actions’ (IFLA, 2017, p. 28). Therefore, a fictitious person cannot be an agent, i.e. a creator of a work. The model suggests that behind every creation attributed to a fictional author, there is a real agent who has taken the name of the imaginary being. Fictitious authors are therefore treated as bibliographic identities of real persons. A bibliographic identity is a cluster of names (or nomens) used by a person in a certain context (IFLA, 2017, p. 89). In this particular context, the name is the same as the name of a fictional character (Fig. 4.4). Fictional character is a type of res and can be associated with the eponymous bibliographic identity, which is also a type of res (IFLA, 2107, p. 90). Bibliographic identities can be assigned identifiers, e.g. International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI) which is assigned to public identities (not persons). Whether a preferred access point will be created for each bibliographic identity in an information system, or some identities will be

160

Metadata for Transmedia Resources

Fig. 4.4 Model of real and fictional authors’ names in the Harry Potter universe.

treated as references, is a matter of the implementation decision. In the case of transmedia the creation of distinct preferred access points is strongly recommended, as they allow for a more refined semantics: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them was written by Newt Scamander; Newt Scamander is an identity of J. K. Rowling; Newt Scamander is not the same as Newt Scamander (character) which appears in another novel by J. K. Rowling, although this whole set of relationships reveals the intention of the author to make us believe that was the case. This model is in line with the possible-worlds semantics as adopted in narrative theory. Elements of fictional worlds are possible entities, and as such are not at the same ontological level as entities in the actual world because things in different worlds are never identical (Lewis, 1986). They are, however, linked by the counterpart relation, which implies they share some essential characteristics. The counterpart relation is established through the common name. This relation can be explicated in the IFLA LRM model as a sub-property of a general relationship res is associated with res: Newt Scamander, a character appearing in various instalments of the Harry Potter universe, has counterpart in one of bibliographic identities adopted by J. K. Rowling. Such relationship-oriented model permits us to adhere to a factual description, but at the same time to infer from it specific diegetic strategies and conventions that have become typical of transmedia.

4.8 Conclusion In general, IFLA LRM provides a good support for bibliographic modelling of transmedia. The model’s high level of abstraction in combination with

How to organise information about transmedia?

161

structural mechanisms aimed at refinement of its broad categories ensure a consistent logical framework for developing a transmedia storytelling ontology or for bringing together schemas and standards aimed at describing various media and platforms. Some general guidelines for describing transmedia resources within the framework of the model have been proposed here, based on the domain analysis of transmedia provided in the second chapter of the book, as well as on a qualitative study that gives insight into how users consume and interpret narratives across media independently of a pre-existent model. The study was primarily interested in capturing the semantics underlying the users’ view on transmedia and translating it into the set of entities and relationships defined by IFLA LRM. Although observations were made about frequency of certain concepts, the primary focus was placed on their meanings and the way they can be accommodated into IFLA LRM. However, more studies are needed in order to confirm present conclusions and provide a more complete picture of user perspectives concerning the logic of transmedia narratives. The propositions set forth in this chapter have also been largely based on the  umer, studies that explored users’ understanding of WEMI (Pisanski & Z 2010a, 2010b, 2012) and users’ models of derivative relationships and bibliographic families (Tallerås, Dahl, & Pharo, 2018), as well as on a study that tested users’ understanding of a previously developed transmedia storytelling ontology (Branch et al., 2017). Observations made by Beddows (2012) about transmedia consumption have also been highly valuable, although her research was not directly connected with the field of information organisation. The following recommendations emerged as possibly useful guidelines: • The WEMI structure should be fully adopted, not only as a means for collocating all the versions, aggregations, editions and other incarnations of a given work, but also as an efficient tool for describing the content of a work and establishing tranfictional relationships between works independently from their realisations (media) and physical embodiments (delivery platforms). • Generally, more attention should be paid to work and expression-level information, with particular emphasis on subject information and refined work-to-work relationships (sequel, prequel, sidequel, adaptation, reboot, parody, inspiration etc.) This type of information constitutes the basis upon which users make decisions related to exploring, finding and selecting transmedia resources.

162

•

Metadata for Transmedia Resources

It is preferable to organise intercompositional transmedia into a set of interrelated works than to collocate all the works under the name of a super-entity (a story or fictional world). Given a variety of transmedia consumption practices, any decision as to what to include in such a record may turn out to be oversimplified or restrictive. A relationshipbased organisation clearly displays how distinct works are interrelated within a transmedia network and leaves more freedom to users in choosing their own itinerary through the story. • Rich subject information based on the ‘ofness’ of a work should be featured in the description. Subject metadata should cover characters, settings, objects, events and other elements of a narrative world, as well as their mutual relationships. Specialised controlled vocabularies or ontologies can be developed for this purpose. • Ephemeral media forms such as games, performances, pieces of interactive fiction or augmented reality events can be modelled as works or additional entities such as events and activities can be borrowed from event-based models (e.g. CIDOC CRM). In both cases these forms should be documented using a variety of available media and platforms such as textual description, photographs, video recordings etc. In the case of digital ephemera, a wider environment e including pieces of hardware and software necessary for accessing the content or experiencing the course of events e should also be documented. This kind of documentation is itself transmedial. • A fictional character credited with responsibility for a real-world resource should be considered a bibliographic identity of a real agent. This bibliographic identity can be related to the character e described as a separate entity e via has counterpart relationship. In order to confirm usefulness of these recommendations in an actual implementation, the possibilities of describing transmedia resources using established bibliographic standards such as RDA (which has already been aligned with IFLA LRM) or ISBD (which is being brought into line with the model at the time of this writing) should be investigated. It would also be interesting to test various formats and schemas such as BIBFRAME to determine more precisely their capability of conveying semantics essential for an efficient bibliographic organisation of transmedia. Another line of research could go in the direction of investigating or developing models that integrate external information about transmedia with library-produced metadata, similar to the approach taken by Kiryakos and Sugimoto (2019) for manga. The ability of metadata schemas to meet the requirements of

How to organise information about transmedia?

163

transmedia resources is not merely a question of describing a special type of material for a specialised community of users: as transmedia is becoming an increasingly used practice of content delivery, helping users explore content across media is turning into a critical goal for bibliographic information organisation.