Toward A Tool For Measuring Transmedia Character Coherence

There are several existing models for measuring the changes actors in storyworlds go through as they move across different media and through time. However, although these are theoretically informative they do not provide a practical, replicable tool for assessing these changes. Such tools are commonplace in disciplines which examine the character traits of non-fictional actors - for example the Mini-Mental State Exam or SF-36, used to compare the mental health of respondents over time - and this paper will attempt to suggest a similar tool for measuring the transmedia character coherence of fictional actors (Folstein, et al., 1975; Jenkinson, et al., 1996).
This paper takes aspects of work by Pearson and Uricchio, Klastrup and Tosca, Paolo Bertetti, Marie-Laure Ryan and Matthew Freeman and shows how the storyworld, character-specific and textual sgnifiers that they identify for transmedia characters can be combined into an eleven-point survey (Pearson & Uricchio, 1991; Klastrup & Tosca, 2004; Bertetti, 2014; Ryan, 2014; Freeman, 2016). The aspects of this survey are as follows:

Storyworld Signifiers
• Previous Events
• Settings
• Objects
• Other characters
Character-Specific Signifiers
• Appearance
• Names And Titles
• Physical actions
• Perceived Behaviours
• Dialogue
Textual Signifiers
• Market Authors
• Textual Authors

This tool is currently being applied to a corpus of 69 texts, selected using a random stratified methodology to generate a representative sample of the Marvel comics character Doctor Doom's transmedia appearances from 1961 to 1987 inclusive. The paper will present some of the preliminary findings from this analysis, including problems found and recommendations as to how this methodology could be used for other characters and other corpora.