Doctor Doom In The Marvel Age: Data

This is data collected as part of the PhD thesis 'Doctor Doom In The Marvel Age: An Empirical Approach To Transmedia Character Coherence'.

266 Texts were identified in which Doctor Doom appeared, taken from comics dated November 1961 to October 1987 - 'The Marvel Age' - and from other media texts issued contemporaneously.

From this corpus, a sample of 69 texts was selected using stratified random sampling.

Each text in the sample was examined for signifiers to do with Doctor Doom. The data was recorded using a unified catalogue of transmedia character components which brings together aspects of the models devised by Pearson and Uricchio, Klastrup and Tosca, Marie-Laurie Ryan, Paolo Bertetti and Matthew Freeman within a framework based on Jan-Noël Thon's ideas of Transmedia Character Networks that extends Henry Jenkin's formulation of 'transmedia' in line with Scolari, Bertetti and Freeman's Transmedia Archaeology. Where gaps were identified within these definitions, specifically around the area of 'behaviour', additional definitions were brought in using the psycholexical approach, the Big Five Index, and the idea of character motivations from creative writing practice. Where necessary the components were re-named for clarity, and finally were placed into groups based on Matthew Freeman's classification of transmedia, with 'behaviour' extracted into a group of its own.

In theory this catalogue can be used as a tool for mapping the coherence of transmedia characters as they move across time and media. Used over the course of a sample of texts, and by recording the signifiers within each component for each text, it should be possible not only to identify a character's core components across time, but also to see whether they vary across different media or storyworlds. This idea is investigated within the thesis itself.