Doctor Doom: Doom's Data: Tracking a Transmedia Supervillain Through Data. (Lexington Books, 2024)

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In: Superheroes and Digital Perspectives: Super Data. Lexington Books, Maryland, USA.

This chapter demonstrates how data can be used to track the changes to a fictional character as they move across time and media, uncovering new information along the way. Using an open access dataset about the Marvel super-villain Doctor Doom as an example, it discusses how a corpus of texts for analysis can be selected, and explains why a smaller sample might be necessary for in-depth examination. A methodology for describing fictional characters using a thirteen-dimensional unified catalogue of transmedia character components is described and, following a brief description of how this was employed for data entry, an in-depth analysis is given of one specific dimension. Finally, some suggestions for further research are given, inviting others to use this dataset and methodology.

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