Engaging history in the media - Building a framework for interpreting historical presentations as worlds

This dissertation suggests that historical presentations should be understood as literary worlds. It studies how they are engaged with in the current media environment. The concept of a world offers a novel way of analysing how presentations are identified as being specifically historical presentations. It is argued that within the digital media environment, historical presentations are intuitively interpreted as incomplete presentations or as fragments of a larger whole. The functioning of historical presentations is examined as part of a large media network. History’s availability through a variety of media is then analysed through the concepts of transmedia and remediation. It is concluded that history is necessarily mediated and that the current media environment is changing how history is being engaged with.