Abstract

NHT is a continuing workshop series associated with the ACM Hypertext conference for over a decade. The workshop acts as forum of discussion for the narrative systems community within the wider audience of the Hypertext conference. The workshop runs both presentations from authors of accepted short research papers, and unstructured unconference sessions to provide a venue for important discussions of issues facing and opportunities for members of the narrative and hypertext community. This year the workshop aims to broaden the community again after two years of more focussed themes on mixed reality by encouraging discussions on the breadth of interdisciplinary hypertext narrative.

CCS Concepts

Applied computing → Arts and humanities.

Keywords

Narrative; Hypertext; Digital Humanities; Narrative Games; Interactive Digital Narratives.

1 Description of the workshop

This workshop aims to provide an interdisciplinary forum to bring together individuals from the humanities and technological communities to share work and discuss state-of-the-art research on narrative from both a technical and aesthetic perspective. It is part of the longest running workshop series at ACM Hypertext – running since 2011 – and has fostered numerous collaborations which have led to work published in the main conference as well as serving as an important discussion point for important issues facing the community.

This year’s workshop aims to continue to consolidate the community by providing an open interdisciplinary forum of discussion on key issues facing the field. Including (but not limited to):

Models of Narrative

Systems for the Presentation of Narratives

Adaptive and Personalised Narratives

Narrative Analysis

Narrative Generation

Social media as Narrative

Interactive Fiction

Authorial support systems

e-Literature

Strange Hypertext

Interdisciplinary collaboration on narrative

Interaction and Narrative

Location-based Narratives

Narrative in Games

Transmedia

Mixed Reality Storytelling

The experience of writing Hypertext

Extended Reality Hypertext

Ethics of Narrative Hypertext

Mixed Reality Ethical Frameworks

As well as these general topics this years theme will be “Interdisciplinary Applications of Narrative Hypertext” and while discussions and submissions will not be limited to this we will be actively encouraging discussion in this space and targeting two invited speakers in this area. The focus of this theme is to bring debate on the interdisciplinary work common in the field while broadening the scope of the more focussed workshop themes on mixed reality for the last 2 years.

Researchers and practitioners working with hypertext or narrative will be invited to attend this workshop. Participants will be asked to submit a short (between 3 and 7 pages CEUR format) position paper on their current work. Authors of papers selected for presentation will be informed 3 weeks after the submission deadline. All the position papers of participants will be made available on the workshop website initially and later (if possible) through CEUR proceedings.

2 Relevance of the workshop to the Hypertext communities

Narrative is a prevalent form of information common in our entertainment and communications, and key to our understanding of the world and its events. By building better models of narrative along with methods for generation, adaption, and presentation we enable narrative systems to become more effective but also improve our understanding of narrative structures.

There is a growing community of researchers working on narrative systems, hypertext narratives, interactive fiction, and machine-readable narrative models, for which this workshop seeks to act as a hub to review advances and to discuss what the field might achieve in the coming year. We are interested in contributions from researchers, developers and writers, covering all aspects of digital narrative, including experiences, reflections, and criticism. This community has particular in recent years been responding to the opportunities and issues facing the use of mixed reality technology in this space.

The hypertext conference has a history of publishing work related to narrative research ranging from explorations of criticism and the creation of digital narrative to authoring hypertext fiction and semantic narrative systems. NHT therefore aims to assist in the conference’s aim to bring back diverse aspects of the historical ACM Hypertext research community.

3 Organisers

Dr Charlie Hargood (Computational Culture Group Creative Technology, Bournemouth University) Charlie Hargood is an Associate Professor in Games Technology in the Creative Technology department at Bournemouth University. He has a research background in narrative systems, hypertext, ubiquitous technology, and location aware applications. He has been involved with the ACM hypertext conference since 2008, twice winning the Englebart best paper award and often serving on the programme committee alongside serving as ACM SIGWeb’s information director. He has organised the NHT Workshop since 2011, the AIS workshop since 2017, and was general chair for ICIDS in 2020.

Prof David Millard (Web And Internet Science, Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton) David Millard is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton, UK. A leading figure in the Hypertext community, he has over 240 publications in international conferences and journals, was Vice-Chair of ACM SIGWEB from 2015-2019, and is the current chair of the ACM Hypertext steering committee. He has won awards for his work on hypertext structures and authoring, and his current research interests are focused on hypertextual structures in games, locative literature, and digital narratives.

4 Motivation (Intended Audience)

The audience for this workshop will be a mixed group of participants from arts, science, and humanities. This will include young researchers and PhD students from these areas using the workshop as a platform to present initial work, members of academia and industry contributing to the wider discussion, technical developers working on relevant systems, and authors with an interest in related research. Previous iterations of this workshop have attracted approximately 20-35 attendees.

5 Workshop Format and Length

The workshop will run for a half day. In terms of format we plan to make use of a mixture of invited speakers and paper presentations in order to both give a publication venue to emerging work in this field and space for us to invite key voices in the area to punctuate paper presentations with topics specific to the theme of interdisciplinary applications of hypertext narrative. We would like to request a single workshop registration fee waiver for a keynote speaker at the workshop to set the tone of the workshops discussions and drive registration and participation.

6 Submission Format and Publication

For the paper sessions this workshop invites both position and research paper submissions to stimulate discussion of important factors facing the community at the workshop. These submissions this year are to be 3-7 pages in CEUR template. Publication will be initially on the workshop website and later, if possible, via CEUR proceedings.

7 Previous editions of the workshop series

NHT 2011 @ HT11 – 5 papers, 2 panels

NHT 2012 @ HT12 – 8 papers

NHT 2013 @ HT13 – 6 papers

NHT 2015 @ HT15 – 7 papers

NHT 2016 @ HT16 – 3 papers, 1 keynote, 1 creative track roundtable, 1 unconference session

NHT 2017 @ HT17 – 6 papers, 1 panel, 1 unconference session

NHT 2018 @ HT18 – 3 papers, 1 unconference session

NHT 2019 @ HT19 – 3 papers, 1 panel, 1 unconference session, 1 plenary

NHT2021 @ HT21 – 6 invited speakers, 1 plenary

NHT2022 @ HT22 – 2 papers, 5 invited speakers

NHT2023 @ HT23 – 6 papers, 2 invited speakers

NHT2024 @ HT24 – 3 papers, 1 invited speaker, 1 panel

The full history and details on previous workshops are here: http://nht.ecs.soton.ac.uk/

8 Programme Committee

Charlie Hargood – Bournemouth University(organiser)

David Millard – University of Southampton(organiser)

Valentina Nisi - ITI

Mark Bernstein – Eastgate Systems

Alex Mitchell - National University of Singapore

Tom Blount – University of Southampton

Sam Brooker – University of London

Dene Grigar – Washington State University

Source file

Original ACM PDF