Abstract

Narrative and Hypertext (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. Traditionally the workshop runs a proceedings with short paper submissions but this year we propose to maximise participation and amplify the main strength of the workshop in discussions and debates on the day to instead call for short 500-word extended abstracts to participate in the workshop through talks and panels. As a theme this year we intend to explore how generative AI is changing narrative Hypertext, but the workshop is open to the impact of other new technological frontiers as well.

1 Description of the Workshop

The Narrative and Hypertext 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 provide 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\

As well as these general topics this years theme is “Narrative Innovations and New Hypertext Frontiers” exploring how new technologies, such as generative AI, are changing how we tell stories with Hypertext. 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 AI as the technological elephant in the room to this forum, while still maximising participation through broader scope.

Researchers and practitioners working with hypertext or narrative are invited to attend this workshop. Participants are asked to submit an extended abstract of 500 words on their work. These will be reviewed by a programme committee for their potential to incite valuable discussion and selected authors will be invited to either give talks or participate in a panel 3 weeks after the submission deadline. All the selected abstracts will be made available on the workshop website.

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 and this year we are broadening this discussion to the impact of other technologies –- particularly generative AI.

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

NHT 2026 has two organisers:

Dr Charlie Hargood

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

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 human-AI interaction and mixed-reality storytelling.

4 Motivation

The audience for NHT is a mixed group of participants from arts, science, and humanities. This will includes 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.

5 Format and Publication

The workshop will run for a half day with speakers expected to cover early research, blue skies ideas, and provocations that resonate with the theme of the workshop. In 2026 participants were invited to submit a 1 page extended abstract on their work and/or their position on how disruptive technologies are changing how we tell stories with hypertext. A selection of these are invited to speak at the workshop while the wider community engages in discussions on the issues raised. The abstracts will be made available on the workshop website1.

Notes

1 http://nht.ecs.soton.ac.uk/2026

Source

ACM full-text HTML

ACM Digital Library

Imported from ACM’s structured HTML source. ACM Reference Format: Charlie Hargood and David Millard. 2026. Narrative and Hypertext (NHT'26). In 37th ACM Conference on Hypertext (HT '26), September 14--18, 2026, London, United Kingdom. ACM, New York, NY, USA 2 Pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3800935.3838295