Narrative and Hypertext 2011

Workshop on narrative systems

To be held in conjunction with Hypertext 2011

This workshop aims to provide an interdisciplinary forum to bring together individuals from the humanities and science communities to share research and discuss state-of-the-art research on narrative from both a technical and aesthetic perspective.

Narrative could be considered as the presentation of an ordered series of experiences. Understanding of narrative includes a wide range of elements including plot, theme, authorial voice, style and genre. The systems that work at constructing, presenting, or analysing these might be called narrative systems. As hypertext systems link and structure information into experiences for their users many hypertext systems could in turn be considered narrative systems.

Narratives are complex creations prevalent in our entertainment, communication, and 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.

Narrative might also be used as a discursive representation of knowledge, allowing for the capture of expert understanding. The potential for grander narratives to be formed from collections of information or discourse on the web (for example from social media) means that knowledge or identity might emerge from otherwise seemingly disparate sources.

This workshop offers a focus for this interdisciplinary community to share research, offer solutions and contributions to the challenges faced in the study of narrative and the development of narrative systems, and offers a platform of discussion for potential collaboration for members of the hypertext community working with narrative. Topics include:

• Models of Narrative
• Systems for the Presentation of Narratives
• Adaptive and Personalised Narratives
• Narrative Analysis
• Narrative Generation
• Narrative as a method of Knowledge Capture
• Social Media as Narrative
• Narrative as a lens on identity
• Argumentation and Rhetoric
• Interactive Fiction
• Cinematic Hypertext
• Authorial support systems
• Novel applications of narrative systems
• e-Literature
• Literary Criticism

Participants

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. Participants are asked to submit a short (between 2 and 5 pages ACM format) paper on their current work. Authors of papers selected for presentation will be informed 2 weeks after the submission deadline.

Activities

The workshop will be split into planned and serendipitous sessions. The planned sessions will comprise of presentations of work from those with selected submitted papers with time for questions and discussion after each.

The serendipitous sessions will depend on the interests of the attendees of the workshop and will function in the style of an unconference. The preceding coffee break to each serendipitous session will allow participants to put forward suggestions for discussion topics, short presentations, or demos. The organisers will then select the most popular activities suggested as the focus for that session.

Submission Details

Papers should be in ACM format, be between 2 and 5 pages long, and submitted as a PDF. The papers should be emailed no later than midday GMT 12th April 2011 midnight GMT at end of 19th April 2011 to Charlie Hargood at cah07r@ecs.soton.ac.uk. Submitted papers will be refereed and notification of acceptance sent out 2 weeks later.

Important Dates

• Papers Due 12th April 2011 19th April 2011
• Notification of acceptance 26th April 2011 3rd May 2011
• Workshop 6th June 2011

Contact

Should you have any questions please feel free to contact the organisers:

Charlie Hargood: cah07r@ecs.soton.ac.uk

David Millard: dem@ecs.soton.ac.uk