Narrative and Hypertext 2012

Workshop on narrative systems

To be held in conjunction with Hypertext 2012, Milwaukee

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 is a prevalent form of information common 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.

There is an increasingly growing community of researchers working on narrative systems, hypertext narratives, and machine readable narrative models for which this workshop seeks to act as a hub to review advances and events over the previous year as well as, looking forward to the coming year, what the field can achieve. One of the identified challenges facing this community is the difficulty of connecting creatives with technologists, which as a topic will form the centre point of discussion, along with the effect of this issue on related projects and systems.

This workshop aims to support this work, and the new research to be presented at the hypertext and narrative connections track at this year’s conference, 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
• 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
• Strange Hypertext
• Innovative digital narratives
• Interdisciplinary collaboration on narrative

Participants

Researchers and practitioners working with hypertext or narrative are invited to attend this workshop. Participants are asked to submit a short (between 2 and 5 pages ACM 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.

Activities

As with last year 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 16th April 2012 to Charlie Hargood at cah07r@ecs.soton.ac.uk. Submitted papers will be refereed and notification of acceptance sent out 2 weeks later. Accepted papers will be included alongside the ACM Hypertext conference proceedings in the ACM Digital Library, and author will have a week to prepare camera ready papers for submission after acceptance.

Important Dates:

• Papers Due - 16th April 2012 19th April 2012
• Notification of acceptance - 7rd May 2012 3rd May 2012
• Camera ready papers due - 14th May 2012 10th May 2012
• Workshop - 25th June 2012

Contact

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