Narrative and Hypertext 2016

Workshop on narrative systems

To be held in conjunction with Hypertext 2016, Halifax

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 follows on from the very successful narrative workshops at HT2011 (the largest workshop in the conference), HT2012 which kick-started a number of collaborations and subsequent meetings (for example, see the websites strangehypertext.org and fractalnarratives.org), at HT2013 where several of these collaborations were consolidated into future research projects, and HT2015 where work that had arisen from the workshop was presented in early form and discussion on the future of the field continued.

This year's workshop will principally build upon these previous successes, and aims to continue to consolidate this community by providing an open interdisciplinary forum of discussion on key issues facing the field.

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, 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.

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. This workshop aims to support this work by providing an open interdisciplinary forum of discussion on key issues facing the field.

The event is a full day workshop with planned sessions based around presentations of short paper submissions from attendees. As well as the planned sessions we plan to have some serendipitous sessions allowing for free discussion on topics of interest to those attending much like what is seen in 'unconference' events. Topics of interest for these sessions will be polled from the participants during coffee breaks at the beginning of the day and over lunch to allowing for serendipitous sessions late morning and at the end of the day. As well as free discussion these serendipitous sessions might include small relevant presentations and technical demos. This structure is based on the highly successful structure of previous workshops. Areas of discussion and relevant topics for the workshop 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
• e-Literature
• Strange Hypertext
• Interaction and Narrative
• Interdisciplinary collaboration on narrative
• Location Aware Narrative
• Digital Journalism and Citizen/Collaborative News

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 4 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 midnight GMT 6th May 2016 to Charlie Hargood at cah07r@ecs.soton.ac.uk. Submitted papers will be refereed and notification of acceptance sent out 4 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 - 6th May 2016
• Notification of acceptance - 3rd June 2016
• Camera ready papers due - 24th June 2016
• Workshop - 10th July 2016

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