The Workshop on Narrative and Hypertext 2024 (NHT24): The Ethics of Mixed Reality Narrative Hypertext
Charlie Hargood, Bournemouth University, United Kingdom, chargood@bournemouth.ac.uk David Millard, University of Southampton, United Kingdom, dem@soton.ac.uk Valentina Nisi, University of Lisbon, Portugal, valentina.nisi@tecnico.ulisboa.pt Nuno Nunes, University of Lisbon, Portugal, nunojnunes@tecnico.ulisboa.pt
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3648188.3675122 HT '24: 35th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media, Poznan, Poland, September 2024
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 build on last years discussed of “Mixed Reality Hypertext” with a targeted discussion of the ethics confronting narrative hypertext and specifically mixed reality hypertext as part of a wider discussion on the ethics of mixed reality games.
CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → Hypertext / hypermedia;
Keywords: Narrative, Hypertext, Digital Humanities, Narrative Games, Interactive Digital Narratives ACM Reference Format: Dr Charlie Hargood, Prof David Millard, Prof Valentina Nisi and Prof Nuno Nunes. 2024. Hypertext 2024 Workshop Proposal Narrative and Hypertext ‘24 (NHT24). In 35th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media (HT '24), September 10-13, 2024, Poznan, Poland. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 4 Pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3648188.3675122
1 DESCRIPTION OF THE WORKSHOP (TOPICS AND GOALS)
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. NHT has also worked hard in recent years to serve as a focus point for the wider narrative and hypertext community and through NHT's sister workshop AIS (http://narrativeandplay.org/ais/) at the ICIDS conference. The intention is for this workshop to act as a bridge to increase collaboration between the interactive narrative and hypertext research communities while bringing some of this research back to ACM Hypertext. In 2022 this resulted in the publication of ‘The Authoring Problem’<sup>1</sup> an edited volume published by Springer, which was a direct outcome of AIS and NHT.
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
The Ethics of Mixed Reality Narrative Hypertext
Researchers and practitioners working with hypertext or narrative will be invited to attend this workshop. Participants will be 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 initially and later (if possible) through the ACM Digital Library.
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. NHT is, thematically, best served to deliver this through the Narrative and Hypertext community and it has already been working towards this twinning with a sister conference in AIS at the interactive narrative conference ICIDS.
3 ORGANISERS
Dr Charlie Hargood
Charlie Hargood is a Principal Academic 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 Engelbart 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 hypertextual structures in games, locative literature, and digital narratives.
Prof Valentina Nisi
Valentina Nisi is tenured Professor at IST, University of Lisbon (Portugal), Affiliated Faculty at the HCI Institute, Carnegie Mellon University (USA) and founding researcher at the Interactive Technologies Institute (ITI LARSyS). Spanning from Fine Arts and Screenwriting to Design and HCI, Valentina's background contributes to an interdisciplinary view of societal challenges combining Research-through-design approaches with post-humanistic concerns. she engages with Interactive Digital technologies, Storytelling, Gaming, and HCI. Her research, supported through EU funding, focuses on the participation of marginalized groups and unheard voices and the respect, celebration and preservation of various forms of tangible and intangible heritage, through storytelling and gaming, recently focusing on nature:cultural constructs.
Prof Nuno Nunes
Nuno Nunes is a Full professor at Tecnico U. Lisbon and the President of the Interaction Technologies Institute (ITI) a research unit of the LARSYS Associated Laboratory. He's also co-Director of the Carnegie Mellon International partnership (www.cmuportugal.org) and affiliated faculty at the HCII at CMU. Nuno's research interests lie in applying models to software, system, and service design for environmental sustainability and participatory culture. Nuno is a strong advocate of the role of design in engineering. Nuno organised several key conferences of the ACM SIGCHI (www.sigchi,org) and published more than 140 peer-reviewed papers in international journals and conferences in software engineering, HCI and service science. He was PI and co-PI of several research projects totalling more than 20M€ from European to national and industry-funded.
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
The workshop will run for a full day. This is to give the workshop room for both traditional NHT submissions and presentations as well as a collective debate on mixed reality hypertext ethics. This way the workshop can both fulfil its yearly service to the community of a publication and discussion venue for new and/or blue skies Narrative Hypertext Research, while also targeting this years theme in a meaningful way. The workshop will be made up of the following three types of session:
5.1 Invited Keynote(s)
We will invite a minimum of 1 keynote speaker connected to the key topics of the workshop to both set tone and draw attendees to the workshop with a leading voice. We would appreciate conference support in the form of waived registration to the workshop for this attendee.
5.2 Paper Presentations
The workshop will call for paper submission on narrative hypertext – this provides an important service to the community in the form of a publication venue for new and emerging work (particularly from PhDs) not yet ready for a full conference paper, but also for experimental blue sky position papers on nascent ideas. These sessions will take a traditional short presentation and questions and discussion format.
5.3 Mixed Reality Hypertext Ethics Debate
The workshop will be closed with a collective debate on mixed reality hypertext ethics. The idea of this session is a more discursive unconference to balance the more passive paper and keynote sessions, and to give space to the focus of the workshop. We will present a series of open questions in the space, potentially with some frameworks to ground discussion, and document a debate on the pertinent perspectives of the ethics in this field. This will, alongside similar workshops, potentially lead to a new collective work on the ethics of mixed reality that accounts for a Hypertextual perspective amongst others.
5.4 Submission Format
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 are all the same ACM template as the Hypertext conference, and of 2-5 pages in length.
6 PREVIOUS EDITIONS OF THE WORKSHOP SERIES
The NHT Workshop has been held in the following years:
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
The full history and details on previous workshops are here: http://nht.ecs.soton.ac.uk/.
7 PROGRAMME COMMITTEE
Please note, with the exception of the organisers, the following programme committee likely drawn fromthese persons only. Exact membership is pending invitation and confirmation.
Charlie Hargood – Bournemouth University – chargood@bournemouth.ac.uk (organiser)
David Millard – University of Southampton – dem@ecs.soton.ac.uk (organiser)
Valentina Nisi - ITI - valentina.nisi@m-iti.org (organiser)
Nuno Nunes – ITI - nunojnunes@tecnico.ulisboa.pt (organiser)
Cristina Da Milano – ECCOM - damilano@eccom.it
Mark Bernstein – Eastgate Systems – bernstein@eastgate.com
Catherine Havasi - MIT Media Lab - havasi@media.mit.edu
Alex Mitchell - National University of Singapore - alexm@nus.edu.sg
Tom Blount – University of Southampton – t.blount@soton.ac.uk
Rosamund Davies – Greenwich University - r.davies@greenwich.ac.uk
Ulrike Spierling - Hochschule RheinMain - ulrike.spierling@hs-rm.de
Jack Brett – Bournemouth University - jbrett2@bournemouth.ac.uk
Yoan Malinov – University of Southampton - yd.malinov@soton.ac.uk
Footnotes
<sup>1</sup>Available from: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-05214-9
HT '24, September 10–13, 2024, Poznan, Poland
© 2024 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). ACM ISBN 979-8-4007-0595-3/24/09.DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3648188.3675122
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