See also my resources on interactive fiction (text adventure games), programming in Inform 7, making games in Scratch, and coding hypertext stories in Twine.
Chair: Andreas Hotho (Universität Kassel, Germany) The Very Small World of the Well-Connected (Long Paper) Xiaolin Shi, Matthew Bonner, Lada Adamic and Anna Gilbert Matt Bonner is the presenter; this paper won a “best paper” award at the banquet last night. Vertex Important Graph Synopsis. (Promises a definition!) Opening image — “Network or Hairball?” Huge…
Brent Batson (via): Academics have long talked of the “academic conversation.” Now, Web 2.0 has called our bluff. We live in the midst of a non-stop world conversation. But, are conversational skills (in writing) important and, if so, how do we teach them?
Scott Sharkey: Often called a dead genre, interactive fiction continues to flourish long after reaching the end of its commercial lifespan. In the decades since whiz-bang graphics drew away the attention of the masses, hundreds of games have continued to evolve the genre — to the point where it can be a little intimidating to…
John Kleinberg This year’s conference emphasizes social linking and its relation to information linking. A striking slide illustrated the tangled interconnections of online friendships, as opposed to the red and blue nodes that characterize political blogs (with some neutral interconnections). (Blackstorm-Huttenlocher-Kleinberg-Lan 2006) and (Adamic and Glance 2005) Bridging levels of scale; Zacharly 1977 studying a…
Chair: Ethan Munson (University of Wisconsin) Dynamic Prediction of Communication Flow Using Social Context (Short Paper)Munmun De Choudhury, Hari Sundaram, Ajita John and Doree Seligmann Estimate intent to communicate and the associated delay. Using MySpace, successful prediction of intent to communicate. [This section is a review of related work, so the speaker is going quickly…
Because I’m unfamiliar with the poster paper genre, my own textual bias made me want to read all the text on the poster before I was ready to listen to the presenter’s explanation. A couple times I had to tell the eager presenter to give me a minute to take in all the information before…
I don’t attend many science/technology conferences, so the genre of the one-minute poster presentations is brand new to me. The genre is akin to the haiku or flash fiction — it’s a research paper bared down to the bones. Flash scholarship? 60-second-scholarship? About 20 people pre-loaded their slides onto the conference room computer, then lined…
Today’s keynote: Brughel painting showing the social dynamics of a village festival. Grounded the talk with a presentation of statistics on user-generated content (Facebook, MySpace, etc.), noting that whether those users are interacting with one another is another question. Noted that his research is observational rather than experimental, and that he won’t be able to…
Literatronica: Juan: Empower the computer to be part of the literary transaction… mathematical literature. Mathematical literature — not the syntatic approach, using mathematical language to describe a story. Not a semantic approach, using theorems to define stories. Lexicographic Hypertext — basic HTML with nodes connected via links. We navigate through the network to get from…
Chris Crawford has been working on Storytron for 16 years. The computer gaming industry was not intersted in or able to solve the problem of interactive storytelling. Left the gaming industry to solve that problem on his own. Has been explaining Storytron for 10 years, says that during that time he has “failed miserably.” About…
Dene joined us remotely from her lab in Vancouver, demonstrating multimedia works that are performed through hyperlinks triggered by a performer’s actions in a 3D space. The demonstration is intended to challenge the notions of a hyperlink as a silent component of a 2D work. First demonstration — Virtual DJ. Spinning circles of light…
Steve introduced Susan Gibb as a driving force behind the writing and digital media culture in a small town in Connecticut. (I’m really impressed by what comes from Tuxnis Community College). Susan presented us with the thinking behind the creation of a 300-node creative hypertext work in StorySpace. Susan walked the audience through the process…
Alan Bigelow discusses his art installations featuring the short-form Flash genre. In his introduction, he stated that he doesn’t think that he writes hypertext, and spoke with hope of a future in which new media authors know what terms to apply to their work. The opening screen of his American Ghosts refers to a “webyarn,”…
Steve Ersinghaus started the creative hypertext workshop by playing Changing Key: A “video hyperdrama” by Charles Deemer. In the introduction, Deemer notes that the audience in a play is passive, and conjures up the idea of a family Thanksgiving in which multiple groups interact in multiple rooms, with the audience inserted into the drama like…
GamePlasma.com broke a story about a new adventure game, Limbo of the Lost, which uses digital assets from the RPG Oblivion. (There are plenty of screenshots in the article.) Eric was recently assigned a game developed by Majestic Studios titled “Limbo of the Lost.” At first glance, this game appears to be your typical point…
From Scholastic, a report that shows books still appeal to kids. Does this mean that mouse-clicking adults will think of books as childish? A new study released today finds that 75% of kids age 5-17 agree with the statement, “No matter what I can do online, I’ll always want to read books printed on paper,”…
Want to quote 5-25 words from an AP story? That’ll be $12.50. ($7.50 for non-profit or educational use.) The AP has published a form that details the cost of an “Excerpt for Web Use” license. The AP has a right to discourage people from posting the full content of articles online, just as you or…
Wired examines a side-effect of the long-awaited life-creation game Spore: Role-playing games have trained millions of gamers in highly complex resource and inventory control. Basically, they’ve made screwing around with databases fun. Or think about conducting a big raid in World of Warcraft, where you need to deploy virtual team-management skills and diplomacy worthy of…
This morning in my mail I found an attractive printing of the proceedings from a January summit on journalism. All in all, this is a good print document that suffered when it was shoveled online. I have no idea what kind of time constraints or “it came to the boss in a dream so do…
At Hypertextopia. I found an interesting, but incomplete and unsigned (update — according to some mouseover text, it’s by Brian Yearling) hypertext that maps out part of the plot of Death of a Salesman. I was interested in the subject matter, but I’m not sure about what value this particular hypertext arrangement offers. If it…