Hypertext '08: Jon Kleinberg, Link Structures, Information Flow, and Social Process

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…

Hypertext '08: Social Linking 1: Link Inference

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…

Clickers, Pedagogy and Edtechtainment :: Inside Higher Ed :: Higher Education's Source for News, Views and Jobs

Inside Higher Ed: Understandably, professors frustrated with large class sizes turn to technology such as clickers in an attempt to engage students. Often, the technology become the handmaiden of an administration bent on sustaining huge classes where students need opera glasses to see the instructor. No wonder students are bored; answer their cell phones and…

Hypertext '08: One-Minute Poster Presentations

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…

Hypertext '08: Bernardo Huberman, Social Dynamics in the Age of the Web

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…

Hypertext '08: Literatronica. Adaptive Digital Narrative :: Juan B. Gutierrez, and Mark C. Marino

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…

Hypertext '08: Chris Crawford — Deikto: An Application of the Weak Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

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…

Hypertext '08: Susan Gibb, The Hypertext Effect: the Transfiguration of Writing and the Writer

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…

Hypertext '08: Hypertext 08 Workshop on Creating out of the Machine: Hypertext, Hypermedia, and Web Artists Explore the Craft

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…

Criticism and an Offer of Help

Inside Higher Ed raises an interesting question. If a student paper learns that sensitive information in an unprotected computer file, and then writes a story about it, how should the administration react after learning the paper still has a copy of that protected information? Here’s what happened at Western Oregon University: In a letter sent…

Test Links

My son created a game in Scratch, “Hector’s Catch and Avoid.” Here’s a short video showing what Scratch looks like from the inside: Hector.swf My Son the Science Teacher Similar:The disinformation system that Trump unleashed will outlast him. Here’s what reality-based… Highlights from a column by Margaret S…UncategorizedI'm really enjoying seeing how my students are…

'Spore' Releases the Pixar in You

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…