In November I attended the International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS’17) on the fantastic island of Madeira. Escaping the British November climate is attraction enough, but the conference was also a great chance to conclude my tour of different interactive narrative communities (the first two being Hypertext and MIX earlier in the year). Valentina Nisi was […]
Year: 2017

People Like You, Like Blog Posts Like This
In August I was privileged to deliver a keynote at the 2017 Eurocall conference, an established (and very welcoming) community researching Computer Assisted Language Learning. I gave the mid-conference plenary, and notionally talked about how Web Science has changed our understanding of why we have the Web we have. The slide for my talk, titled […]

Mix 2017 – Ambient Literature and Feral Hypertexts
Following on from my trip to ACM Hypertext in Prague I just returned from the Mix 2017 conference, held at Bath Spa University’s Newton Park campus in Somerset. Mix has much more of a focus on practitioners and scholars of digital media and was a really interesting comparison, as well as an enormously fun, lively, […]

Hypertext 2017 and the Festival of Narrative Automata
I spent the last week in Prague at the 28th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media. As usual it was a pleasure to catch up with friends and colleagues, and Prague is a beautiful city. The conference venue used to be a church, and the vaulted ceilings and huge wall frescos certainly added to […]

Crystal Palace – Overground Festival
This week we took the StoryPlaces show in the road for the last time, with a stall in the storytelling area of the Crystal Palace Overground Festival. A few months ago we ran a workshop for local and digital writers at the Upper Norwood Library Hub, and four of our authors produced final stories that […]

Crystal Palace Writer’s Workshop
As part of the StoryPlaces project we recently ran a workshop for writers in Crystal Palace Park, exploring the creation of locative stories. The workshop was based in the Upper Norwood Library Hub, and we invited local writers, and also digital writers from Southampton who were keen to experiment with locative media in the park. […]

Two Clock Country
There is a long used aphorism, that a person with one clock always knows the time, but a person with two clocks is never sure. As 2016 slithers into the past it leaves behind two democracies, the US and the UK, with the democratic equivalent of the two clock problem. It was Churchill who observed that democracy is the […]