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, […]
Category: Hypertext and Narrative
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. […]
The Narrative Structure of The Witcher 3
Let’s get this out of the way first. The Witcher 3 is an astonishingly good game: fun, engaging, massive, and worthy of just about every superlative you could chug down before overdosing on praise and reaching for your White Honey. It’s a very good game. It also has a strong narrative, and while The Witcher 3 […]
StoryPlaces – Bournemouth Natural Science Society
This week we once again climbed down the long ivory staircase from the University in order to run the second of our location-based story events for the Leverhulme funded StoryPlaces project. This time as part of the Bournemouth Arts By the Sea festival, and focused around the wonderful collection and people of the Bournemouth Natural Science […]
StoryPlaces – Southampton Old Town
Last week we ran our first location-based story event as part of the StoryPlaces project, making location-based stories based around Southampton Old Town available to members of the public. We set up in the beautiful Tudor House, and over three days helped around 100 people to read one of 6 stories set in the city – including […]
Tales of Tiree
In March I travelled up to the Scottish Island of Tiree with my StoryPlaces partner-in-crime Charlie Hargood in order to take part in the 11th Tiree Tech Wave organised by Alan Dix. The Tech Wave is a creative space where people can come together to talk interesting ideas and make cool things. I’ve known Alan for a […]
Canyons, Deltas and Plains
I’m not a hard-nosed computer scientist. I’m more interested in people than algorithms, and that’s why my research has taken me in the direction of hypertext, UX and narrative. That’s also why earlier this month I was so sad to hear about the death of Douglas Engelbart, the American Scientist who thought that computers could […]