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 […]
Category: Hypertext and Narrative
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 […]
Hypertext 2012: Fractal Narratives, Ergodic Literature and Submarines
I have just returned from the ACM conference in Milwaukee, excellently run and as interesting as ever, but smaller than it has been in a number of years. I also co-chaired the Hypertext and Narrative workshop with my old student Charlie Hargood (now a postdoc at Southampton). The Narrative workshop had its inception seven years […]
Choosing our Science: Hypertext and Web Science
This blog post is an abridged version of a guest editorial I co-wrote for the New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia, Special Issue on Web Science. The full editorial can be found in EPrints. Hypertext and the Web What is Hypertext? It is well known in our community that the word Hypertext was coined by […]
Killer Semantics: The Challenges of Linked Data in Higher Education
This week I was at ECTEL – The European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning. The main event for me was actually the workshop for Semantic Technology in Higher Education (SEMHE), where I was on a discussion panel at the end of the day considering potential roadmaps for semantic technology adoption in HE. The atmosphere was […]
Stephen Fry: Computer Science Linguistics 101
Stephen Fry continues on his merry rise to sainthood with his latest podcast about Language and Linguistics. In fact it’s more of a love poem to words, but it’s so sprinkled with wry commentary on structuralism, etymology and modern day pedantry that you could use it directly as a student primer on all three. My […]
How is the Semantic Web like Open Hypermedia?
Will history be kind to Open Hypermedia? The other day I gave a presentation on the Evolution of the Web to our new Masters students (part of their pre-sessional programme at Southampton) and I was forced to face an awkward thought. Open Hypermedia was an interesting side road of the Information Superhighway, but it wasn’t […]
WikiSym 2008
I’m currently attending WikiSym 2008 in Porto, Portugal. WikiSym is a small conference with a mix of participants: wiki enthusiasts, developers, researchers, consultants, cynics and evengalists. It also has a very open freeform structure, helped along by the fantastic Portuguese sunshine (a weather event not seen in the UK since April 2007), and the welcoming […]