Research

I have been lucky enough to be involved in Hypertext and Web research for over twenty-five years, firstly in the area of Open, Adaptive and Contextual hypermedia and later the areas of Social Media Analytics, Linked Data, UX Design, Web Science, and Interactive Digital Narrative. I spent a number of years applying this sort of technology to e-learning, in particular digital literacy, personal-learning systems, and open educational resources (OER). My current research interests are based around digital narratives, narrative games, and mixed reality storytelling, in particular locative literature. I am the co-director of the 3M Euro LoGaCulture project on Locative Games for Cultural Heritage (2023-26), and I was the Principle Investigator on the Leverhulme funded StoryPlaces project (2016-19).

I am a founding member of the Web and Internet Science (WAIS) research group, and am the Head of the ECS Education Group which has a remit to continually improve and innovate in ECSs own teaching practices. I was member of the steering group for the Web Science Doctoral Training Centre (DTC), and have been involved in Web Science at Southampton from its conception. I was the Vice-Chair of SIGWEB, the ACM Special Interest Group for hypertext and the web (2015-2019), and am currently the chair of the ACM Hypertext Steering Committee. For fun I bask in the reflected glory of my brilliant research students, talented researchers, and brilliant colleagues.

You can view my ORCHID record here (0000-0002-7512-2710).

Interactive Digital Narrative (IDN)

My interests in Hypertext have grown into a fascination with Interactive Narratives and Narrative Games. Broadly speaking this work falls into several different categories:

Hypertext Modelling

My PhD work was in Open Hypermedia Systems, and in particular in modelling multiple domains of Hypertext (I developed the Fundamental Open Hypermedia Model, FOHM). I have also completed work in Semantic Wikis, and with students have analysed Wikipedia structures. But over the years I became interested in creative hypertexts, especially Strange Hypertexts (hypertexts that are playful with their data models and interaction mechanisms), and then later Narrative Games.

I am particularly interested in the overlap between Hypertext, Games, and Interactive Digital Narratives (IDNs). My paper Games/Hypertext explores each of the two forms through the eyes of the other, and Hypertext as a Lens develops this idea into a fully realised hypertextual analysis of narrative games and IDN. My work has helped to define the area of Sculptural Hypertext (hypertext governed by rules and constraints rather than navigational links), a modelling approach also known as Storylets that is highly suitable for conceptualising and designing narrative structures within digital games. My students and I were some of the first to explore multi-player interactive narratives, modelled as Sculptural Hypertexts, where multiple players experience independent but interdependent stories within the same narrative world.

Locative Literature and Mixed Reality Games

I have also worked extensively on locative narratives, interactive digital narrative games that are experienced on location-aware smart devices. I was one of the very first people to work on this area, suggesting in 2004 that hypertext was an appropriate basis for locative narrative games, and working with the Equator project to create an experience at Chawton House in Hampshire in 2005. Most recently have been trying to understand locative narratives as a design space, proposing the Balance of Attention as the primary poetic of locative narrative, and working towards a design framework for successful locative experiences.

I am proud to be a double-award winner of the Engelbart Award (2013, 2016) for my work on location-based storytelling and sculptural hypertext – exploring how digital narratives can be interwoven with real-world places. This is best exemplified by StoryPlaces, an interdisciplinary research project working with writers to explore the poetics of location-based narratives through digital storytelling deployments in Southampton, Bournemouth, and Crystal Palace.

StoryPlaces_200pxThe StoryPlaces web client (created in 2016) is a powerful sculptural hypertext engine designed to be accessed on a smart device, and capable of driving complex interactive location-based stories. 

My work has frequently touched on Mixed Reality, starting with collaborative work I undertook back in 2002 on Augmented Reality and tangible hypertext interfaces. Most recently I have worked with my students on multi-model interactions in mixed reality, and in particular how this effects immersion and embodiment.

This work on locative games and mixed reality continues in the LoGaCulture project (Locative Games for Cultural Heritage) which launches in 2023 with locative game case studies in some of Europe’s most significant tourist destinations, including Avebury in the UK.

Authoring Interactive Narratives

My interests in modelling and strange hypertext forms has also led me to look at how people can author interactive experiences, and how different abstractions and interfaces might open up the creative process to the widest number of people. With my students I have explored the authoring process, and deconstructed the authoring burden. I have also done a lot of work on patterns, including Transmedia and Sculptural Hypertext patterns, and in particular my 2022 chapter on Strange Patterns that both summarises three decades of patterns work in Hypertext and IDN but also considers the theoretical roots of patterns in structuralism and the consequences of that foundation.

I am also interested in role of automation in authoring, exploring how AI co-pilots might aid IDN authors overcome by the inherent complexity of the medium. This began with a 2018 paper on ReaderBots (programs that automatically read and reread stories looking for flaws) and I continue to explore this space with my students, including analysing what UX dimensions might be targets for analysis, as well as exploring IDN datasets for traditional NLP techniques.

Web Science, Social Media, and E-learning

Web Science studies the web as a socio-technical system, bringing together many fields including computer science, sociology, psychology, law and economics.  From 2010 to 2020 I had the pleasure of co-supervising many postgraduate students on interdisciplinary areas such as learning analytics, personal data and privacy, digital literacy, and online patterns of behaviour. This was an amazing opportunity to work with and learn from colleagues in many other departments including Law, Social Sciences, English, History, Geography, Politics, Education, Film, Psychology, and the Arts.

Digital Literacy in particular was a motivator for work I completed in technology enhanced learning, and continues to be an aspect of my work as Head of the Education Group. I have acted as the principle investigator on a number of projects exploring how digital literacy effects our expectations and interactions with web systems, and how this shapes the way we use the web as a personal learning and knowledge tool, in particular in regard to Open Educational Resources (OER) and Personal Learning Environments (PLEs).

faroesThe LanguageBox was developed with the LLAS and was our first attempt to reinvent teaching and learning repositories, and completely rethink learning objects. It is based on the tried and tested EPrints platform, and we learnt from Web 2.0 sharing sites, and aimed to produce an online tool that minimised the effort it took to upload content, and resulted in learning objects that were more focused on content and the history of use (rather than abstract metadata).
 edshare-blogSouthampton EdShare was the result of us applying this same philosophy to an institutional repository. It resulted in not only the first OER tool for the University of Southampton, but also a reusable repository framework (called simply ‘EdShare’) that allows the creation of new repository sites with the same functionality.
Hum_box_LogoThe HumBox is one of the best well-known OER repositories created using the EdShare framework. It is used by teachers and lecturers in humanities across the UK to share resources and ideas.

PhD Students

In the last twenty years I have supervised over forty PhD students, and acted as an internal examiner for another forty students.

At present I am looking for new postgraduate students who are interesting in studying digital interactive narratives, or mixed reality games.

Current Students

  1. Qianwen Lyu – Emergent Narratives
  2. Joey Jones – Tackling Combinatorial Explosion in Branching Interactive Narratives
  3. Ashwathy Revi – AI support for Interactive Digital Narratives
  4. Lesia Tkacz – Computational Creativity and the Importance of Paratext
  5. Frode Hegland – Augmented scholarly text
  6. Yoan-Daniel Malinov – Multimodal Co-presence in Virtual Reality
  7. Ben Giordano – Social Media as Community Memory
  8. Simon Jonsson – Flow, gamification, and language learning

Completed Students

  1. Ryan Javanshir (PhD, 2022) – Revealing Structures in Transmedia Storytelling for the Purposes of Analysis and Classification
  2. Emma Craddock (PhD, 2021) – A New Approach to Categorising Personal Data to Increase Transparency Under the Obligation to Inform
  3. Justyna Lisinska (PhD, 2021) – How do populist supporters engage online?
  4. Fatima Asiri (PhD, 2021) – Unpacking Privacy Practices in SNSs: Users’ Protection Strategies to Enforce Privacy Boundaries
  5. Callum Spawforth (PhD, 2021) – Multiplayer Interactive Narrative Experiences: Understanding Player Interaction in Authored Non-Linear Narratives
  6. Adriana Wilde (PhD, 2021) – A Platform-Agnostic Model and Analysis of Learner Engagement within Peer-Supported Digital Environments: FutureLearn MOOCs and PeerWise
  7. Sofia Kitromili (PhD, 2021) – Authoring Digital Interactive Narratives
  8. Mark Anderson (PhD, 2021) – Sustainable Knowledge in Hypertext
  9. Vincent Marmion (PhD, 2021) – Exploring Identity Assurance as a Complex System
  10. Taghreed Alghamdi (PhD, 2021) – Blended MOOCs Acceptance and Use: A Cross-Cultural Study of the Factors Affecting Lecturers’ Use of bMOOCs
  11. Nick Bennett (PhD, 2020) – Data Mining Narratives of Social Space: Analysing Twitter, Census and POI Data to Extract the Changing Nature of Social Locations
  12. Nada Albunni (PhD, 2019) – The Arabic Online Public Sphere
  13. Rob Blair (PhD, 2018) – Attitudes of School Children to using Social Media for Non-Formal Learning
  14. Tom Blount (PhD, 2018) – Online Eristic Argumentation
  15. Tim O’Riordan (PhD, 2018) – Pedagogical Content Analysis applied to MOOC forums
  16. Brian Parkinson (PhD, 2018) – Personal Data and the Digitally Extended Self
  17. Fahad Almoqhim (PhD, 2017) – Building Tag Hierarchies Based on Co-occurrences and Lexico-Syntactic Patterns
  18. Jonathan Scott (PhD, 2017) – Enhancing Credibility of Citizen News
  19. Rikki Prince (PhD, 2017) – Sharing User Models Between Interactionally-Diverse Adaptive Educational Systems
  20. Nora Almuhanna (PhD, 2017) – Social Media Acceptance and Use under Risk: A Cross-Cultural Study of the Impact of Antisocial Behaviour on the Use of Twitter
  21. Phil Waddell (MPhil, 2017) -Investigating the role of Social Media Technologies in the political narratives of Global Justice Activists
  22. Syed Asim Jalal (PhD, 2015) – Educational Multimedia Adaptation for Power-Saving in Mobile Learning
  23. Muhammad Imran (PhD, 2015) – The Impact of Consolidating Web Based Social Networks on Trust Metrics and Expert Recomendation Systems
  24. Reuben Binns (PhD, 2015) – Openness for Privacy: Applying Open Approaches to Personal Data Challenges
  25. Areeb Alowisheq (PhD, 2014) – EXPRESS Resource-Oriented and RESTful Semantic Web Services
  26. Aristea Zafeiropoulou (PhD, 2014) – A Paradox of Privacy: Unravelling the Reasoning behind Online Location Sharing
  27. Norhidayah Azman (PhD, 2014) – Dark Retweets: An Investigation of Non-Conventional Retweeting Patterns
  28. Saad Alahmari (PhD, 2012) – Service Identification using Choreography and Model Transformations
  29. Ali Aseere (PhD, 2012) – A Voting-Based Agent System to Support Intelligent System for E-learning Scenarios
  30. Wen-Pin Chen (MPhil, 2012) – Design of a Scrutable Learning System
  31. Charlie Hargood (PhD, 2011) – Semiotic Term Expansion as the Basis for Thematic Models in Narrative Systems
  32. Clare Hooper (PhD, 2011) – Towards Designing More Effective Systems by Understanding User Experiences
  33. Asma Ounnas (PhD, 2010) – Enhancing the Automation of Forming Groups for Education with Semantics
  34. Mischa Tuffield (PhD, 2009) – Telling Your Story: A Tale of Autobiographical Metadata and the Semantic Web

(Btw – the image at the top of this page is from a demonstration memex built by Trevor Smith – you can find out more about it here – or watch his demo video)