The Narrative and Hypertext Workshop Series and the value of Workshops to Research Communities

Narrative and Hypertext (NHT) is the longest running workshop series at ACM Hypertext, and as it enters its 8th year we reflect on the value of workshops to research communities, and how they enable dissemination and discussion in a different, but equally valuable, form to conferences. We look at NHT as a case study, and how through providing a publication venue for new ideas and early work alongside a substantial platform for key discussions it has supported it's community

Tiree Tales: A Co-operative Inquiry into the Poetics of Location-Based Narratives

In a location-based story a reader's movement through physical space is translated into movement through narrative space, typically by presenting them with text fragments on a smart device triggered by location changes. Despite the increasing popularity of such systems their poetics are poorly understood, meaning limited guidance for authors, and few authoring tools. To explore these poetics we present a co-operative inquiry into the authoring of an interactive location-based narrative, `The Isle of Brine', set on the island of Tiree. Our inquiry reveals both pragmatic and aesthetic considerations driven by the locations themselves, that affect the design of both the Story (narrative structure) and Fabula (events within the story). These include the importance of paths, bottlenecks, and junctions as a physical manifestation of calligraphic patterns, the need for coherent narrative areas, and the requirement to use evocative places and to manage thematic and tonal discord between the landscape and the narrative

Location location location: experiences of authoring an interactive location-based narrative

Location-based narratives are a form of digital interactive storytelling where a reader's physical movement triggers narrative events. Unlike traditional hypertext the poetics of these narratives is poorly understood, meaning that it is difficult to build effective authoring tools or to train new writers. In this paper we present our experience of authoring an interactive location-based narratives, focused on the creation of a story 'The Isle of Brine' set on the island of Tiree. Our experience highlights the primacy of location in the authoring process, and both pragmatic and aesthetic considerations for the design of the narrative

What's the Story? A Proposed Approach for the Evaluation of Experimental Interactive Narrative.

Evaluation of experimental digital narrative often focuses on the overall user experience. While this is important, we recognise the need for more granular forms of evaluation to measure the efficacy of individual digital narrative delivery techniques which continue to grow in variety as authors explore different approaches to telling stories using interactive media. In this paper we propose a multi-layered evaluation methodology based on the principle of deconstructing an interactive narratives internal fabula and story and three separate stages of interview for collecting evidence of the efficacy of different techniques used within story payloads to deliver content. This proposed methodology shows early promise, and potentially provides a means to identify the individual efficacy of techniques within a wider digital narrative

Textual Authoring for Interactive Narrative

Narrative design and implementation in interactive softwares has always possessed an intrinsic issue, in that the person or persons with the responsibility of authoring the narrative will most likely lack ability in programming. Because the narrative does eventually become implemented in software, the in uence the technical side has on the creative side is unavoidable. The design of the March22 Engine, its scripting language, and its accompanying authoring tool are all designed to facilitate those of least programming ability, whilst not limiting those of greater ability. By making the scripting language as similar to a screenplay as possible, and showing the ow of narrative via charts, the writer is left with as little programming requirements as possible, whilst still able to produce quality narrative

The narrative braid: a model for tackling the narrative paradox in adaptive documentaries

The Narrative Paradox is a theory that describes interaction and narrative cohesion as being in tension, and asserts that the structure of a narrative is disrupted by user adaptivity, leading to possible incoherence as the system accounts for interaction. We propose an approach that may reduce this disruption. Specifically, we propose to model a narrative as a collection of threads, woven together into the discourse as a narrative braid. By separately maintaining logical coherence within a thread and thematic coherence between threads we believe it is possible to introduce inter- activity while maintaining a strong narrative structure. We discuss how this may be applied to adaptive documentaries which, with a wide base of recorded material and diverse plot threads, provide a rich medium for initial experimentation in this area

Aggregated Erevnametrics: bringing together alt-metrics through Research Objects

This position paper examines the spectrum of artefacts that contribute to the research process, in the context of bibliometrics and erevnametrics. We examine how existing research evaluation techniques could be enhanced with richer information about the research process and research outputs

The StoryPlaces Authoring Tool: Pattern Centric Authoring

Building authoring environments for constraint-based inter- active narratives (sculptural hypertexts) is challenging, as dealing di- rectly with functions and variables is alien to many authors and requires them to think at a lower level than story structure. We propose an ap- proach that uses higher level constructs based on common structural patterns, which are then translated behind the scenes into a set of con- straints for a sculptural engine. We present the StoryPlaces authoring tool that applies this idea with the patterns of Locking and Phasing and allows for the creation of constraint-based locative hypertext ction. Our work shows how the poetics of interactive narratives can be used in the software design process to create more accessible authoring tools

NHT'23: Narrative and Hypertext 2023

NHT is a continuing workshop series associated with the ACM Hypertext conference for over a decade. The workshop acts as forum of discussion for the narrative systems community within the wider audience of the Hypertext conference. The workshop runs both presentations from authors of accepted short research papers, and invited talks to provide a venue for important discussions of issues facing and opportunities for members of the narrative and hypertext community. This year the workshop aims to specifically target the timely issue of "Mixed Reality Narrative Hypertext"while maintaining an open venue for wider relevant work