Hypertext Theory and Narrative

The title of this essay may at first glance seem strange. The linkage of a computer based technology with a theory of narrative might seem incongruous; however, hypertext and what George Landow has called the \u27convergence of critical theory and technology\u27 has stimulated interest in new theories and problematics of the text and of narrative. Interest in studying the textual implications of hypertext systems has grown almost as rapidly as these systems themselves. It is not an overstatement to say that of all the technological developments of the twentieth century, the emergence of hypertext and the internet has been the most widely studied. The interdisciplinary nature of this work is perhaps its most notable feature and there is a need to see hypertext not merely as a technological phenomenon but as a system which has deep implications for many \u27communications· disciplines. There have been a few pioneers whose interdisciplinary work on hypertext predates the emergence of the World Wide Web (the most famous of hypertext systems) and whose work I will outline below

Visualising Museum Stories

Storytelling is fundamental to our ability to understand, and find meaning in, the world around us. Stories allow us to organise and share knowledge, and to identify the relationships between objects, events, and experiences. Within museums stories allow visitors to engage with collections and to gain meaningful understanding of museum objects. Stories transform a collection of objects into a meaningful knowledge structure that connects the objects and give them meaning. This paper describes the Open Source Storyscope system that has been developed by the EU FP7 DECIPHER project. Storyscope\u27s workspace and tools allow museum professionals and visitors to research, develop, and present stories that connect objects across museum collections. Storyscope has been built using advanced machine reasoning technologies that help the user to search for, organise and present resources from Collection Management Systems from Linked Data sources

Storyscope: Supporting the authoring and reading of museum stories using online data sources

Museum staff tell stories to assist visitor interpretation of artworks. Visitors also tell their own stories to articulate their understanding and opinion of artworks. Additional knowledge about the concepts mentioned or tagged in these stories can be found from online data sources. These could be used to assist reader interpretation or author development of stories. However, the potentially vast network of heterogeneous knowledge that can be created around the tags or annotations of a story could be bewildering for the story reader or author. Here we present Storyscope, a test-bed environment for the authoring, reading and semantic annotation of museum stories. The integration of online knowledge within the task of story authoring or interpretation is facilitated by mapping the available knowledge to a set of facts and simple events related to each story annotation. Narrative principles of theme and setting are used to discover and highlight aspects of the knowledge of potential value to the author or reader. Preliminary studies indicate the potential of the approach for providing a form of semantic navigation across stories and concepts having a better cognitive fit to story related tasks than existing forms of navigation

Storyscope: Using setting and theme to assist the interpretation and development of museum stories

Stories are used to provide a context for museum objects, for example linking those objects to what they depict or the historical context in which they were created. Many explicit and implicit relationships exist between the people, places and things mentioned in a story and the museum objects with which they are associated. Storyscope is an environment for authoring museum stories comprising text, media elements and semantic annotations. A recommender component provides additional context as to how the story annotations are related directly or via other concepts not mentioned in the story. The approach involves generating a concept space for different types of story annotation such as artists and museum objects. The concept space of an annotation is predominantly made up of a set of events, forming an event space. The story context is aggregated from the concept spaces of its associated annotations. Narrative notions of setting and theme are used to reason over the concept space, identifying key concepts and time-location pairs, and their relationship to the rest of the story. The author or reader can use setting and theme to navigate the context of the story

Using event spaces, setting and theme to assist the interpretation and development of museum stories

Stories are used to provide a context for museum objects, for example linking those objects to what they depict or the historical context in which they were created. Many explicit and implicit relationships exist between the people, places and things mentioned in a story and the museum objects with which they are associated. We describe an interface for authoring stories about museum objects in which textual stories can be associated with semantic annotations and media elements. A recommender component provides additional context as to how the story annotations are related directly or via other concepts not mentioned in the story. The approach involves generating a concept space for different types of story annotation such as artists and museum objects. The concept space is predominantly made up of a set of events, forming an event space. The concept spaces of all story annotations can be combined into a single view. Narrative notions of setting and theme are used to reason over the concept space, identifying key concepts and time-location pairs, and their relationship to the rest of the story. Story setting and theme can then be used by the reader or author to assist in interpretation or further evolution of the story

Effects of Aging and Hypertension on Plasma Angiotensin II and Platelet Angiotensin II Receptor Density

Plasma renin activity (PRA) declines with age in normal individuals, but the effect of age on plasma angiotensin II (ANG II) is less clear. A decline in plasma ANG II with age could result in altered platelet ANG II receptor density since plasma hormone levels influence their target organ receptors. To investigate this possibility, PRA, plasma ANG II, and platelet ANG II receptor density were examined in 17 young, 12 middle-aged, and 14 elderly healthy normotensive volunteers. To assess whether hypertension altered receptor density, these variables were also examined in 23 hypertensive patients. In normotensives, there was a negative correlation between age and PRA (r = — 0.43, P < .05), no significant change in basal plasma ANG II with age, and a weak positive correlation between age and ANG II receptor density (r = 0.34, P < .05). Multiple regression analysis revealed that the relationship between age and ANG II receptor density was independent of the associated rise in mean arterial arterial pressure with age (P < .05). Platelet ANG II receptor density was not significantly related to PRA or plasma ANG II. ANG II receptor affinity did not change with age. Neither PRA nor ANG II receptor density or affinity differed between hypertensives and normotensives of similar mean age, but plasma ANG II was significantly lower in hypertensives compared with normotensives. We concluded that aging is associated with a decline in supine PRA. The small decrease in plasma ANG II was not significant. Platelet ANG II receptor density increased with age primarily due to a small group of elderly subjects with elevated receptor density. There was no change in ANG II receptor density or affinity in hypertensives despite apparently lower plasma ANG II in these patients. Am J Hypertens 1992;5:687-69

HTML5 and the Learner of Spoken Languages

Traditional corpora are not renowned for being user friendly. If learners are to derive maximum benefit from speech corpora, then better interfaces are needed. This paper proposes such a role for HTML5. DIT’s dynamic speech corpus, FLUENT, contains a limited series of informal dialogues between friends and acquaintances. They are characterised by naturalness and their audio quality and marked-up using a schema which allows learners to retrieve features of spoken language, such as speaker intention, formulaicity and prosodic characteristics such as speed of delivery. The requirement to combine audio assets and synchronous text animation has in the past necessitated the use of browser ‘plug-in’ technologies, such as Adobe Flash. Plug-in-based systems all suffer from major drawbacks. They are not installed by default on deployed browsers. More critically they obscure the underlying speech corpus structure. Also proprietary UIs offer no standard way of dealing with accessibility or dynamic interface reconfiguration, e.g. moving from corpus playback to concordance views. This makes design of a unified interface framework, with audio playback, synchronous text and speech, more difficult. Given the profusion of plug-in architectures and plug-in types, it is clear that such an environment is unsustainable for building tools for speech corpus visualisation. In order to overcome these challenges, FLUENT drew heavily on the HTML5 specification coupled with a user-centred design for L2 learners to specify and develop scalable, reusable and accessible UIs for many devices.This paper describes the design of the corpus schema and its close integration with the UI model