StorySpinner: Controlling Narrative Pace in Hyperfiction

This paper describes the StorySpinner system, a sculptural hypertext reader used as a test bed for experimenting with the authoring of narrative flow in automatically generated stories. An overview of the system is presented along with discussion and conclusions arising from initial user trials

On measuring the impact of hyperlinks on reading

We increasingly spend a vast amount of time on the Web and much of that time is spent reading. One of the main differences between reading non-Web based text and reading on the Web is the presence of hyperlinks within the text, linking various related Web content and Web pages together. Some researchers and commentators have claimed that hyperlinks hinder reading because they are a distraction that may have a negative effect on the reader’s ability to process the text. However, very few controlled experiments have been conducted to verify these claims.In the experiments documented here we utilise eye tracking as a new methodology for examining how we read hyperlinked text. An eye tracker was used to observe participant’s behaviour while reading. The results showed that hyperlinked text did not generally have a negative impact upon reading behaviour. However, participants did show a tendency to re-read sentences that contained hyperlinked uncommon (low frequency) words. This suggests that hyperlinks highlight important information to the reader and the hyperlinks add additional content which for more difficult concepts, invites rereading of the preceding text

Visualisation of Hypermedia Systems: An Open Approach

Hypermedia systems are designed to allow links, or connections, to be made between different media objects. Key issues tackled in early hypermedia systems included developing tools to help guide users through the material and tools to help authors maintain the material that they create. The open approach to hypermedia emerged, where links were separated from the content of documents, allowing a more modular approach to hypermedia services. The ease of integration of tools in these open systems promoted the creation of many different types of navigational aids, designed to help users of the systems to access and maintain the information contained within them. The openness and modular nature of such systems creates its own problems however. Users will often have to interact with a number of disparate interfaces to manipulate the navigational information. A new approach is presented which provides an open framework for these interfaces, allowing for a co-ordinated strategy and the modular addition of tools to help manage the screen interface and reduce the complexity of the interaction for users. A second approach to the problem is to provide the different hypermedia information within a unifying visualisation. A novel framework is presented which allows more open access to the underlying navigational information of hypermedia systems. Visualisation tools can be connected to this framework in a modular fashion to provide flexible visualisations of the underlying information. By generating a number of different visualisations, the openness and flexibility of the visualisation framework approach is demonstrated

Exposing potential narrative structure through user choice

The reading of a hypertext fiction could simply be viewed as the reordering of events, reviewing and accessing fragments of a story that has already taken place. A different reader experience would come from different orderings and the effects that these might produce. This doesn’t have to be the case however. The fragments of a fiction also can represent possibilities that have yet to occur. This is independent of the over-arching narrative of the piece. At points in the fiction the reader is presented with choices. Do I follow this link or do I choose a different path? Here, the narrative structure of the piece is leaking through the text and not just the read structure but potential future structures. These choices must be presented to the reader by the author. This paper will examine some of the consequences of exposing the visibilities of these narrative structures, using the presentation of choices in hypertext fiction as an exemplar

An On-the-fly Provenance Tracking Mechanism for Stream Processing Systems

Applications that operate over streaming data withhigh-volume and real-time processing requirements are becomingincreasingly important. These applications process streamingdata in real-time and deliver instantaneous responses to supportprecise and on-time decisions. In such systems, traceability -the ability to verify and investigate the source of a particularoutput - in real-time is extremely important. This ability allowsraw streaming data to be checked and processing steps to beverified and validated in timely manner. Therefore, it is crucialthat stream systems have a mechanism for dynamically trackingprovenance - the process that produced result data - at executiontime, which we refer to as on-the-fly stream provenance tracking.In this paper, we propose a novel on-the-fly provenance trackingmechanism that enables provenance queries to be performeddynamically without requiring provenance assertions to be storedpersistently. We demonstrate how our provenance mechanismworks by means of an on-the-fly provenance tracking algorithm.The experimental evaluation shows that our provenance solutiondoes not have a significant effect on the normal processing ofstream systems given a 7% overhead. Moreover, our provenancesolution offers low-latency processing (0.3 ms per additionalcomponent) with reasonable memory consumption.<br/

Dark retweets: investigating non-conventional retweeting patterns

Retweets are an important mechanism for recognising propagation of information on the Twitter social media platform. However, many retweets do not use the official retweet mechanism, or even community established conventions, and these "dark retweets" are not accounted for in many existing analysis. In this paper, a comprehensive matrix of tweet propagation is presented to show the different nuances of retweeting, based on seven characteristics: whether it is proprietary, the mechanism used, whether it is directed to followers or non-followers, whether it mentions other users, if it is explicitly propagating another tweet, if it links to an original tweet, and what is the audience it is pushed to. Based on this matrix and two assumptions of retweetability, the degrees of a retweet's "darkness" can be determined. This matrix was evaluated over 2.3 million tweets and it was found that dark retweets amounted to 12.86% (for search results less than 1500 tweets per URL) and 24.7% (for search results including more than 1500 tweets per URL) respectively. By extrapolating these results with those found in existing studies, potentially thousands of retweets may be hidden from existing studies on retweets

The Researcher Social Network: a social network based on metadata of scientific publications

Scientific journals can capture a scholar’s research career. A researcher’s publication data often reflects his/her research interests and their social relations. It is demonstrated that scientist collaboration networks can be constructed based on co-authorship data from journal papers. The problem with such a network is that researchers are limited within their professional social network. This work proposes the idea of constructing a researcher’s social network based on data harvested from metadata of scientific publications and personal online profiles. We hypothesize that data, such as, publication keywords, personal interests, the themes of the conferences where papers are published, and co-authors of the papers, either directly or indirectly represent the authors’ research interests, and by measuring the similarity between these data we are able to construct a researcher social network. Based on the four types of data mentioned above, social network graphs were plotted, studied and analyzed. These graphs were then evaluated by the researchers themselves by giving ratings. Based on this evaluation, we estimated the weight for each type of data, in order to blend all data together to construct one ideal researcher’s social network. Interestingly, our results showed that a graph based on publication’s keywords were more representative than the one based on publication’s co-authorship. The findings from the evaluation were used to propose a dynamic social network data model

The Chawton House Experience - Augmenting the Grounds of a Historic Manor House

Museum research is a burgeoning area of research where ubiquitous computing has already made an impact in enhancing user experiences. The goal of the Chawton House project is to extend this work by introducing ubicomp not to a museum as such, but a historic English manor house and its grounds. This presents a number of novel challenges relating to the kinds of visitors, the nature of visits, the specific character of the estate, the creation of a persistent and evolving system, and the process of developing it together with Chawton House staff

Fathers’ perinatal mental health: Impacts, interventions and supports

Background. Fathers’ perinatal mental health problems have far reaching implications not only for themselves, but also for their partner, their couple relationship, and their children. The primary objective of this thesis by publication was to generate evidence to inform the development of policy and intervention efforts to promote fathers’ mental health in the perinatal period. The aims of the research were four-fold: first, to determine the extent to which fathers’ experiences of mental health problems impact parenting and their children; second, to undertake a systematic review into interventions targeting fathers’ perinatal mental health; third, to explore fathers’ support needs in the perinatal period; and finally, to investigate midwives’ perceptions and experiences of working with fathers. Method. A multi-method approach was adopted across four studies. The first study used data from a longitudinal study of a nationally representative sample of Australian children and their families (N = 3,741 fathers) and explored mechanisms that link fathers’ postnatal distress to later child outcomes. Second, a systematic review of existing research detailing interventions targeting expectant and new fathers’ mental health was conducted. Third, fathers’ perceived support needs to accessing mental health and parenting support in the perinatal period were explored through qualitative interviews with fathers (N = 20). Finally, midwives’ perceptions and experiences of engaging fathers in the perinatal period were surveyed via a national online survey (N = 106) and qualitative interviews (N = 13). Results. In Study 1 (Chapter 6), results indicated that fathers’ postnatal distress and low parenting self-efficacy (PSE) were associated with higher levels of fathers’ parenting hostility and lower levels of parenting consistency when children were aged 4-5 years. In turn, this was associated with children’s emotional and behavioural difficulties when aged 8-9 years. Additionally, fathers’ levels of parenting warmth when children were aged 4-5 years was associated with fathers’ postnatal PSE and children’s prosocial outcomes when aged 8-9 years. In Study 2 (Chapter 7), the systematic literature review of interventions identified 11 studies, only five of which demonstrated significant intervention effects. The review highlighted the paucity of literature on interventions targeting fathers’ perinatal mental health and identified specific design issues related to outcome measures, timing of content delivery, and the mode of intervention delivery across the studies. Study 3 (Chapter 8) described a wide range of fathers’ experiences related to seeking support and several subthemes were identified within each broad area of inquiry: 1) support accessed; 2) support needs; 3) barriers to support; 4) facilitators of support; and 5) timing of support. Finally, online survey results in Study 4 (Chapter 9) indicated that the midwives considered engaging fathers to be a part of their professional role and that father-specific training is needed to develop their knowledge and skills in this area. Analysis of the interview data led to the identification of factors specific to midwives, the external workplace, and fathers that can impact a midwife’s ability to engage men in their services. Conclusion. Findings from this thesis extend our theoretical understanding of issues related to fathers’ perinatal mental health in three key areas; intergenerational health, the role of fathers’ PSE, and models of men’s help-seeking behaviour. Practical implications include intervention and support strategies to promote fathers’ perinatal mental health, and building capacity in the service system so perinatal health professionals can engage, support, and be more inclusive of fathers. Recommendations for future research focusing on fathers’ perinatal mental health include the exploration of diverse father groups, longitudinal research designs, enhanced intervention design and evaluation, and expanded professional training resources