I’m reading old documents to prepare a first sketch of a paper I’m writing on early (pre-2000) electronic literature communities. I was intrigued to find Jakob Nielsen’s trip report from the very first ACM Hypertext conference held in 1987. By now, the real difference between Nelson and most other hypertext […]

Ooh. The game conference just started, and Espen started his lecture by asking how many people have played World of Warcraft. Yay! Now he’s showing a screenshot from a raid with lots of high level characters, and yes, it’s so complicated. “How do we read it?” he asks.

They’ve announced where the next Hypertext conferences will be. Usually the conference has alternated between the US and Europe, but the conference hasn’t been able to find a site in the US for 2006, so it’ll be in Denmark in 2006, and in Austria in 2007. Unfortunately that means that […]

For my presentation today I’m going to hand out the draft of the paper I just had accepted to Hypertext ’05, about feral hypertext (yay!), but instead of discussing it directly I’m going to demonstrate the technology, which is I think less familiar to most of the world than to […]

I’m going to Salzburg today, to the program committee meeting for ACM’s Hypertext ’05. Hypertext ’98 was the first conference I ever went to. It was my first time in the US and my first long journey absolutely all alone, knowing nobody. I was so scared I thought of just […]

In a brief article in Interactions, Brenda Laurel writes that in her study of 1000 children, she found that “narrative construction was the largest category of play for girls ages eight to 12.” That certainly seems to fit what I see in my 8 year old daughter. She plays stories […]

I’m reading old hypertext papers and found Andries van Dam’s keynote for the first ACM Hypertext conference in 1987 (or ACM library). van Dam created the first working hypertext system at Brown University in 1967 in collaboration with several other scientists, including Ted Nelson, and also greatly inspired by Doug […]

Jamie Blustein alerted me to the cover story of the latest issue of Interactions, ACM’s magazine, which is by Jim Miller and about immersive gaming and storytelling. Here’s the abstract: if you’re lucky your library or university might have a subscription and you’ll be able to click right through to […]

One of my greatest aha! moments learning about hypertext theory was when I at a conference naively commented, over drinks I expect, that hypertext requires links. A spatial hypertext expert (I think it must have been Frank Shipman, or maybe Gene Golovchinsky, though it could have been a dozen others) […]

The latest ACM Communications has a pile of articles on blogging. So nice that there’s enough out there now that one can choose to only read the articles on one’s own particular blogging focus. More literary blogging papers, anyone?