David Millard

University of Southampton · Department of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS)

The title of this book is ‘The Authoring Problem: Challenges in Supporting Authoring for Interactive Digital Narrative’. For a reader new to this emerging field, while the title must have been intriguing enough to attract them to start reading this introduction, there may be a number of questions in their mind. What exactly is the ‘authoring proble...

This study investigates the impact of the perceptions of antisocial behaviour on the use of the social media platform Twitter. We extend the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) with the Perception of Antisocial Behaviour as a risk factor, and two supporting constructs: Strategic Self-Presentation and Protective Self-Presentat...

Interactive Narrative is blessed with a myriad of forms, this richness makes it hard to compare IDN systems or to develop general theories and tools as each example can seem like a special case. We take the approach of using hypertext as a method of inquiry to explore the similarities of different IDN forms. Using the Interactive Process Model to s...

Digital behavior change interventions (DBCIs) provide customized advice, ongoing support, and web- and mobile-based platforms for learners who want to change their undesirable behaviors. DBCIs have been successful in the past for delivering interventions which support sustained changes to health behaviors, such as disease prevention and health prom...

There is a long history of research exploring how augmented and mixed reality systems can be used to support visitors to cultural heritage locations, but the technological or application specific focus of much of this research means that our understanding of how these experiences work is more of a collection of insights, rather than a coherent theo...

Building our discipline has been an ongoing discussion since the early days of ICIDS. From earlier international joint efforts to integrate research from multiple fields of study to today’s endeavours by researchers to provide scholarly works of reference, the discussion on how to continue building Interactive Digital Narratives as a discipline wit...

Learners' progress within Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) environments is typically measured via analysis and interpretation of quantitative web interaction measures. However, the usefulness of these 'proxies for learning' is questioned as they do not necessarily reflect critical thinking-an essential component of collaborative lea...

The relationship between hypertext research and games design is not clear, despite the striking similarity between literary hypertexts and narrative games. This matters as different communities are now exploring hypertext, interactive fiction, electronic literature, and narrative games from different perspectives - but lack a common critical vocabu...

Despite significant research into authoring tools for interactive narratives and a number of established authoring platforms, there is still a lack of understanding around the authoring process itself, and the challenges that authors face when writing hypertext and other forms of interactive narratives. This has led to a monolithic view of authorin...

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling, ICIDS 2020, held in Bournemouth, UK, in November 2020. The 15 full papers and 8 short papers presented together with 5 posters, were carefully reviewed and selected from 70 submissions. The conference offers topics in game narrat...

As mixed reality storytelling becomes more popular we are beginning to see examples of where it can go wrong, by causing harm to those that directly participate, or offence to those indirectly affected. Without an ethical framework to inform design, mixed reality storytelling could have the same sorts of unintended consequences as other digital tec...

NHT is a continuing workshop series associated with the ACM Hypertext conference. 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, panel discussions of experts, and unstructured unco...

Despite a proliferation of hypertext systems used for fiction, and accompanying authoring tools for those systems, relatively few studies have looked at what are the distinct activities involved in hypertext authoring. This has meant that research into authoring tools has not sufficiently targeted specific activities, leading to complexity for user...

p>This paper presents a study which aims to provide an understanding of the impact of using the components of a digital mobile-based behavior change intervention (mBCI) to support critical thinking skills during university student research projects. The digital behavior change interventions are tools and techniques designed to induce behavior chang...

Multiplayer Interactive Narrative Experiences (MINEs) are interactive authored narratives in which multiple players experience distinct narratives (multiplayer differentiability) and their actions influence the storylines of both themselves and others (inter-player agency). Little research has been done to explore the possibilities of this type of...

Narratives form a key component of multimedia knowledge representation on the Web. However, many existing multimedia narrative systems either ignore the narrative qualities of any media, or focus on the literal depicted content ignoring any subtext. Ignoring narrative subtext can lead to erroneous search results, or automatically remixed content th...

Locative Hypertext Narrative has seen a resurgence in the Hypertext and Interactive Narrative research communities over the last five years. However, while locative hypertext provides significant opportunities for rich locative applications for both education and entertainment, many applications in this space are tied to very specific locations, re...

Locative narrative systems have been a popular area of research for nearly two decades, but they are often bespoke systems, developed for particular deployments, or to demonstrate novel technologies. This has meant that they are short-lived, the narratives have been constructed by the creators of the system, and that the barrier to creating locativ...

User-defined location privacy settings on Twitter cause geolocated tweets to be placed at four different resolutions: precise, point of interest (POI), neighbourhood and city levels. The latter two levels are not described by Twitter or the API, resulting in a risk that clustered tweets are unintentionally treated as real clusters in spatial analys...

University students’ attempts at critical thinking in research projects frequently require supervisor interventions in the form of advice giving, feedback and supportive information. Providing such interventions to each student through classroom teaching or conventional meetings is restrictive as to timing and place. By using a Digital Behaviours C...

Interactive Digital Storytelling is a diverse field, with a variety of different tools and platforms, many of them bespoke. Understanding how these tools effect the stories created using them would allow authors to better select tools for projects, and help developers understand the consequences of their design decisions. We present an initial expl...

Multi-participant Interactive Narratives have the potential for novel types of story and experiences, but there is no framework to show what is possible, and therefore no description of what types of multi-participant narrative could exist. In this paper, we attempt to build such a framework by first considering the core characteristics of interact...

One of the most significant challenges facing narrative systems research is the authoring of interactive storytelling, and the processes and technology to support it. In this workshop we propose to host a discussion and presented new work in this space from researchers in creative and technical domains from both the Hypertext and Interactive Storyt...

Despite the increasing popularity of locative interactive stories their poetics are poorly understood, meaning that there is little advice or support for locative authors, and few frameworks for critical analysis. The StoryPlaces project has spent two years working with over sixty authors creating locative stories. Through analyzing the stories the...

Building authoring environments for constraint-based interactive narratives (sculptural hypertexts) is challenging, as dealing directly with functions and variables is alien to many authors and requires them to think at a lower level than story structure. We propose an approach that uses higher level constructs based on common structural patterns,...

As large, collaboratively authored hypertexts such as Wikipedia grow so does the requirement both for organisational principles and methods to provide sustainable consistency and to ease the task of contributing editors. Large numbers of (potential) editors are not necessarily a suffcient bulwark against loss of coherence amongst a corpus of many d...

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 f...

Locative Stories are narratives that are read on a smart device where text is triggered by changes in the reader’s location, resulting in a hypertextual narrative that is navigated by real world movement. Despite the creation of numerous examples over the last decade the poetics of locative stories is poorly understood, and as a result there are li...

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...

Location based narratives are an emerging form of digital storytelling that use location technologies to trigger content on smart devices according to a user's location. In previous work on the Canyons, Deltas and Plains (CDP) model we argued that they are best considered as a form of sculptural hypertext, but sculptural hypertext is a relatively u...

The problem of online antisocial behavior is increasingly attracting public attention and is compromising the quality of online communities. Previous research on online hostility looked at different aspects of the problem such as its definition, classification, or studying specific case studies, however, the impact is still not clear. In this paper...

The european higher education area (EHEA) aims to create a more comparable, compatible and coherent space of Higher Education in Europe. After a decade of reforms, most of the required instruments are already in place, so the next years are key to complete the implementation and consolidation of the EHEA. However, data challenges pose a threat to p...

Despite playing many important roles in society, the news media have been frequently criticised for failing to represent a wide range of viewpoints. Online news systems have the potential to allow readers to add additional information and perspectives. However, due to the sim- plicity of the filtering mechanisms typically employed, these systems ca...

The use of avatars in shared virtual spaces provides a useful vehicle with which people can present themselves in the way they choose. These avatars can also shape the behaviour of individuals, and their interactions with groups of users. Here, we make the case that there is scope for investigation into how avatars impact argumentation in virtual s...

The proliferation of Web-based learning objects makes finding and evaluating online resources problematic. While established Learning Analytics methods use Web interaction to evaluate learner engagement, there is uncertainty regarding the appropriateness of these measures. In this paper we propose a method for evaluating pedagogical activity in Web...

Argumentation is a key aspect of communications and can broadly be broken down into problem solving (dialectic) and quarrelling (eristic). Techniques used within argumentation can likewise be classified as fact-based (logical), or emotion/audience-based (rhetorical). Modelling arguments on the social web is a challenge for those studying computatio...

Content on the Web is huge and constantly growing, and building taxonomies for such content can help with navigation and organisation, but building taxonomies manually is costly and time-consuming. An alternative is to allow users to construct folksonomies: collective social classifications. Yet, folksonomies are inconsistent and their use for sear...

The process of producing news has changed significantly due to the advent of the Web, which has enabled the increasing involvement of citizens in news production. This trend has been given many names, including participatory journalism, produsage, and crowd-sourced journalism, but these terms are ambiguous and have been applied inconsistently, maki...

Modelling arguments on the social web is a key challenge for those studying computational argumentation. This is because formal models of argumentation tend to assume dialectic and logical argument, whereas argumentation on the social web is highly eristic. In this paper we explore this gap by bringing together the Argument Interchange Format (AIF)...

As mobile devices are getting more powerful and more affordable the use of online educational multimedia is also getting very prevalent. Limited battery power is nevertheless a major restricting factor as streaming multimedia drains battery power quickly. Many battery efficient multimedia adaptation techniques have been proposed that achieve batter...

As mobile devices are getting more powerful and more affordable the use of online educational multimedia is also getting very prevalent. Limited battery power is nevertheless, a major restricting factor as streaming multimedia drains battery power quickly. Many battery efficient multimedia adaptation techniques have been proposed that achieve batte...

Using online multimedia content on mobile devices is a power hungry activity and drains battery power very quickly. This poses a big challenge in using mobile devices with limited battery power for learning purposes using online educational multimedia. Multimedia adaptation techniques have been developed that preserve battery power by lowering mult...

Building taxonomies for Web content manually is costly and time-consuming. An alternative is to allow users to create folksonomies: collective social classifications. However, folksonomies have inconsistent structures and their use for searching and browsing is limited. Approaches have been proposed for acquiring implicit hierarchical structures fr...

The web routinely spreads personal data from one jurisdiction to another, where levels of legal protection over such data vary. This raises the potential for some jurisdictions to become "data havens" specialising in either strong protection of data, or allowing its unrestricted use [5],[3]. In order to promote interoperability and harmonisation, s...

As a result of tremendous enhancements in the capabilities of mobile devices and availability of higher data rate mobile internet, the use of online multimedia learning resources on mobile devices is increasingly becoming popular. Limited Battery Power of mobile devices, however, is still one big challenge in Mobile Learning. High Quality multimedi...

Building taxonomies for web content is costly. An alternative is to allow users to create folksonomies, collective social classifications. However, folksonomies lack structure and their use for searching and browsing is limited. Current approaches for acquiring latent hierarchical structures from folksonomies have had limited success. We explore wh...

Due to the tremendous enhancements in the capabilities of mobile devices in recent years and accessibility to higher bandwidth mobile internet, the use of online multimedia learning resources on mobile devices is increasingly becoming popular. Improvements in battery capacity have not matched the same advancements compared to other features of mobi...

The HumBox is a learning resource repository for the Humanities educational community in the UK. Over the last three years the challenge for HumBox has been to act as not only a shared library for its community, but also to change the working practices of individuals in that community by encouraging them to work in a more open way and to actively s...

Social Media and Web 2.0 tools have dramatically increased the amount of previously private data that users share on the Web; now with the advent of GPS-enabled smartphones users are also actively sharing their location data through a variety of applications and services. Existing research has explored people's privacy attitudes, and shown that the...

With the growing ubiquity of mobile devices, new ways of sensing context and the emergence of the mobile Web, digital storytelling is escaping the confines of the desktop and intertwinging in new and interesting ways with the physical world. Mobile, location aware, narrative systems are being applied to a range of areas including tour guides, educa...

Human-Computer Interaction and Web Science are radically interdisciplinary fields, but what does this mean in practical terms? Undertaking research (and writing papers) that encompass multiple disciplinary perspectives and methods is a serious challenge and it is difficult to maintain conferences that fairly review and host contributions from multi...

Open Educational Resources (OERs) depend on being hosted in repositories so that they can be effectively viewed, managed, searched and indexed online. Content – especially multimedia content – that is not hosted in this way has no metadata and is effectively dark to the wider community. Similarly content that is not described properly, and with app...

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 pr...

The current advancements in mobile and communication technologies provide mobile users with unprecedented possibilities to learn on the move. The diversity in the capabilities of mobile devices as well as needs of mobile learners have, however, created many challenges for learning resource providers. To cope with these diversity problems, many cont...

The ACM Hypertext conference has a rich history of challenging the node-link hegemony of the web. At Hypertext 2011 Pisarski [12] suggested that to refocus on nodes in hypertext might unlock a new poetics, and at Hypertext 2001 Bernstein [3] lamented the lack of strange hypertexts: playful tools that experiment with hypertext structure and form. As...

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 na...

This special issue reports on the latest developments on the use of semantic technologies to support learning, especially in higher education and lifelong learning contexts. The Guest Editors then provide an overview of the technical articles presented in this issue.

Innovative services have exploited data about users’ physical location, sometimes but not always explicitly with their consent. As new applications that reveal users’ location data appear on the Web it essential to focus on the privacy implications, in particular with respect to inferences about context. This paper focuses on the understanding of l...

The current advancements in mobile and communication technologies provide mobile users with unprecedented possibilities to learn on the move. The diversity in the capabilities of mobile devices as well as needs of mobile learners have, however, created many challenges for learning resource providers. To cope with these diversity problems, many cont...

This paper discusses the development of a Web-based media annotation application named Synote, which addresses the important issue that while the whole of a multimedia resource on the Web can be easily bookmarked, searched, linked to and tagged, it is still difficult to search or associate notes or other resources with a certain part of a resource....

A major potential of agent technologies is the ability to support personalized learning. This is a trend where students are taking more control of their learning in the form of personal choice over topics, activities and tools. In this context, in previous work we presented a multiagent system based on an iterative voting protocol where student age...

The popularity of Resource Oriented and RESTful Web Services is increasing rapidly. In these, resources are key actors in the interfaces, in contrast to other approaches where services, messages or objects are. This distinctive feature necessitates a new approach for modelling RESTful interfaces providing a more intuitive mapping from model to impl...

Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) refer to systems that allow individual learners to manage and control their own learning in their own space and at their own pace. In previous work we have proposed a 4D model of informal learning to analyse the informal aspects of a learning experience. The model includes dimensions for learning objectives, th...

Location-based applications have recently begun to emerge on the Social Web. After their appearance numerous concerns with regards to location privacy have been provoked. However, these privacy concerns seem to have effects beyond location, as other contextual information can be inferred through location information. This research addresses these i...

Adaptive Hypermedia has sought to tackle the problems of dealing with complex, heavily structured information and the presentation of views of that structure to users. Increasingly, adaptive content is achieved through different forms of context. Using two case study applications we will reflect on how Augmented Reality may present solutions to a...

HumBox is a community repository for humanities-focused resources. It was created using a co-design process that revealed that for the repository to successfully support a community its users needed to have an identity in the repository, control of their own resources and lightweight communication tools. Now that HumBox has been running for over tw...

Location-based applications have recently begun to emerge on the Social Web. After their appearance numerous concerns with regards to location privacy have been provoked. However, these privacy concerns seem to have effects beyond location, as other contextual information can be inferred through location information. This research addresses these i...

Agents are autonomous software components that work with one another in a decentralized fashion to achieve some end. Agent systems have been used in Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) before, but these applications seldom take advantage of the fact that each agent may have its own goals and strategies, which makes agent systems an attractive way of...

As Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) systems become more essential to education there is an increasing need for their creators to reduce risk and to design for success. We argue that by taking an ergonomic perspective it is possible to better understand why TEL systems succeed or fail, as it becomes possible to analyze how well they are aligned wi...

Digital library systems and other analytic or computational applications create documents and display screens in response to user queries “dynamically” or in “real time.” These “virtual documents” do not exist in advance, and thus hypermedia features (links, comments, and bookmark anchors) must be generated “just in time”—automatically and dynamica...

Agent technology is a good approach for solving a number of problems concerned with personalized learning. In personal learning contexts individual students are given an environment that takes into account of their needs, interests and aspirations, and this is intended to lead to an enhanced learning experience. The aim of this paper is to show how...

Over the last few years we have been working to reinvent Teaching and Learning Repositories learning from the best practices of Web 2.0. Over this time we have successfully deployed a number of innovative repositories, including Southampton University EdShare, The Language Box, The HumBox, Open University’s LORO and Worcester Learning Box. A key pa...

In this paper we explore the use of creative software engineering design methods, particularly for rebuilding experiences in new contexts. We present results from a comparative evaluation of three approaches (scenarios with personas, TAPT, and no formal method): these suggest that techniques such as brainstorming are helpful, while structure and fo...

A wide variety of systems could be considered `narrative systems', either directly working towards generating rich narratives or, more frequently, because they present or handle information in a narrative context. These narratives, generated or otherwise handled, may contain themes; an essential part of the subtext of narrative communicating import...

In this paper we explore the use of creative software engineering design methods, particularly for rebuilding experiences in new contexts. We present results from a comparative evaluation of three approaches (scenarios with personas, TAPT, and no formal method): these suggest that techniques such as brainstorming are helpful, while structure and fo...

It seems self-evident that life for teachers would be simplified if there existed a large corpus of relevant resources that was available for them to reuse and for inquisitive students to download. The learning object community has worked for the past decade and more to provide the necessary infrastructure, standards, and specifications to facilita...

Tags describing objects on the web are often treated as facts about a resource, whereas it is quite possible that they represent more subjective observations. Existing methods of term expansion expand terms based on dictionary de�nitions or statistical information on term occurrence. Here we propose the use of a thematic model for term expansion ba...

It is difficult to deeply understand Web-based interactions and people’s use of information online. This makes it difficult to capture existing web experiences so they can be recreated in other systems (for example, to help with accessibility) and to move real-world situations to the web while maintaining the essential elements of the original situ...

Web Science which is a new discipline that is concerned with the study of the Web and one's behavior on it is discussed. Web Science draws on a wide range of traditional disciplines (such as sociology, economics, and law) to understand, model, and predict the Web's impact on the lives and societies. The aim is to better guide new developments in bo...

Deploying semantic tools and services over a field of linked data could be a way to address many current challenges of higher education. The strengths of semantic technologies for learning and teaching, and their benefits for digital libraries, virtual communities, and e-learning, have been a major topic of discussion during recent years. Experts a...