Hypertext 2007
University of Manchester
Nick Lowe, Kieron O'Hara
David Millard, and Emily Short
organized by Clare Hooper & Nathan Matias

* Slide 1: History * Slide 2: Staging the Illiad-- according to Lowe, 5th century Greek Tragedy was less about concern with psychological effect than it was with expressing and understanding certain ideals of the Greek heroic tradition. Example: Aeschylus's trilogy-- the very first-- of the Illiad. * Slide 3: Aristotle's Poetics -- trying to come up with a metalanguage to describe storytelling, and using it on tragedy as a test case. Notice how the system is primarily defined in terms of how these techniques might articulate a particular band of the emotional frequency, rather than, for example, deliver any kind of ideology.

Kieron O'Hara ( presentation PDF ) * Shift in focus from tragic events to tragic condition * Decline of the supernatural * From the Gods to impersonal nature * The process of decline is less interesting * Tragedy becomes democratised * Tragedy becomes personal * Effects become localised * The end of the grand narrative * Potential for electronic forms of art/communication * Characters explore a space * Discover failures

David Millard (Presentation Flash) * Engineering systems for creative projects * A basic model of storytelling * Areas where generic software can provide systems for computer storytelling.

* Professor of Classics. Emily's research focuses on the relationship of ancient Greek religion to Greek Tragedy. * Author of numerous works of interactive fiction; she is a multiple, multiple winner of annual IF and XYZZY awards (works). * Works on the Inform IF authoring system. * Website

Emily Short (presentation PDF) * What interactive fiction is * What interactivity contributes to our experience of fiction * Some examples of IF with tragic elements * Lessons learned from critical response to this material * Potential strengths of interactive traged

J. Nathan Matias is a postgraduate at Cambridge University studying English Literature and has been bumblingly trying to understand topics in Hypertext and Electronic Literature since 2002. He was the recipient of the 2005 ACM SIGWEB Nelson Award and the author of this spatial hypertext user interface.

Clare Hooper is an Eng.D. student at the University of Southampton's ECS & IBM Hursley. She's part of the ECS Learning Societies Lab and is the creator of StorySpinner.