Workshops

The conference offered two workshops on the 19th of June before the start of the main conference. The purpose of the workshops was to provide a more informal setting where participants exchanged ideas on a focused topic. Our two topics, Web Science and Creating out of the Machine, demonstrate the breadth of the Hypertext community, and the wonderful way in which the subject touched on technical, social and artistic ground.

Workshop proceedings appear on the Hypertext '08 Proceedings CD and are available in the ACM digital library.

More details can be found on the individual workshop pages below:

• Web Science: Collaboration and Collective Intelligence
  Weigang Wang (University of Manchester, UK) and David Millard (University of Southampton, UK)
  
  

  Web Science is an emerging interdisciplinary field that lies at the boundary of Computer Science, Sociology, Psychology, Media, Economics and Law. Its aim is to understand the Web and its impact on the way people think, behave and interact. This workshop was for people who believe that their work could be part of this new discipline and who are interested in helping to define Web Science. We invited position papers on a variety of technical topics with a human slant, including Social Collaboration, Knowledge Interfaces, Collective Intelligence and Emergent Structures.

• Creating out of the Machine: Hypertext, Hypermedia, and Web Artists Explore the Craft
  Stephen Ersinghaus (Tunxis Community College, Connecticut, USA)
  
  People often wonder about the process behind the creation of exciting and complex works of digital narrative.  They may wonder about and want to engage the tools themselves.   This workshop was about how artists create, what decisions they make, and how ideas are realized and problems are solved.  It invited people actively engaged in the production of digital narrative to discuss their tools, methods, and decisions as they work through the creative process.  This workshop targeted students of digital narrative, artists seeking more involvement either with existing or emergent tools, educators looking for insight into the creative process as it is relevant to the creation of digital narrative, and system designers interested in exploring how the tools match the creative process. Presentations ranged from the conventional to the experimental.