Call for Papers

HT’23 is open to a range of submission formats, from long and short papers to demos and artworks to panels, posters, tutorials and workshops (see Call for Workshops & Tutorials). We aim to reflect the diversity of practices embraced by different communities and welcome submissions that reflect approaches such as (but not limited to):

  • Computational methods, such as Algorithms & Models powering hypertext systems or supporting their study, management, and analysis of related practices
  • Case Studies & Applications on specific systems, platforms, or communities and Systems & Workflows for, e.g., authoring and publishing, digital curation, e-learning, or social reading
  • Artworks, Traversals, & Demos showcasing novel concepts or ideas about the use of new media in art and creative works
  • Visions & Theories about the role and future of hypertext and web systems in society

All accepted contributions will be published by ACM and will be available in the Proceedings via the ACM Digital Library in the format in which they are submitted (e.g., long paper, short paper, extended abstract). To be included in the Proceedings, at least one author of each accepted paper must register for the conference and present the paper there. Selected contributions will be invited to submit an expanded version after the conference to a special issue of the New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia.

Submit a proposal on EasyChair.

Important Dates

  • Workshops
    • Submission: 31 March 2023 AOE
    • Notification: 7 April 2023
  • Regular papers
    • Submission: 31 March 2023 AOE 21 April 2023 AOE
    • Notification: 15 May 2023 31 May 2023 AOE
  • Late breaking, blue sky, demos, traversals, and doctoral consortium
    • Submission: 26 May 2023 AOE 9 June 2023 AOE
    • Notification: 26 June 2023
  • Student travel awards
    • Submission: 30 June 2023 AOE
    • Notification: 7 July 2023
  • Camera ready
    • Submission: 23 July 2023 AOE
  • Registration
    • Early bird rate: 4 Aug 2023 AOE
    • Regular rates until 1 September 2023 AOE

Tracks

Late breaking, blue sky, demos, traversals and doctoral consortium

Track chairs: Dr Alessio Antonini (The Open University, UK), Dr Elisa Bastianello (Bibliotheca Hertziana, Rome), Dr Francesca Benatti (The Open University, UK), Dr Sam Brooker (University of the Arts London, UK), Dr Mariusz Pisarski (University of Information Technology and Management in Rzeszow, PL)

The Late breaking, blue sky, demos, traversals, and doctoral consortium  track welcomes submissions of original and unpublished ideas that are still in the early stages of research (work-in-progress). We encourage researchers and practitioners to use this track as a valuable opportunity to receive useful feedback on early-stage work and foster discussions and collaborations among colleagues. We look forward to receiving:

  • Innovative research plans and preliminary results;
  • System prototypes addressing the theory and practice of topics relevant to the hypertext community;
  • Essays introducing recently started research projects or summarising project results.
Demos

The demonstrations are an essential and exciting complement to the overall conference program. These are a great way to show implementations of novel, engaging, and crucial concepts or systems related to hypertext interest areas and receive some helpful feedback from the community.

Note: that all submissions should be intended to convey a scientifically founded result or work in progress and not as advertisements for commercial software packages.

Blue Sky papers

We also invite submissions with an emphasis on visionary ideas, long-term challenges, and new research opportunities. Here we want to overcome the constraints of the traditional review process by incubating innovative approaches, risky and provocative ideas, and propose challenges and opportunities in the near future. We are particularly excited about ideas that address the conference theme of “The Humanity within.”

Submission guidelines

Submissions to this track should follow the same formatting guidelines as submissions to the research track but are limited to the short paper format (3-6 pages maximum references excluded) or the poster/demo format (2 pages maximum references excluded). Accepted papers will be published in the conference proceedings and presented at the conference. See the Submission and Review Process section below for links to the appropriate ACM publications templates.

Submit a proposal on EasyChair.

All submissions and reviews will be handled electronically.

Interactive Media: Art and Design

Track chair Dr Sam Brooker (University of the Arts London, UK)

This track is dedicated to papers that explore creative expression through digital technology. Submissions may showcase new approaches to – or applications of – interactive media technology for creative expression, or evaluate existing work from a new perspective. Hybrid presentations that mix theory and practice are welcome, though work should be rooted in hypertext as method or approach.
Topics include but not limited to:  

  • Demonstrations: Live exhibition or exploration of a new or existing creative work.
  • Critical analysis: Reflection on or discussion of pre-existing works or theoretical approaches.
  • Traversals: Demonstrations performed on historically appropriate platforms, with participation and commentary by the authors of the works.
  • Interdisciplinary creative work: Evaluation or demonstration of creative work that crosses disciplinary boundaries

Authoring, Reading, Publishing

Track chair Dr Leah Henrickson (University of Leeds, UK)

This track is dedicated to exploring how hypertext has transformed authoring, reading, and publishing by disrupting, subverting, or complementing book and media culture and practice. Submissions may focus on specific case studies or theories of new emerging practices, rhetorical analyses, or methodological reflections that take inspiration from fields such as book history, digital humanities and/or media studies.

Topics include, but not limited to:

  • Authorship: Contextualising the production of hypertexts.
  • Book history: Historically-informed frameworks, theories, and concepts for understanding hypertextual production, dissemination, and reception.
  • Digital scholarly editions and adaptations: Hypertextual representations and reconceptualisations of extant texts.
  • Digital storytelling and electronic literature: How hypertexts are used to communicate ideas and facilitate alternative textual experiences.
  • Reading practices and reader response: How hypertexts are read (or not read) and interpreted.
  • Rhetorics and poetics: How hypertexts are framed in popular and scholarly discourse, as well as theoretical considerations on forms of expression supported by hypertextual formats.
  • Text, paratext, and multimodality: Manifestations and effects of digital forms of intra- and intertextual connectivity.,

Workflows and Infrastructures

Track chair Dr Davide Picca (Université de Lausanne, CH)

This track is dedicated to hypertext systems and their professional applications to the GLAM field  in order to facilitate access to cultural knowledge. The main purpose is to illustrate through the different contributions to the track, how STEM disciplines can help and support the preservation and dissemination of tangible and intangible cultural resources. This track welcomes contributions that present real-world applications of hypertext systems, with a focus on the benefits, challenges, and gaps that emerge from daily practice in fields of study such as (but not limited to) Digital Museology, Intangible Cultural Heritage applications and NLP approaches to cultural resources. 

Topics include, but not limited to: 

  • Semantic knowledge: How formal ontologies and formal modelling can contribute to organise cultural knowledge
  • GLAM applications: Pipelines and digital curations for restoration and preservation of cultural artefacts
  • Digital Museology: Innovations, trends as well as practical challenges encountered  in the fields of museology
  • Intangible Cultural Heritage applications: How Big Data workflows and digital transformation methods can be applied to cultural objects
  • NLP approaches to cultural resources: Computational semantics and pragmatics, machine translation and multilingual NLP for cultural objects

Social and Intelligent Media

Track chair Dr Grégoire Burel (Knowledge Media Institute, UK)

The social and intelligent media track is dedicated to the understanding and modelling of sociotechnical systems and their role in shaping communication and information access, both virtually and offline. Submissions should consider any online systems that include socially and AI-mediated information such as social networks, recommender systems, online publication tools and discussion platforms. As the focus of this year conference is “Humanity within”, authors are encouraged to submit interdisciplinary articles centred around the impact of social media and AI on how hyperlinked content is accessed and consumed and its impact on Humanity. This track welcomes submissions that further the understanding of the technical inworkings of digital communities and their societal impact, as well as novel methods and algorithms that shape online communication, content creation and socially-mediated information access. 

Topics include, but not limited to:

  • Privacy and Anonymity in Social Media – The way social media protect and/or blur the lines between the real and virtual world.
  • Inclusiveness of Social Media – The role of social media in including minorities, disabilities and minoritised communities. 
  • Diversity and Representativeness of Social Media – The way social media favour (or not) content diversity and its representativeness as well as the involvement of individuals (e.g., echo chambers, content moderation).
  • Immersive Social Media (e.g., metaverse) – The development and impact of new interaction paradigms on real-world interactions and online communication. 
  • Network Effects in Social Media – The impact of social and hyperlink ties on content access and distribution e.g., information access, ranking, misinformation and bot networks).
  • Social Media Algorithms – The structure, development, design, and analysis of social media platforms and algorithms.

Reflections and Approaches

Track chair Dr Mariusz Pisarski (University of Information Technology and Management in Rzeszow, PL)

This track considers how hypertext has transformed society and its tools: new perspectives, future directions, and ongoing transformations that challenge our assumptions about hypertext. This track welcomes submissions focused on (but not limited to) critical reflection on the evolution of hypertext systems, paradigms for new hypertext applications, as well as theories for understanding and navigating the complexity of digital communities enabled by hypertext design and systems. 

Topics include, but not limited to:

  • Histories of hypertext: hypertext systems in critical discourse, technology discourse and in the arts community.
  • Histories of social media: how the pioneering formulas of early systems – such as BBS, MUD and email discussion groups –  evolved to modern social media.
  • Designs, paradigms and theories: evolution of hypertext in scholarly and artistic practice 
  • Self-reflectivity of systems: historical impact of one hypertext system upon another; remediations, migrations and borrowings of features in contemporary writing/reading platforms
  • Visual histories and meta-histories of social media and hypertext: hypertext and social media communities and ideas in visual and big-data analysis.

Submission and Review Process

Submit a proposal on EasyChair.

All submissions and reviews will be handled electronically.

Content expectations

Reviewers will evaluate papers based on their relevance to the 2023 conference theme “The Humanity Within”. For submissions that focus on computer science, papers should emphasise the human implications, factors, assumptions behind the technology. For submissions that focus on a Humanities perspective, papers should include recommendations, lessons learned and wider significance beyond a single case study. Both types of submissions should include how it can benefit others in the community at large.

Additionally, submission will be evaluated based on their significance, originality, rigour, and contribution to the field. Papers that are out of scope, incomplete, or lack sufficient evidence to support the basic claims, may be rejected without full review.

Papers should report on original and substantial contributions of lasting value. Evaluations of proposed solutions/applications must be commensurate with the claims made in the paper.

Research procedures and technical methods should be presented in sufficient detail to ensure scrutiny and reproducibility. We recognize that user data may be proprietary or confidential, but we encourage the sharing of (anonymized, cleaned) data sets, data collection procedures, and code. 

Results should be clearly communicated and implications of the contributions/findings for the Hypertext community and beyond should be explicitly discussed. A discussion of the ethical considerations behind / implications of the presented work and/or its intended application is expected where appropriate. This includes an acknowledgment of ethical considerations for papers that include human-subjects research.

Length and formatting

The conference accepts different length requirements which differ by track and type of contribution.

The Workflows and Infrastructures & Social and Intelligent Media tracks accept the following formats:

  • Full papers (6 to 12 pages maximum references excluded)
  • Short papers (3 to 6 pages maximum references excluded)
  • Poster / Demo (2 pages maximum references excluded)

The Authoring, Reading, Publishing & Interactive Media: Art and Design tracks accept the following formats:

  • Long presentations (20 minutes)
  • Short presentations (10 minutes)
  • Panels (90 minutes)
  • Poster

The submission can be as follows:

  • Extended abstract (2-4 pages)
  • Proceedings-ready paper
    • Long presentation (6 to 12 pages maximum references excluded)
    • Short presentation (3 to 6 pages maximum references excluded)

The Reflections and Approaches track accepts all the above formats.

The submission of Tutorials, Training & Workshops should include the following information:

  • Title of the workshop and suggested acronym
  • Keywords (describing the main themes)
  • Abstract
  • Description of the workshop (topics and goals)
  • Relevance of the workshop to Hypertext
  • Motivation (why the topic is of interest for the conference audience)
  • Workshop and submission formats
    • Modality (hybrid, fully online or fully in-presence)
    • Length (half day or full day—in this case, motivation for the need of a full day)
    • Submissions format (position papers, research papers, demo, poster, presentations, …) and, for each type of submission, specify the features (length of the papers, template, etc.)
  • Previous editions of the workshop series, if applicable (URLs, conference it was co-located with, number of registrants, number of submissions, number of accepted papers, and any other relevant information)
  • Any plan for further publication (e.g. special issue in journals)
  • Initial list of (potential) members of the program committee
  • Workshop organizers’ bios (1-2 paragraphs per organizer)
  • Expected number of participants

Submissions for all tracks should be using the template indicated below (new ACM single-column format). We encourage papers of any length up to 12 pages; reviewers will be asked to comment on whether the length is appropriate for the contribution. Shorter papers should generally report on advances that can be described, set into context, and evaluated concisely; they are not “work-in-progress” reports but rather complete reports on a smaller or simpler-to-describe but complete research work. Longer papers should reflect more complex innovations or studies and should have a thorough discussion of related work. Appendices count toward the page limit—we recommend that supplementary material is linked to an external source using an anonymized URL. 

Each accepted paper will be included in the conference proceedings and presented at the conference. 

Papers must be formatted as a single-column manuscript according to the new workflow for ACM publications. The templates and instructions are available here: https://www.acm.org/publications/taps/word-template-workflow.

Available templates include:

Note: Accepted papers will be subject to a further revision to meet the requirements of camera-ready format required by ACM. We strongly recommend the usage of LaTeX/Overleaf for the camera-ready papers to minimize the extent of reformatting. Users of the Word template must use a recent version Microsoft Word(Windows: Word 2007 or above, Mac: Word 2011 or above; other formats such as Open Office, etc., are not admitted) for the camera-ready submission to avoid incompatibility issues. Instructions for the preparation of the camera-ready versions of accepted papers will be provided after acceptance. This might include instructions to prepare a video of the accepted contribution.

Authors are strongly encouraged to provide “alt text” (alternative text) for floats (images, tables, etc.) in their content so that readers with disabilities can be given descriptive information for these floats that are important to the work. The descriptive text will be displayed in place of a float if the float cannot be loaded. This benefits the author as well as it broadens the reader base for the author’s work. Moreover, the alt text provides in-depth float descriptions to search engine crawlers, which helps to properly index these floats. Additionally, authors should follow the ACM Accessibility Recommendations for Publishing in Color and SIG ACCESS guidelines on describing figures.

Should you have any questions or issues going through the instructions above, please contact support at acmtexsupport@aptaracorp.com for both LaTeX and Microsoft Word inquiries.

Accepted papers will be later submitted to ACM’s new production platform where authors will be able to review PDF and HTML output formats before publication. Extended versions of selected papers presented at the conference could be selected to appear in different special issues in international journals according to the specific tracks (see the below for details).

HT uses a double blind review process. Authors must omit their names and affiliations from submissions, and avoid obvious identifying statements. For instance, citations to the authors’ own prior work should be made in the third person. Failure to anonymize your submission results in the desk-rejection of your paper.

Ethical Review and Human-Subjects Research Considerations

HT’23 expects papers to include a discussion of the ethical considerations behind / implications of the presented work and/or its intended application where appropriate. HT’23 further expects all authors to comply with ethical standards and regulatory guidelines associated with human subjects research, including research involving human participants and research using personally identifiable data. Papers reporting on such human subjects research must include a statement identifying any regulatory review the research is subject to (and identifying the form of approval provided), or explaining the lack of required review. 

The ACM Code of Ethics gives the HT’23 program committee the right to (desk-)reject papers that perpetuate harmful stereotypes, employ unethical research practices, or uncritically present outcomes/implications that clearly disadvantage minoritized communities. Reviewers will be asked to consider whether the research was conducted in compliance with professional ethical standards and applicable regulatory guidelines.