Workshops

HUMAN – Human Factors in Hypertext

The HUMAN workshop has a strong focus on the user and thus complements the strong machine analytics research direction represented at previous conferences. This user-centric perspective on hypertext extends beyond user interfaces and interaction to include discussions of hypertext application domains as well as human-centred AI. Furthermore, the workshop explores how original hypertext visions, such as Douglas Engelbart’s “augmenting human intellect” and Frank Halasz’s “hypertext as a medium for thinking and communication”, can inform and improve today’s hypertext systems. Now taking place for the ninth time at the ACM Hypertext Conference, the workshop continues to provide a venue for interdisciplinary discussion on the human aspects of hypertext research.

Organisers

HTKG26 – Knowledge Graphs and Hypertext

Hypertexts combine rich knowledge structures with ways of exploring them. Recently, knowledge graphs have emerged as a popular framework for knowledge representation. Knowledge graphs and related structured knowledge representations have been developed across many domains, ranging from digital humanities to scientific research and, more broadly, from Wikidata to the Google Knowledge Graph. This workshop will consider how knowledge graphs and related structured knowledge corpora can be matched with different types of user interaction. Hypertext offers a variety of modes for interacting with structured content such as argumentation and issue-based information systems, guided tours, and adaptive personalization. The workshop will consider how different modes of interaction can be applied to various domains, and conversely, how the knowledge structures need to be extended to support these modes. In addition, there are many open questions to be examined, such as extensions to ontologies, capturing the evolution of knowledge, and the relationship to LLMs.

Organiser

MULTIVERSE – The Media Multiverse as Hypertext: A Speculative Design Workshop to Explore Communication within Future Mediascape

Today’s mediatic spaces continue to fragment across platforms and virtual worlds. Consequently, we envision the future mediascape not as a single, unified Metaverse, but rather as a pluralistic and diverse “Media Multiverse.” This multiverse constitutes a hypertextual space that can be understood both as a network of interconnected digital environments and as an intertextual space shaped by processes of translation, adaptation, and reinterpretation.

This speculative design workshop invites researchers and practitioners to explore how this emerging multiverse may be reshaped through communication across primary reality and multiple mediated “alternative” realities, including AR, XR, VR, and digital virtual worlds. Participants will develop and critically examine sociotechnical imaginaries of communication by constructing personas, envisioning communication scenarios across realities, and creating speculative artifacts in various textual formats through bodystorming and fictional writing.

Overall, the workshop aims to generate counter-narratives to singular and generic visions of future media while opening new questions about hypertextuality, communication, and processes of translation between different realities.

Organisers

NHT – Narrative and Hypertext

Narrative Innovations and New Hypertext Frontiers: How are new technologies, such as generative AI, changing how we tell stories with Hypertext.

NHT is a long-running workshop series that has been associated with the ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media for more than a decade. The workshop serves as a forum for discussion within the narrative systems community and engages with the broader audience of the Hypertext conference. While the workshop has traditionally included proceedings with short paper submissions, this year’s edition places a stronger emphasis on participation, discussion, and debate by inviting 500-word extended abstracts for talks and panels.

The workshop theme explores how generative AI is transforming narrative hypertext, while also welcoming contributions addressing the impact of other emerging technological frontiers.

Organisers

SUNRISE – Hypertext and Security

SUNRISE 2026 is a platform for interdisciplinary discussion at the intersection of hypertext theory and security. Hypertext research did not emerge in a vacuum: Vannevar Bush’s 1945 vision of the Memex arose directly from his role in coordinating the U.S. wartime scientific effort, including the Manhattan Project, and from his conviction that networked, associative information systems were essential for managing the complexity of modern conflict. The ARPANET likewise began as a defence initiative before becoming public infrastructure. Security, in other words, was not a later concern grafted onto hypertext; it was present at its origin.

Today, this awareness has become increasingly urgent. In an era shaped by information warfare, hybrid operations, and fundamental transformations in the nature of conflict – from conventional weapons systems to drone warfare and remotely coordinated strikes – the structural properties of hypertext, including linking, navigation, provenance, and composition, have become both instruments of attack and potential frameworks for defence.

This year’s ACM Hypertext theme, “hypertext as a method,” creates an opportunity to address security questions within a framework where media philosophy, semiotics, and social analysis intersect with the technical realities of threat detection, information security, and networked content protection.

Hypertext as a method enables inquiry into security from navigational, spatial, and compositional perspectives. Phishing and link manipulation can be understood as pathologies of navigational structure, while algorithmic amplification of disinformation exploits the associative logic of spatial hypertext. Similarly, the crisis of content provenance reflects a broader crisis of compositional authority, further intensified by the large-scale AI-driven production of text. The SUNRISE workshop advances the methodological claim that security belongs within hypertext theory, where design philosophy and critical reflection intersect with the practical implementation of augmentation tools and hypertext systems.

Organisers