This workshop aims to provide an interdisciplinary forum to bring together individuals from the humanities and technological communities to share work and discuss state-of-the-art research on narrative from both a technical and aesthetic perspective. It follows on from the very successful narrative workshops at HT2011 (the largest workshop in the conference), HT2012 which kick-started a number of collaborations and subsequent meetings, and at HT2013 where several of these collaborations were consolidated into future research projects.

This year's workshop will principally build upon these previous successes, and aims to continue to consolidate this community by providing an open interdisciplinary forum of discussion on key issues facing the field.

Narrative is a prevalent form of information common in our entertainment and communications, and key to our understanding of the world and its events. By building better models of narrative along with methods for generation, adaption, and presentation we enable narrative systems to become more effective but also improve our understanding of narrative structures.

There is a growing community of researchers working on narrative systems, hypertext narratives, and machine readable narrative models, for which this workshop seeks to act as a hub to review advances and to discuss what the field might achieve in the coming year.

The hypertext conference has a history of publishing work related to narrative research ranging from explorations of criticism and the creation of digital narrative to authoring hypertext fiction and semantic narrative systems. This workshop aims to support this work by providing an open interdisciplinary forum of discussion on key issues facing the field.

The event is a full day workshop with planned sessions based around presentations of short paper submissions from attendees. As well as the planned sessions we plan to have some serendipitous sessions allowing for free discussion on topics of interest to those attending much like what is seen in 'unconference' events. Topics of interest for these sessions will be polled from the participants during coffee breaks at the beginning of the day and over lunch to allowing for serendipitous sessions late morning and at the end of the day. As well as free discussion these serendipitous sessions might include small relevant presentations and technical demos. This structure is based on the highly successful structure of previous workshops. Areas of discussion and relevant topics for the workshop include:

Researchers and practitioners working with hypertext or narrative are invited to attend this workshop. Participants are asked to submit a short (between 2 and 5 pages ACM format) position paper on their current work. Authors of papers selected for presentation will be informed 4 weeks after the submission deadline. All the position papers of participants will be made available on the workshop website.

As with last year the workshop will be split into planned and serendipitous sessions. The planned sessions will comprise of presentations of work from those with selected submitted papers with time for questions and discussion after each.

The serendipitous sessions will depend on the interests of the attendees of the workshop and will function in the style of an unconference. The preceding coffee break to each serendipitous session will allow participants to put forward suggestions for discussion topics, short presentations, or demos. The organizers will then select the most popular activities suggested as the focus for that session.

Papers should be in ACM format, be between 2 and 5 pages long and submitted as a PDF. The papers should be emailed no later than midnight GMT 12th June 2015 to Charlie Hargood at cah07r@ecs.soton.ac.uk. Submitted papers will be refereed and notification of acceptance sent out 4 weeks later. Accepted papers will be included alongside the ACM Hypertext conference proceedings in the ACM Digital Library, and author will have a week to prepare camera ready papers for submission after acceptance.

Notification of acceptance - 10th July 2015

Camera ready papers due - 17th July 2015

Workshop - 1st September 2015

you have any questions please feel free to contact the organizers:

Charlie Hargood: cah07r@ecs.soton.ac.uk

David Millard: dem@ecs.soton.ac.uk

Kate Drabinski, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Today, the news media will look over the aftermath of yesterday’s uprising in Baltimore and take stock of the burned remains of cars and storefronts. Reporters will also see the shells of 46,000 empty lots and vacant homes lining the neighborhoods that were riven by unrest.

However, the media and its audience must be careful not to think that the burned-out look of so much of the city is the result of this recent unrest, or even of the uprisings of 1968, which followed the assassination of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.

Baltimore’s blight is the result of decades of disinvestment, from theblockbusting and white flight of the 1950s, the urban renewal policies of the 1960s, and the evacuation of the largely poor and black neighborhoods of East Baltimore to make way for the expansion of Johns Hopkins University taking place today. Development has long been uneven in Baltimore, and black folks and their neighborhoods have consistently been left out of that development.

What we are seeing today could only have occurred against this backdrop of planned uneven development. One of the dangers of seeing the riot as an event is precisely this danger of losing historical perspective about the ways the neighborhoods burning on television are the very ones that have been cut off from the growth of the city’s downtown core.

When asking what can be done, it is important to get to the root, to ask and see how these neighborhoods have been constituted as the ones that will burn, figuratively and literally.

Arlene Barrow is a Gender and Women's Studies major with a 4.0 GPA, and she has been on both the Dean's List and the President's List each semester she has been at UMBC. She is a co-leader in Women Involved in Learning and Leadership (WILL), and she has helped organize various events on campus, including WILL's 2015 production of the Vagina Monologues. Arlene was also a Teaching Assistant for Brigid Starkey's Introduction to Global Studies course in her junior year. She is planning on taking a year off, and then she will seek to enter graduate school in the fall of 2016. Arlene received the Jo Ann E. Argersinger Academic Achievement Award in GWST.

Amelia Meman is a Gender + Women's Studies major and a Writing minor. She has been a co-leader with Women Involved in Learning and Leadership (WILL) for two years and in this time has put on programs ranging from educational panels on social justice issues like prison and gender, advocacy campaigns with Baltimore-based non-profits, and creative projects like WILL’s annual production of the Vagina Monologues. Amelia has also worked with the Women’s Center for two years, and is the founder of the Critical Social Justice (CSJ) initiative—an ongoing interdisciplinary campus-wide project that empowers the UMBC community to engage in social justice activism. Working towards sustaining this initiative, Amelia has recently created the CSJ Student Alliance where UMBC students are encouraged to coalesce and work on a variety of projects involving direct action, advocacy, and/or education. Retaining a 4.0 GPA throughout her time with UMBC, Amelia is a member of the Honors College, will be presenting her research on feminist epistemology and belonging at Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievement Day (URCAD) this year, and will be inducted into the honor society of Phi Beta Kappa this May. Outside of school, Amelia is a co-chair on the National Women’s Studies Association’s (NWSA) Undergraduate Research Caucus, and has recently submitted her first conference session proposal. After graduating, Amelia will work with community organizations and apply to graduate school programs that focus on gender and ethnic studies, philosophy, and writing. Amelia received the Jo Ann E. Argersinger Academic Achievement Award in GWST.

Ashley Sweet is a Social Work and Gender and Women's Studies dual major with a 4.0 GPA. She is a co-leader in Women Involved in Learning and Leadership and member of Golden Key International, Sigma Alpha Lambda, Phi Alpha, and Phi Kappa Phi Honors Societies. She has organized student activism projects for body positivity, pay equity, and street harassment awareness, presented on the Healthy Masculinities Campus Conversation panel, and co-directed a production of the Vagina Monologues. Ashley is a mother of two boys and currently a Newcombe Scholar as a returning woman student. Ashley has been accepted to the Advanced Standing program for the Master’s program at the University Of Maryland School Of Social Work. Ashley received the Jo Ann E. Argersinger Academic Achievement Award in GWST.

Juliette Seymour graduated in December 2014 with a double major in Gender and Women's Studies and Media and Communications as well as a minor in Critical Sexuality Studies. During her time at UMBC, Juliette was involved in the activism and feminist community on campus. She acted as Director of Public Relations for the Gender and Women's Studies Council of Majors and Minors along with being a member of Women Involved in Learning and Leadership. Juliette organized the 2013 Puppy Picnic at UMBC, which partnered with local animal rescue shelters to bring adoptable dogs to campus as an opportunity to provide stress relief to students during Finals week. She is currently working at Fleet Street Kitchen while deciding which path she wants to take for her next journey. Juliette received the Joan S. Korenman Award for Service in GWST.