23rd August, 2006
This workshop follows on from the first successful NMCG event held at Hypertext 2005, Salzburg. NMGC aims to be a broad forum for researchers working with media that has a high level of structural arrangement, for example: narrative, music, rhetoric, cinema and games (structures that are effected by rules about the syntactic and semantic arrangement of content at a relatively high level of abstraction).
Media types, such as text, music and video, contain complex layers of structure and meaning, and this is also true of dynamic constructs such as games. In classical rhetoric we might use the word Dispositio to describe this multi-layered, high-level structural organisation. Other terms include Form, Syntax or Arrangement.
This high-level view is important for automatic generation of media (for example, to build narrative or to construct a rhetoric), but they are also important in hypertext navigation as links could impact on their effectiveness, or change their shape entirely.
The research community is still exploring the ways in which authoring and viewing applications might support dispositio like structural arrangement and expose it in some meaningful way so that it can be explicitly authored, used or reasoned about. While the media and the form varies, the methods are often common; such as the use of schemas, logic-rules or semantic annotation.
This workshop aims at being a unified forum where people researching computer support of dispositio/structural arrangement, whatever the type, can discuss and contrast their approaches. As such it will be based around Papers and Discussion. The Papers will be reviewed by a small workshop committee and be made available through the ACM Digital Library.
The Call for Participation is available as a text file.
The important dates are:
The workshop agenda and position papers will be made available once the final papers have been accepted. All papers will be made available prior to the workshop so that participants can familiarise themselves with the relevant ideas. Each participant is also asked to provide a set of questions or topics that seemed most urgent for discussion after having read the papers. The organizers will cluster these questions and take the results as corner stones for the discussion during the workshop. One of the focuses of discussion is to identify topics for future work in the area, and identify possible opportunities for collaboration. The workshop is also intended to be fun!
The workshop will take place on the 23rd August 2006, alongside the ACM Hypertext Conference in Odense, Denmark. We will put further location details here when they become available.
The papers will be published as workshop proceedings in the ACM digital library.
David Millard is a Lecturer in the Intelligence Agents Multimedia and Learning Technology groups at the University of Southampton in the UK. He has a background in contextual/adaptive open hypermedia, and mobile and ubiquitous information systems. He is interested in narrative as a human-to-computer knowledge interface.
Frank Nack is senior researcher at V2_ Institute for the Unstable Media in Rotterdam and member of the Semantic Media Interfaces Theme at the Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica (CWI)in Amsterdam. His Research Interests include Interactive Storytelling, AI and film (semantics, semiotics, perception) and automated video editing
David Millard
Department of Electronics & Computer Science,
University of Southampton,
Highfield, Southampton,
SO17 1BJ, UK
dem@ecs.soton.ac.uk