What is Hypertext Authoring?

Kitromili, Sofia; Jordan, James; Millard, David E.

doi:10.1145/3342220.3343653

Cited by 9 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 39 publications

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“…Codes were generated based on two areas of interest. The first set of codes reflected steps in the authoring process, this allowed us to validate the seven steps from [16] and explore whether authors referred to other steps not otherwise mentioned in the literature. The second set of codes were based on the issues that participants reported encountering while authoring.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In previous work we deconstructed the authoring process into its constituent parts [16] enabling us now to conduct a series of qualitative author interviews, and then inductively code and map them to the specific authoring processes that were identified. Our aim was to hear from Authors about the barriers they face and issues that most frustrate them, and locate where in the process those issues occur in order to help future tool builders mitigate and overcome the most common problems.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To help develop a greater understanding of the authoring process and what steps it might entail we previously undertook a systematic literature review of the academic work around authoring tools [16] analysing papers across three decades: starting with the first ACM Hypertext conference proceedings publication in 1987 and the first ICIDS conference proceedings publication in 2001. From these papers we were able to elicit a set of authoring processes that have been mentioned in the literature, identifying seven distinct activities.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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What Authors Think about Hypertext Authoring

Kitromili

Jordan

Millard

2020

Proceedings of the 31st ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media

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Despite significant research into authoring tools for interactive narratives and a number of established authoring platforms, there is still a lack of understanding around the authoring process itself, and the challenges that authors face when writing hypertext and other forms of interactive narratives. This has led to a monolithic view of authoring, which has hindered tool design, resulting in tools that can lack focus, or ignore important parts of the creative process. In order to understand how authors practise writing, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 20 interactive narrative authors. Using a qualitative analysis, we coded their comments to identify both processes and challenges, and then mapped these against each other in order to understand where issues occurred during the authoring process. In our previous work we were able to gather together a set of authoring steps that were relevant to interactive narratives through a review of the academic literature. Those steps were: Training/Support, Planning, Visualising/Structuring, Writing, Editing, and Compiling/Testing. In this work we discovered two additional authoring steps, Ideation and Publishing that had not been previously identified in our reviews of the academic literature-as these are practical concerns of authors that are invisible to researchers. For challenges we identified 18 codes under 5 themes, falling into 3 phases of development: Preproduction, where issues fall under User/Tool Misalignment and Documentation; Production, adding issues under Complexity and Programming Environment; and Post-production, replacing previous issues with longer term issues related to the narrative's Lifecycle. Our work shows that the authoring problem goes beyond the technical difficulties of using a system, rather it is rooted in the common misalignment between the authors' expectations and the tools capabilities, the fundamental tension between expressivity and complexity, and the invisibility of the edges of the process to researchers and tool builders. Our work suggests that a less monolithic view of authoring would allow designers to create more focused tools and address issues specifically at the places in which they occur.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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What Authors Think about Hypertext Authoring

Kitromili

Jordan

Millard

2020

Proceedings of the 31st ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media

Self Cite

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“…Within IDN, several authoring tools already exist that help authors create their narratives. Keonitz [15], Kritromili et al [14] and Shibolet et al [30] already provide an excellent overview on existing tools. Shibolet et al [30], analysed various authoring tools for IDNs and defined an authoring tool as digital software, where the tool should be an independent and comprehensive workspace and simplify the authoring process.…”

Section: Authoring and Toolsmentioning

confidence: 99%