The ACM Hypertext & Social Media Conference is one of the oldest annual academic events dedicated to the connections between information systems and the humanities, literature and the art of storytelling in the digital medium. In 2024, the Faculty of Polish and Classical Philology is the host of the conference, and it will be held from 10 to 13 September at the Collegium Maius in Poznań.
ACM stands for 'Association for Computing Machinery' and refers to one of the oldest computer science associations in the globe. Hypertext, on the other hand, is a technology that allows statements, documents and databases to be created, viewed and linked together in a non-linear and adaptive way. As such, hypertext is considered a deep structure and paradigm of contemporary digital communication. In the context of literary studies, reflection on hypertext includes issues such as interactive storytelling, narrative in computer games, digital editions of literary classics, extended scholarly publishing, collaborative work, issues of animated digital poetry, etc.
The history of the ACM Hypertext conference dates back to the early 1980s. The first Hypertext conference was organised in 1987. It was at this event, in addition to presentations of classic hypertext systems such as Xanadu, Intermedia, and NLS Augment, that the young writer Michael Joyce demonstrated the original version of his acclaimed novel An Afternoon, a Certain Story. It was also at the ACM Hypertext-related conference held a few years later in Paris that Tim Berners-Lee presented a prototype of the World Wide Web. Today's ACM Hypertext conferences continue this legacy, focusing on the one hand on innovations in the development of hypertext systems and structures, user interfaces in the latest technological contexts, and on the other hand, exploring the history and evolution of digital communication and the art of storytelling in the digital space.
Each year, innovations related to technology, human-computer interaction and the scientific and practical aspects of hypermedia systems design and analysis are presented.