Extremely short Hypertext 98 trip report
Date: Fri, 26 Jun 1998 10:18:51 +0200
By: Lynda Hardman


Lynda, Lloyd and Jacco attended ACM Hypertext 98 in Pittsburg, 20-24 June
1998.

I had a great time at Hypertext 98.  Lloyd and Jacco had fun too. Lloyd is
continuing on at Digital Libraries as I type and Jacco should be enjoying
himself on holiday.

Our participation in the conference was:

Workshop on Open Hypermedia Systems - Jacco and Lloyd
     Having chatted to Jacco and Lloyd it seems that our group can play a
     role in communicating between the hypertext community and the W3C.
     Steve DeRose is the W3C chair of the XLink working group and has
     already chatted to Jacco/Lloyd about participating. 

Tutorial on public standards and tools.... - Lloyd
     Attendees were sparse, but keen...

Tutorial on SMIL - Lynda
     I had a "full" tutorial - 9 participants.
     Of which 4 or 5 seemed interested and understood what I was talking
     about. Two seemed to actually be thinking about using it.
     One asked for the player (he'll mail me) and authoring system. 
 
Demo on SMIL/GRiNS - Lloyd, Jacco, Lynda
     Lots of interest.  It didn't help that the list of demos was still at
     the printers when the demos started.  But people came round to see
     what we were doing.

Panel on "Time" - Lynda
    The best panel of the conference (says she modestly...).
    (Jacco's opinion was best panel he'd ever been to...)
    A techie and literati view of time.
    Maja should have been there.
    Nitin Sawhney was also on the panel.
    He's coming to visit on July 10th - and if we can organise it, also
    give a talk.

as well as just being interesting people to talk to....
(A number of people were aware of SMIL already.)


There are 3 things I want to follow up after the conference:

(1) the OHS/W3C connection.
    This should involve Lloyd/Jacco going to visit the Southampton mafia in 
    October or so.
    
(2) read up the work I'm interested on in generating presentations in some
    automatic fashion (including an invite to talk in Manchester)

(3) get more into the "literati" side.  This has been mostly text based
    until recently. Nitin gave a paper (demo?) in Hypertext 96 on
    HyperCafe (I have a copy of the CD if you are interested), and another 
    creative work called "Califia" was shown.  (Mainly text-based with use
    of images and sound.)
    What I'd really like to do is have a regular "criticism" hour, where
    one of us presents a creative work to the rest of us and we can chat
    about it.  (Say once every two weeks.)
    If we can start this up in August.....
    
("our 4 main weapons")
(4) Keep in touch with Marjorie (creator of Califia) and try to organise a
    joint techie/literati workshop at Hypertext 99.
    (Maja - can you make it to Darmstadt?? If we can also get Nitin
    involved.... )

("among our weapons")
(5) In order to justify travel funding to Darmstadt (in February - groan)
    we need to write stuff before Oct 1st.
    Both Lloyd and I have ideas....
    

     Lynda