The hypertext ecosystem is inherently dynamic, with digital content continuously evolving and disappearing. Web archiving and digital libraries serve as crucial infrastructures for preserving hypertext structures, enabling scholarly research on the evolution of hyperlinked content, and supporting knowledge continuity across various domains. This workshop will explore cutting-edge approaches in web archiving and their intersection with hypertext research, emphasizing AI-driven preservation, user engagement with digital archives, decentralized archival systems, and ethical considerations. WADL 2025 will feature interactive sessions, hands-on demonstrations, and cross-disciplinary discussions that directly align with ACM Hypertext 2025 themes, including hypertext history, digital storytelling, automation, decentralized hypertext, and ethical concerns in web preservation.
The VR project Fulfilment, is a multi-year research project developed at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) in collaboration with the Anthropology Department at the University of Chicago. The project was enabled through a unique collaboration between anthropologists, designers, and other social scientists from several research institutions spanning the U.S., Europe and Asia with support from the National Science Foundation. This proposal is for a public exhibition of Fulfilment project in the CAVE2 VR Environment as part of the Demos and Exhibitions track during the for ACM Hypertext 2025 Conference. Project Fulfilment brings VR technology to the forefront of anthropological research to engage participants in guided first-hand observation of the hidden aspects of logistics and the behind-the-scenes effects of supply chain capitalism on ecology, labor and socio-economic wellbeing. This immersive experience unfolds the increasingly pervasive yet often obscured ways in which the infrastructural and operative dimensions of commercial logistics are reshaping the way we work, live and relate to each other and to our environments. Participants enter a virtual narrative environment by initially selecting an object of “fulfillment” from a 3D user interface of everyday consumer items—such as a teddy bear, stationery, or a healthcare product. The selection of the item serves as an entry point into a deeper exploration of the hidden costs and consequences of commercial logistics. Using a button-equipped wand in the immersive CAVE2 VR system, participants navigate through ten interconnected scenes—including a cityscape, data center, warehouse zones, modern cemetery, prairieland, and military ruins—each revealing layers of ecological, social, historical, and economic entanglements that shape global supply chains. Interactive objects embedded within each scene act like hyperlinks: when activated, they visually tear open the environment to expose new narratives and landscapes connected to the selected item, inviting participants to reflect on the often-invisible infrastructures and labor that sustain contemporary consumer worlds. This immersive system transforms data-driven insights from fieldwork and archival research into ethnographic spatial storytelling, giving multisensorial form to complex systems and fostering critical reflection on the ethics and impacts of global commerce. Through this project, we seek to illuminate the hidden dimensions of global supply chains and their entanglements with labor, consumption, and ecological systems. By leveraging the immersive power of virtual reality, Fulfilment expands the methodological toolkit of anthropological fieldwork and deepens public engagement with complex, often obscured, socio-technical infrastructures. The project also invites reflection on hypertext as a conceptual and navigational framework—encouraging viewers to explore how non-linear storytelling and associative connections can reshape the way we experience, interpret, and share immersive ethnographic knowledge. In doing so, it catalyzes interdisciplinary collaboration across anthropology, design, and science, while fostering multimodal pathways for educating scholars and engaging wider publics.
NHT is a continuing workshop series associated with the ACM Hypertext conference for over a decade. The workshop acts as forum of discussion for the narrative systems community within the wider audience of the Hypertext conference. The workshop runs both presentations from authors of accepted short research papers, and unstructured unconference sessions to provide a venue for important discussions of issues facing and opportunities for members of the narrative and hypertext community. This year the workshop aims to broaden the community again after two years of more focussed themes on mixed reality by encouraging discussions on the breadth of interdisciplinary hypertext narrative.
Large Language Model (LLM) dialogue is rapidly displacing the blue-link lists that once defined web navigation. While LLM with its fluent answers delights users, this shift affects readers' agency concealing the associative links and orienting cues that the hypertext community has spent eight decades refining. This paper asks: What must be reclaimed, and what new affordances are possible, when navigation is mediated by a conversational model? We revisit seminal systems from Bush's Memex to Intermedia and Storyspace to surface five core principles (associative linking, agency, information scent, non-linearity, maps) and trace how each is strained or obscured in single-pane chat. By framing the problem through human-data interaction, we articulate three design obligations-legibility, agency, and negotiability-and demonstrate how emerging techniques such as evidence cards, trail-map overlays, diversity sliders, and on-device tiny LLMs can move us towards reclaiming user agency in navigating the web. We then outline a research agenda that ranges from authoring grammars for LLM-mediated hypertexts to ethical navigation standards that curb bias and filter bubbles. Near-term tweaks are actionable today; longer-term questions chart a collaborative path for hypertext, HCI, and AI researchers. Combining classic hypertext insights with modern LLM capabilities, we aim to outline a road map for conversational interfaces that preserve critical reading and empower users to see (and steer) the trails behind every answer.
Engelbart’s proposal for “Augmenting Human Intellect” envisioned innovation in personal workstations, organizational management, and social organization in order to tackle society’s most intractable problems. Recent thinking about animal cognition and in the philosophy of the mind leads to intriguing speculation about the experience of augmentation. A large body of literature, seldom cited in this connection, explores the tensions between the Augmented and the Basic remnant.
