Proceedings of the 2nd workshop on Narrative and hypertext

Welcome to Narrative and Hypertext 2012, the second such workshop to have been hosted at the ACM Hypertext conference. A range of papers were submitted covering a variety of relevant areas from narrative systems to digital expressions. In total eight papers were accepted into the proceedings and invited for presentation at the workshop itself. The narrative and hypertext workshop aims to provide an interdisciplinary forum to bring together individuals from the humanities and science communities to share research and discuss state-of-the-art research on narrative from both a technical and aesthetic perspective. NHT'12 follows on from the very successful narrative workshop event at HT2011 (the largest workshop in the conference) which kick-started a number of collaborations and subsequent meetings (for example, see the websites strangehypertext.org and fractalnarratives.org). This year's workshop will principally build upon these previous successes, and aims to consolidate this community. Narrative is a prevalent form of information common in our entertainment, communication, and understanding of the world and its events. By building better models of narrative along with methods for generation, adaption, and presentation we enable narrative systems to become more effective as well as improving our understanding of narrative structures. Narrative might also be used as a discursive representation of knowledge allowing for the capture of expert understanding. The potential for grander narratives to be formed from collections of information or discourse on the web (for example from social media) means that knowledge or identity might emerge from otherwise seemingly disparate sources. There is an increasingly growing community of researchers working on narrative systems, hypertext narratives, and machine readable narrative models for which this workshop seeks to act as a hub to review advances and events over the previous year, as well as looking forward to the coming year, and what the field can achieve. One of the crucial conclusions of the previous year was focused on the difficulty of connecting creatives with technologists, which as a topic forms the center point of this year's discussion, along with the effect of this issue on related projects and systems.