HT

Welcome to the 27th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media, Hypertext 2016, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. The Hypertext conference series is concerned with all aspects of modern hypertext research, including social media, the user experience, the semantic web, adaptive hypertext and hypermedia, as well as narrative systems and applications.

The ACM Hypertext 2016 conference invited submissions in three main tracks: Collaboration in the Social Web; Narrative, Adaptation and Multimedia Storytelling; and User Experience and the Web. We also welcomed submissions in additional categories including the new Creative track, as well as to the well-established categories of late-breaking results and demonstrations, plus papers submitted to the satellite events, the workshops and the doctoral consortium.

Collaboration in the Social Web focuses on the analysis and exploration of links between topics, people and activities in social media and beyond, including social groupware, which integrates social media interaction into a structured collaboration process and adds various structure and computational support to social media. Such collaboration could be with the use of existing social media systems as a communication or collaboration platform, or with new systems, applications, methods, practices and tools that support communication and collaboration in the Social Web.

Through Narrative, Adaptation and Multimedia Storytelling, we acknowledge that hypertext and Web systems are fundamentally about communication between people, and that people are storytellers. The track covers a broad range of topics in New Media and digital storytelling, from both technological and human points of view. This area includes technologies to support content curation and creation, dynamic linking and navigation, as well as data analysis, interactive visualization and presentation, and novel forms of digital narratives. It also includes exploration of existing practices of online storytelling, plus new media artistry and writing, online reportage and journalism, applications of digital storytelling, and critical theory around online expression.

The track User Experience and the Web is a recognition that navigating through the abundance of information on the Web is a complex cognitive and interactive process involving several factors, many of which are not well-understood. The track focuses on interdisciplinary efforts from several disciplines, such as cognitive psychology, cognitive science, Web design, human-computer interaction, information science, artificial intelligence, machine learning and recognises that other aspects of computer science as well as hypertext are needed to make interaction with the Web as easy and effortless as possible.

We received 76 submissions, comprising 54 full papers, 18 short papers and 4 posters. Each submission was reviewed by at least three programme committee members, followed by a metareview by the track chairs, who recommended acceptance or rejection of the papers. In some cases, full paper submissions were accepted as short papers, and promising submissions that were not sufficiently mature have been accepted as posters. The final decisions were taken by the programme chairs, with the exception of submissions with one of the organizing team's members involved, which were handled separately by the remaining programme/general chairs. We accepted 16 regular papers, 23 short papers and 7 posters, which are included in the main proceedings. The Extended Proceedings contain a selection of submissions to the Creative track, late-breaking results, demonstrations, doctoral consortium papers and workshop papers. The conference will make two awards, these being the Douglas Engelbart Best Paper Award and the Ted Nelson Newcomer Award. Three candidates for each award have been selected by the chairs and the winners will be selected during the conference by an awards committee.

We are pleased to host two keynote speakers who beautifully complement our technical programme, with blogger Hossein Derakhshan providing a unique perspective on the changes in how people use social media, and Katy Börner from the Indiana University Bloomington with her remarkable scientific visualisation ideas.