ACM Hypertext 2024

Poznań, Poland, the 6th of September, 2024. Pouring rain in England, tranquil sun in Poland, a plane, a bus, stumbling over the railway bridge multiple times trying to work the GPS on my phone. I’m glad I gave myself a day to adjust before the INTR/HT Summer School started proper - you never know what to expect from a new place, and that goes double when it’s an entirely different country. I’m happy to say that I found the conference immensely rewarding.

Day 1: Welcome Dinner

The first “day” of the Summer School was an introductory dinner - meeting the organisers and other students in person, enjoying some excellent food, and preparing a little for the meat of the conference. I was a little anxious at this point, I’m quite nervous when meeting new people, especially when I don’t have any comfortable shoulders to cling to. My tensions were, luckily, relieved by finding out that everybody was lovely.

Day 2: Summer School

We held the Summer School-specific sessions in a tiny little room, just big enough to fit all of us. As an extremely recent graduate and somebody whose work has so far focused more on game studies, I was more than a little nervous. “If I managed to make a good impression at dinner, what if I mess it all up with a really underwhelming presentation?” was the thematic substance of the morning for me. I got through it, though, and so did everyone else!

There was a nice diversity of academic level and subject focus in the room, from Undergraduates up to PhD students, and it was interesting to get a brief glimpse at how many different directions there are to explore Hypertext. You can read as many papers as you want, but you don’t quite grasp the diversity of such a niche field until you’re seeing people present their side of it in front of you.

After presenting our work we were run through some topics relevant to the field and the conference, and participated in group discussion on a selection of papers. This selection of papers was chosen very well - there were seminal works, modern developments in Hypertext systems, and a couple of papers that gave important context to the Summer School and its place within the platform of INTR/HT. I will freely admit that Joyce’s writing on exploratory and constructive hypertexts was the hardest for me to grasp. I loosely understand ideas from it, but it’s one I will need to revisit with greater context.

Day 3: Workshops 1 & 2

Our training complete, we were let into the real world. This day had three workshops - two for the entire day (NHT and OASIS), with one only starting after lunch (Web/Comics). I had a read-up on these beforehand, and decided to attend NHT in the morning and Web/Comics in the afternoon. The scheduling was quite freeform, and I’ve learnt for the future that it would be completely acceptable to pop back and forth between workshops at future conferences.

Our afternoon involved a Summer School catchup, reflecting on our day, our thoughts, how we were feeling, and so on. I would have liked a brief catchup like this after the conference every day, but that’s a lot to ask to fit in an already busy schedule! I like that we slowly upsized our rooms throughout this day - it was a lot of fun to start in a tiny little classroom and work our way up into progressively larger auditoriums as more people arrived.

Day 4: Workshops End, The Conference Begins

The first half of this day offered three half-day workshops (HUMAN, LIRAI, and PIM). None of these “called out” to me as much as the previous day’s workshops, but the value of considering ideas that aren’t immediately within your sphere of interest seems like a critical part of academic conferences, so I attended HUMAN.

The second half of the day was an exciting one - the conference officially began, with the opening ceremony and keynote leading into the Authoring Practices and Notes on Artificial Intelligence sessions. I will lay out, openly, that AI research and technologies do not catch my interest, outside of some more measured applications within topics I am keen on. Authoring Practices was a lot more suited to my interests - the AI research presented was at least more likely to overlap.

Days 5 - 7: The Conference

The last three days of the conference were a bit of a blur - I ended up a little bit more tired every single day, made connections with more attendees, and even found a lovely café right next to the conference venue (important for me as the catering often didn’t provide anything that works for my palate). Those are three very different things - balancing the combination of academic, social, and personal influences seems like an important conference skill to practice.

I attended the New Directions and Digital Communities sessions on Wednesday, the Critical Reading and Applications sessions on Thursday, and the Scholarship session on Friday. Some of the work was incredible - sometimes I would find myself getting lost trying to process the information presented, but learning what you struggle to understand is itself a form of new understanding.

There were also the exhibitions on Wednesday and Thursday. I was excited to see the work of other students and practitioners, and it was great to have other people play my anthology. I’ve learnt a little about exhibiting from my first go at it - this time I had a stack of business cards ready on the desk - but it’s a skill to continue practicing. It’s tough to balance wanting to be there to present and represent your work with wanting to try everything else.

The seventh day ended on the reveal of next year’s conference location, a discussion on the future of the conference, and a small reflection amongst the Summer School. It was interesting to see the Town Hall session - trepidations, considerations, and so on. I tried to chime in a little when I felt like I had something relevant to contribute, especially as I’ve loved this year’s conference and would hate to see it lose its unique character.

Day 8: The End

The 14th of September, 2024. I spent just over a week in Poznań, a city of great charm and hospitality. My hotel was great - no complaints in terms of quality - but the 10AM check-out on my final day was brutal. Waking up, getting ready, and packing my things was a rush, leading me to get down to reception with just minutes to spare.

Luckily, the weather was pleasant and Poznań has ways to occupy yourself. I strolled from my hotel to the café I had found earlier in the week, ordered a brownie with ice cream and a glass of milkshake, and happily sat down with a book for about an hour. Once relaxed and ready, I had a leisurely walk towards my bus stop, hopped back to the airport and, within a few hours, found myself back in England (with much nicer weather than when I left). That evening, it was a relief not to need a morning alarm.