Childish enthusiasm and Sculptural Hypertext

I gave my first seminar yesterday, talking about how I come to begin the PhD. It seemed to go pretty well, and was recorded for posterity, so when it appears online, I’ll post a link to it.

But before the seminar I spoke at a workshop examining Digital Narratives, and was impressed and excited by all the other speakers. One in particular got my childish enthusiasm all fired up though. David Millard, of the university’s Electronics and Computer Science department, spoke about “strange” and “sculptural hypertext.”

Hypertext is of course the basis of the World Wide Web. But the last time I did anything with it was when I was using Hypercard to prototype museum interactives for my degree. What makes hypertext “sculptural” is the idea that instead of authoring links between individual cards, all the “cards” are linked to all the others to begin with, and you cut away links to get to what you want. (This may be massive oversimplification, or I might have got hold of the wrong end of the stick entirely – if so forgive me, I only learned about it yesterday.)

This cutting away can be done dynamically, so for example, links might not be evident until you are in the right place geographically, or until you’ve read a particular “card”, or until the right time of day.

The more David explained, the more I thought “this sounds like the real world equivalent (actually not quite real world – I need to think about which of Pine’s “eight realms” it is) of the algorithm behind the likes of Red Dead Redemption”. Which is, I think, exactly what I’m looking for right now.

So, this morning, my childish enthusiasm got the better of me, and I’ve been on-line looking for a free Hypertext authoring tool that I might be able to get my head around to give it a go. I’ve just downloaded HypeDyn (pronounced Hyped-in) which seems an easy enough authoring tool to start with.  Its produced by my my wife’s old Alma Mater (or one of them) the National University of Singapore, who say “Much of our focus is on end-user technologies for people who may not be technically inclined, but who want to use the power of computation to build and explore things,” which sounds just like me. It’s very latest development version includes location tools and a way or publishing to HTML5 which can be used on any mobile phone. So it could be used to prototype a pretty sophisticated location based narrative. I’m going to start on a more stable version though.


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I came to cultural heritage via five years working at Midland Bank when I left school. In my free time, I volunteered as a costumed interpreter at Kentwell Hall and, with re-enactment societies, at various medieval sites around the UK and France. When, one evening, a few of us said “we could make a business out of this” I left my job at the bank to go to college, first to get an Art Foundation and then to Manchester Polytechnic to join an innovative course called Design for Communications Media. I specialised in Educational Media Design, with the intention of applying what I was learning to cultural heritage. During my vacations and upon graduation I worked for the nascent company my friends had started, Past Pleasures, creating immersive living history festivals at Lancaster and Tunbridge Wells, as well as projects including: an exhibition for the centenary of the Commonwealth Institute; a design for a metafictional Sherlock Holmes exhibition in Croydon; and, a game that combined real-time investment advice from 300 year-old characters at the Bank of England Museum with a digital simulation, tracking the players’ investment portfolio from the founding of the bank to its tercentenary. In 1996 I helped found JMD&Co, and for two years I also lectured on Heritage Tourism and Visitor Management and Interpretation modules for a Portsmouth University validated HND/degree course at Farnborough Technical College. Subsequently, I enrolled in the new Distance Learning delivered Masters’ degree in Museum Studies at Leicester University, where I became interested in the social use of space, particularly Bill Hillier’s “space syntax,” and the increasing futility of cultural heritage sites trying to tell doggedly linear stories in three-dimensional spaces. Although my dissertation explored models for mapping interpretation, and particularly learning styles, onto spaces, a satisfactory reconciliation of linear story and three-dimensional space eluded me. After graduation, I decided my time in the “small business” end of cultural heritage was over for a while, and I left JMD&Co to join a cultural institution, the National Trust, as a Regional Community, Learning and Volunteering Manager. I brought the first National Trust iPad into use at Batemans, where, combined with a wax cylinder record player, and the help of renowned folk singer, Jon Boden, we’ve returned Rudyard Kipling’s voice back into his old home. However, one of the innovations which I am most proud of is the National Trust’s virtual tours. Working with a small company, and a range of disabled stakeholders, we created a touch-screen based human computer interface that could also, if required, be controlled with other input devices, and allowed visitors with a variety of disabilities to fully enjoy the virtual tour. The teams’ achievement was recognised with a Jodi Award for Excellence in accessible digital media in 2008.

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