Yet More Views of Hypertext '99

Marc Nanard (left), president of SIGWEB, meeting with Frank Shipman (Texas A&M).

Shipman, together with co-authors Catherine C. Marshall and Mark LeMere, received the 1999 Engelbart Prize, the award for the best research paper at the conference. Shipman's paper, "Beyond Location: Hypertext Workspaces and Non-Linear Views", describes fisheye views in spatial hypertext systems as they are used in VIKI -- important steps toward making hypertext maps clearer and easier to use.

Jill Walker (Bergen) waits to receive the first Nelson Award for "Piecing together and tearing apart: finding the story in afternoon". Walker's paper shows how Joyce manipulated time, and did a masterful job of explaining how ideas taken from literary criticism can influence hypertext design.

The Nelson award, named in honor of Theodor Holm Nelson, recognizes the best research by a newcomer to the hypertext conference.

Anja Rau (Mainz), one of the conference's invaluable student volunteers, offers advice to a prospective reader at Eastgate's hypertext bookstore.

Rau presented a very intriguing short paper that explores the critical boundaries of published hypertexts. She argues convincingly that critics need to look beyond the body of a hypertext, that the also need to contemplate its shell -- the software in which the hypertext is performed, the wrappings in which it arrives in the reader's hands, and the written materials that may accompany it.

Kai Groenbaek, former recipient of the Engelbart Award and an expert on formal models of hypertext, contemplates an issue of The Eastgate Quarterly Review.

Throughout the conference, attendees remarked on the intense interest that engineers and scientists have begun to take in literary hypertext, and the equally intense interest that writers are now taking in systems research.