Call for Participation

A reading room for hypertext literature has been an occasional feature of hypertext conferences going back at least to ECHT '94 in Edinburgh when Ian Ritchie, the conference chair, expressly asked for this. I am happy to announce that our hosts for Hypertext '02 at the University of Maryland have again agreed to provide the hypertext literature community with a reading room during the conference, thanks to the co-sponsorship of MiTH -- Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities. All cybertext writers are encouraged to submit proposals for works to be included in the reading room. We are expressly encouraging a broad interpretation of "hypertext"; cybertexts of all kinds are welcome, including such forms as Generator Poetry, poésie animée, narrabase, and other forms of cybertext that are not often presented at the hypertext conference. Also please note that although submissions to the hypertext conference are normally expected to be in English, because of the special demands of translating cybertexts into other languages, the reading room is accepting submissions in all languages. Non-anglophone submissions are expressly encouraged. In deciding which of your works to submit, please focus on current work. Work in progress is acceptable, as is not-yet published work.

In conjunction with the Reading Room, there will also be a reading. Please note that there will be a separate CFP for the reading. (You may certainly submit proposals for both.) If you are responding to both CFPs, please send a separate E-mail for each.

What to Submit

Please send an E-mail to the Reading Room co-chair, Jim Rosenberg, jr@amanue.com, containing the following information:

1. Title and author(s) of the work, and contact information for the author(s), including E-mail address. If your work is handled by a publisher, please give a contact at the publisher including E-mail address.

2. Media: If your work is Web-based, please indicate the URL(s). If your work is distributed as software, please indicate the medium (e.g. CD-ROM, floppy disk, etc.). If your work is distributed as software but is available on the Internet for download, please give URL or ftp address. If your work is distributed as software but a sample is available on the Web, please indicate this and give the URL.

3. System Requirements: If your work is Web-based and requires browser plug-ins, please list them. List any browser capabilities that are specifically required, such as Java, etc. If your work requires a particular Web browser please indicate this. Please be sure to list memory requirements (even in the case of Web-based work if your work is particularly memory-intensive.) Please indicate minimum display requirements, whether a sound card is required, etc.

For work which is not Web-based, please indicate what system(s) it runs on, memory requirements, what other applications if any must be installed, etc. Please indicate whether a "pre-install" is necessary, or whether the work can e.g. run from a CD-ROM without installation. If an install is necessary, please indicate whether the install requires a reboot.

4. Reference Platform: Please list a platform on which your work is known to run. Try to be explicit with as weak a system as possible that will still show your work satisfactorily. (For example, "This work is known to run on Windows 95 using Netscape 4 with 32M RAM.")

5. Mirror: For Web-based work, please indicate if you are able to submit a complete and accurate archive of the files required to install your work on a local web server. Providing a "local mirror" for web-based work will help guarantee reliability and performance, but this year we are leaving it to the authors to insure the accuracy of any archives used for a local mirror. An archive may be submitted as an E-mail attachment if it is not too large, or on CD-ROM, in any format understandable by WinZip on Windows or Stuffit Expander on the Mac (UNIX .tar.gz archives are also fine). Note if you are unable to submit an archive for web-based work but are able to submit a complete and accurate list of all files contained on the web server to implement your work (including subdirectories) this will suffice.

For work which is not Web-based, please do not submit physical media until I contact you, and likewise for archives of Web-based work.