A set of data, descriptive and visualisation files based on the published papers in the ACM Hypertext Conference 1987–2026 (including the non-ACM ECHT'90).
Note: URLs for resources here. Until a more permanent home emerges, this page's URL will be persistent, but items within this overall resource set may move around. Thus, if a URL direct to an item fails, reload the resource form this page and update the bookmarked URL.
Conference short name syntax. This has varied over the years, in part reflecting typographical customs and limitations of the day. Generally it occurs in variations of two primary forms based open the stems 'Hypertext' or 'HT', with the three European conferences always using 'ECHT'. For 1987–2000, 'Hypertext' in sentence-case or all-uppercase was used, after which the shorter stem 'HT' was adopted. The year is given as its last two digits: 87, 04, etc. An optional single space may be placed after the stem. An apostrophe usually precedes the part-year, although inept past typesetting/re-parsing means any of ', ‘, or ’ characters may occur. In the 1980s, UTF-8 text encoding and ‘curly’ (typographic) quote characters were not available. To resolve the ambiguity in the historical record, the (case-insensitive) regular expression to correctly match the short title is:
(?i)(hypertext|ht|echt) *['‘’]*\d{2}.
Note: object IDs are consistent/unique across all three JSON files below so their data may be connected via ID.
JSON of All Items Published in Conference Proceedings
Every discrete proceedings item is an object in the set.
Each object holds (separately)the IDs of objects it cites in the corpus and those objects citing it.
Each object nests BibTeX fields as needed for ACM-style referencing.
An object for the actual conference proceedings. This allows citation of conference events not published as discrete items (but which may be described in the Proceedings‘ Front Matter.
JSON of All Authors Published in Proceedings
An object for each discrete author published within the conference series.
Where an author's name is used in more than one form each form is listed, for provenance, but alternatives are nested under a canonical name.
All instances of main or nested names link to the IDs of the paper(s) they authored using that form of their name.
Main instances also roll up data for their nested alternate name versions.
Author (assumed) gender as used in some of my reports, e.g. my HT'22 paper, is deliberately not included because it is sensitive personal information.
BibTeX of All Conferences And Proceedings Items
Per-proceedings-item BibTeX, with the required fields and data format as per ACM style (above).
Useful for those authoring in LaTeX for papers needing to use ACM’s ‘acmart’ package. Authors writing in word should use the ‘ACM-styled Reference Listing of All Proceedings’ PDF listed in the Documentation section below.
BibTeX of Selected Papers‘ References
The Future Is Not What It Used To Be (HT'26). BibTeX (163 refs). Paper at DL.ACM: PDF, ePub, HTML.
W(h)ither Spatial Hypertext? (HT'25). BibTeX (192 refs, one DOI corrected from the published version)). Paper at DL.ACM: PDF, HTML.
Beyond The Page-Break (HT'24) BibTeX (83 refs). Paper at DL.ACM: PDF, HTML.
Hypertext’s Meta-History (HT'23) BibTeX (205 refs). Paper at DL.ACM: PDF.
Hypertext’s Meta-History (HT'22) BibTeX (44 refs). Paper at DL.ACM: PDF, HTML.
A description of the ACM's style for references used in the ACM papers. Based on the ACM’s ‘acmart’ LaTeX package. Examples are provided for all BibTeX styles for which ‘acmart’ contains a styling. The project's BibTeX file is also available for download.
Each style variant is given in two form (unless unnecessary). The first is all the fields for ACM's desired output styled listing. The second is the minimum selection of BibTeX fields to avoid a LaTeX log warning over omissions.
ACM-styled Reference Listing of All Proceedings
A complete listing of all Hypertext Conferences and their Proceedings items, showing the correct rendered form. This is to aid Word-based used from whom the ACM provide no style guide.
This uses BibTeX data from the ‘BibTeX of all Proceedings items’ file (Metadata section above) and ACM’s ‘acmart’ LaTeX package.
The styled reference shown is the first (full) form of each reference type as defined in the ‘ACM Citation Styles’ PDF above.
ACM Reference BibTeX Validator (for pre-flight checking of BibTeX data for ACM submissions).
A validator for pre-flighting BibTeX to be used in ACM papers. All content (HTML/JS.CSS) is inline in the page: the Creative Commons license is inline SVG. This does not use a full LaTeX evaluation but instead uses JavaScript routines based on reverse-engineering the styles ‘ACM Citation Styles’ PDF above. The aim is to avoid an author's LaTeX log being swamped with preventable error/warning messages. It also has advisory notes, e.g. indicating the item pre dats ISBN, or DOI, etc., invention so log warnings about incompletion may be a false positive.
The tool may be used online of locally and has no dependencies. A zipped version is provided for easier download.
A set of visualisations, all based on the long/short papers within the ‘JSON of all Proceedings item’ file (metadata available in the section above).
A colophon is offered on the demo index.
Zip of Multi-view Demo (above) for local use
A zipped set of the above demo's files. Unzip and use in-situ for local/offline use.
ACM Hypertext In-Conference Cited-by Demo (to HT‘22 only) [new window]
A Gephi-generated visualisation. Currently only up to HT‘22 data (it may get updated if I find time).
Each item on the ring is a discrete proceedings item, hover to see its name. Different colours are different years (conferences).
Click and item to select it. The graph now only shows those HT items citing it and the item's metadata in sidebar.
Close the sidebar to deselect the item and reset the graph. The Graph is zoomable./p>
Generation: node/edge CSVs, imported to Gephi, and circular graph generated. Exported to HTML via a Gephi plug-in using sigma.js. The plug-in is an incomplete, undocumented project which is why parts of the visualisation are less customised than I'd like (perhaps AI might now help?).
Forty years of Hypertext [new window]
A visualisation based on those long/short papers within the data set above that cite or are cited in-conference. All scripts and data ere inline.
Concept: Frode Hegland. Coding: Claude AI. Prompt: "show me something cool with the data".
[note by Mark A] This design is suspiciously reminiscent of the 2013 Citeology [4]. Ironically the inspiration of this Hypertext dataset was in order to build something like Citeology. Clearly, AIs don't feel the need to attribute sources.
Halasz's Seven Issues For Hypertext, all three versions mapped [new window]
A PDF of the three iterations of Frank Halasz’s ‘Seven Issues’: 1987 (HYPERTEXT'87) [1], 1991 (HYPERTEXT'91 keynote), and 2001 (ACM JCD 25(3)). The ‘Dimensions’ left side panel comes from the 1987 paper.
A BibTeX file for all three references.
The dataset covers 38 discrete Conference Proceedings as found in DL.ACM (except for ECHT'90 which was published outside the ACM): note that 2025 had a separate Adjunct Proceedings. These contain 1,695 discrete items including 1,265 full/short papers. There are 3,121 discrete authors, with 212 being variants of a unique author name. Of the 2,909 unique authors, 163 are represented by more than one styling of their name.
This is an enhanced version of the dataset originally created by manual review of source material from 2018-20, and published at eprints.soton.ac.uk/457992/ (DOI:10.5258/SOTON/D1870). It was presented to the 2022 Hypertext Conference in paper “Hypertext’s Meta-History: Documenting in-Conference Citations, Authors and Keyword Data, 1987-2021” (https://doi.org/10.1145/3511095.3531271).
The dataset has been improved and updated manually since inception including date on each new conference and its content. Part of the provocation for this was inconsistent BibTeX at DL.ACM (since then much improved in the current website) and to enable data visualisations as in the demos above.
Concept, information design, dataset creation/curation: Mark Anderson (ORCID: 0000-0001-7396-0721).
Data compilation/curation/export: Eastgate’s Tinderbox software.
Sources:
- The Hypertext Conference listing in DL.ACM, https://dl.acm.org/conference/ht/proceedings.
- For ECHT'90, the data was recovered from the printed Proceedings (pub. Cambridge University Press).
1. Halasz, Frank G. 1987. Reflections on NoteCards: Seven Issues for the next Generation of Hypermedia Systems. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Hypertext (Chapel Hill, NC, USA) (HYPERTEXT'87). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA. 345–365. DOI: 10.1145/317426.317451
2. Halasz, Frank G. 1991. “Seven Issues”: Revisited [unlisted Keynote]. In Proceedings of ACM Hypertext'91 Conference (San Antonio, TX, USA) (HYPERTEXT ‘91). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA. 1–18. The keynote is not in the proceedings but see footnote 1.
3. Halasz, Frank G. 2001. Reflections on “Seven Issues”: Hypertext in the Era of the Web. ACM Journal of Computer Documentation (JCD). 25, 3, 109–114. DOI: 10.1145/507317.507328.
4. Matejka, Justin, Grossman, Tovi, and Fitzmaurice, George 2012. Citeology: Visualizing Paper Genealogy. CHI'12 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 181–190. (CHI EA ‘12). DOI: 10.1145/2212776.2212796, and BibTeX for same.
1. Although the keynote was never recorded as an item in the Proceedings, a transcript was recovered via Texas A&M staff and is available here. Sadly DL.ACM, despite being asked, chose not to host it in the Library. This odd, given the historic role of the presentation in a well-known field.