A set of data, descriptive and visualisation files based on the published papers in the ACM Hypertext Conference 1987–2026 (including the non-ACM ECHT90).
Note: object IDs are consistent/unique across all three JSON files below so their data may be connected via ID.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 fiest form as defined in the ‘ACM Citation Styles’ PDF above.
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 section above).
A colohpon is offered on the demo index.
A zipped set of the above demo's files. Unzip and use in-stu for local/offline use.
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 metadate 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 way parts of the visualisation are less customised than I'd like (perhaps AI might now help?.
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 is very reminiscent of the 2013 Citeology1, which was ironically the inspiration of my HT dataset, in order to build something like Citeology, although this was not (apparently) hinder to the AI.
A PDF of the three iterations of Frank Halasz’s ‘Seven Issues’: 1988 (CACM 31(7)), 1991 (HYPERTEXT'91 keynote), and 2001 (ACM JCD 25(3)).
The ‘Dimensions’ left side panel is also from 1988 (CACM 31(7)).
This 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 each new conference's data. Part of the provocation for this was inconsistent BibTeX at DL.ACM (since then much improved in the current website) and to do 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. Matejka, Justin, Grossman, Tovi, and Fitzmaurice, George 2012. Citeology: Visualizing Paper Genealogy. CHI EA ‘12. CHI ‘12 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 181–190. (DOI: 10.1145/2212776.2212796, BibTeX for same).