The StoryPlaces Platform: Building a Web-Based Locative Hypertext System.

Abstract

Locative narrative systems have been a popular area of research for nearly two decades, but they have tended to be bespoke systems, developed for particular deployments, or to demonstrate novel technologies. This has inevitably meant that they are short-lived, the narratives have been constructed by the creators, or co-creators, of the system, and that the barrier to creating locative experiences has remained high due to a lack of common tools. We set out to create a re-usable platform that would be based on the commonalities of these historic systems, with a strong focus on hypertext structure, and designed to enable a range of locative based narratives to be created, deployed, and experienced in-the-wild. The result is StoryPlaces, an open source locative hypertext platform and authoring tool designed around a generic sculptural hypertext engine and built with established Web infrastructure and standards. As well as providing an open platform for future development, StoryPlaces also offers novelty in its management of location within a hypertext, including the separation of location and nodes, separation of descriptions from locations, and the separation of content from pages, as well as being designed to have run-time caching and disconnection resilience. It also advances the state of the art in sculptural hypertext systems delivery through conditional functions, as well as nested, geographic and temporal conditions. The StoryPlaces platform has been used for the public deployment of over twenty locative narratives, and demonstrates the effectiveness of a general sculptural hypertext engine for delivering complex locative narrative experiences. In this paper we describe the process of creation of the platform and our insights on the design and construction of locative hypertext platforms.