Alessio Antonini

Littoral zones are not merely boundaries between land and water; they are dynamic bridges and buffers, fundamentally shaped by shifting environmental forces. The intangible cultural heritage embedded within these coastal zones (encompassing generational practices of resilience, navigation, and ecological adaptation) is highly vulnerable to loss. Current information systems are poorly equipped to safeguard these living practices. Historically grounded in "urban ontologies," digital architectures inherently favour stability, permanent landmarks, and predictable spatial control. This paper presents a gap analysis examining how existing information systems, from geo-spatial hypermedia to immersive media, fail to capture the fluid, cyclical, and seasonally contingent nature of littoral heritage. By contrasting the performative, ultra-local realities of the coast against the static nature of traditional archives, we outline the structural limitations of current digitisation efforts. Finally, we propose conceptual foundations for future interactive architectures capable of supporting the active transmission, continuous evolution, and structural fluidity required to truly preserve littoral knowledge.

This article presents the Immersive Online Reading for Mental Wellbeing project, developed through Northern Ireland’s Connected 5 knowledge exchange fund. The project explored how a storytelling-based bibliotherapy programme delivered by the Verbal Arts Centre might be remediated for individual online use through AI-supported systems within a hypertext frame of reference. Working collaboratively across higher and further education, we examined how humanities scholarship, digital humanities methods, and computing expertise might contribute to accessible and scalable mental wellbeing interventions. We outline the challenges of translating a group-based storytelling model into a hypertextual individual digital experience. We describe the development of a multi-agent architecture and focus in particular on the annotation of short stories for AI retrieval and moderation. The project functioned as a proof of concept rather than a full prototype. Our findings indicate both the potential and the limits of AI in narrative-based wellbeing contexts. Human curation, ethical safeguards, and interdisciplinary collaboration remain central, underpinned by the hypertext goal of augmenting human cognition.

This special issue brings together six contributions that explore the Web as a space where meaning is produced, negotiated, and preserved. Spanning topics such as digital archiving, generative AI, accessibility, and interactive narrative, the articles reflect a diversity of approaches while converging on a shared concern with how digital infrastructures shape expression and interpretation. Rather than offering a unified framework, the issue highlights key tensions—between scale and situated practices, human authorship and algorithmic generation, and inclusion and exclusion in digital memory—inviting a reconsideration of the Web as a sociotechnical system of meaning-making.

Digital applications for supporting health management often fail to achieve large-scale adoption. Costs related to purchasing, maintaining, and using medical or sensor devices, such as smartwatches, currently hinder uptake and sustained engagement, particularly in the prevention and monitoring of lifelong conditions. As an alternative, smartphone-based passive monitoring could provide a viable strategy for lifelong use, removing hardware-related costs and exploiting the synergies between mobile health (mHealth) and ambient assisted living (AAL). However, smartphone sensor toolkits are not designed for diagnostic purposes, and their quality varies depending on the model, maker, and generation. This narrative overview of recent reviews (narrative meta-review) on the current state of smartphone-based passive monitoring highlights the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT analysis) of this approach, which pervasively encompasses digital health, mHealth, and AAL. The results are then consolidated into a newly defined concept of a mobile biomarker, that is, a general model of medical indices for diagnostic tasks that can be computed using smartphone sensors and capabilities.