Untitled - witz cultural

63RECONFIGURINGWRITINGsystems like Microcosm, Storyspace, and Intermedia provide several meansof helping orient the reader; others provide little built-in assistance to solvingbasic problems of orientation. But whatever system authors employ, theyshould use overview and gateway documents, which are devices entirelyunder their own control. Overviews or sitemaps, which can take many forms,are author-created (as opposed to system-generated) documents that serve asdirectories to aid in navigating the materials. Overviews assist readers to gainconvenient access to all the materials in many documents or to a broad topicthat cuts across several disciplines.Overviews or sitemaps take six forms, the first of whic-h is a graphic conceptmap that suggests that various ideas relate to some central phenomenon or impingeon it. This center, the subject of the overview can be an author (Tennyson,Darwin), chronological or period term (eighteenth century Victorian), idea ormovement (realism, feminism), or other concept (biblical typology, cyborg).The implied and often reinforced message of such arrangements is simplythat any idea that the reader makes the center of his or her investigations existssituated within a field of other phenomena, which may or may not relateto it causally. Such graphic presentation of materials depicts one informingidea or hidden agenda of hypermedia materials, namely, that one proceeds inunderstanding any particular phenomenon by relating it to other contexts.These kinds of overview lexias, which I have used since the first days ofIntermedia, have particular value for the World Wide Web, which tends towarda flattened form of hypertext. Their emphasis on multiple approachessimultaneously provides a way of breaking out of the implied page formatthat confines the Web and also of creating what Paul Kahn has termed a"crossroads document," a point to which the reader can retum repeatedly andbefore departing in new directions. The various websites I maintain usedifferent kinds of overview s . The Victorian Web sunotnds a central image bya range of related topics. In that for Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South, forexample, a linked icon for political and social context appears at the top center,and immediately beneath comes those forbiography, other works by thesame author, Victorianism, and women's lives (Figure 17). The icons for literaryrelations and visual arts flank the image representing the novel. In theline below are five icons representing aspects of technique-setting, syrnbolism,characteizarion, narration, and genre; centered beneath them appearsthat for religion and philosophy.Although one could use a single image map for such an overview on awebsite, using separate icons has some advantages, the first of which is thatby using the 'Alt" option in HTML that permits one to include a text label,