Untitled - witz cultural

'171RECONFIGURINGWRITINGAuthor-Created Orientation Devices: Marking the Edges. In the absence ofsuch tools, what kinds of techniques can one use to assist readersl Onedevice especially important to those creating materials in HTML involvesusing visual indications of a lexia's identity, location, and relation to others.These signals can take the form ofheader icons, color schemes, backgroundtexhrres, linked icons that appear at the foot of lexias, or all in combination.Such devices play a crucial role on the Web, where readers may arrive at anydocument via a search engine, entering at what could be the middle of aplanned sequence or set of documents. Without some such device even readerswho find that a particular arrival lexia meets their needs and taste becomefrustrated because they cannot conveniently determine whether it forms partof a larger structure.One of the most commonly used such devices is the header icon, whichimmediately informs the reader that a lexia belongs to a particular web orsubweb. For example, lnTheVictoianWeb a blue-and-white header elementappears immediately following the lines providing title and author. At the leftof this icon, which is a third of an inch high and 7 inches wide, appears ablack-and-white image of Queen Victoria followed by the words "The VictorianWeb" and a white line extending the remaining length of the header.Using an editor, such as Dreamweaver or BBEdit, which permits easily makingglobal changes-that is, changing all occurrences of a word or phrase inan entire set of documents rather than having to do them one at a timemakesinserting such elements exkemely easy to do. Whereas The VictoianWeb empToys a single header icon, some of the other websites I maintain,such as that on recent postcolonial literature, uses a different one for eachmajor division or subweb. This second web has separate sections for anglophoneliterature of Great Britain, the Indian subcontinent, Afica, and Australiaand New Zealand, and therefore employs different headers as well asother devices for each section. Similarly, Adam Kenney's Museum, a Web versionof anthology-fiction like The Decameron, organizes itself around a seriesof individual narrators and uses an image at the top center of each lexia toidentify different narrative arcs.Other devices include color schemes as well as background texhrres, andcombined with footer icons they make an efFective means of simultaneouslyorienting the reader while indicating the permeable borders of both the lexiaand the larger units to which it belongs. For example, an essay from The VictorianWeb that compares the railway swindlers in Trollope's The Way We LiveNow and Carlyle's "Hudson's Statue" has five footer icons, one for the main