Romedi Passini's Wayfinding in Architecture examines the process of navigating in large, built environments like airports, shopping malls, and office buildings. When discussing imageability--the ease with which users can form a mental image of a structure--he refers to Kevin Lynch's five elements important for navigating cities. These elements are paths, nodes, landmarks, edges, and districts. Passini finds that these same elements are used when navigating built structures smaller than cities.
Guided by our HYPERTEXT IS A STRUCTURED SPACE metaphor, we can map each of these elements to their hypertext equivalent in order to better understand how we navigate hypertexts.
| Architectural Element | Translation to Hypertext |
|---|---|
| Paths: the channels of transport, such as roads, elevators, hallways, etc. | Links: the means by which we move between lexia/pages |
| Nodes: entry and focus points, such as squares, intersections, circles, and other open places | Lexia: source and destination areas of links, containing various content |
| Landmarks: physical reference points, objects of note, buildings, mountains, towers, stores | Page Content: distinctive images, labels, or text. |
| Edges: linear elements not used as paths; especially important as borders, such as rivers, coastlines, walls, etc. | ?: rarely found in hypertext, beyond district edges noticeable only after crossing them. |
| Districts: medium to large areas with recognizable flavor or distinction, such as neighborhoods | Subsite/Thread: differentiated areas of a site or work |
This mapping does reveal certain differences in navigating hypertext verses physical spaces. First of all, "paths" have no length. Clicking a link teleports the reader instantly from one lexia to another. Additionally, landmarks cannot, by default, be seen from a "distance" in hypertext. An author could provide for landmark navigation by providing small forms of landmarks--a thumbnail image, icon, or popup text--associated with links to that landmark. Finally, edges are rare in hypertext. One type of edge is a dead-end lexia, with either no outbound links or only a single link to the lexia that lead to it. Another type of edge is the edge of a subsite or thread. Frequently, however, this kind of edge is only realized after it has been crossed.
These Waves of Girls suffers from a number of minor technical oddities, inconsistencies, and irritations. These begin with menu4, the poorly-titled first page after an initial splash screen. A menu of choices overlays a distorted blue image of a girl. Though an image reminiscent of a play button appears at the bottom left, accompanied by the word "listen", no sounds are produce by this page or its destination links. Eight options are available from this page, each opening a new framed window. Other authors have examined in more detail some of the difficulties arising from the seemingly poor technical implementation of These Waves (Koskimaa 2004). We will instead focus on the essential hypertext features that are present in the work.
Links abound in These Waves, originating from both text and images. However, the organization of these links is not always clear.
Through the use of frames, the notion of a single lexia becomes blurred. Though internal pages change, the navigation bar on the left remains stable. At times, however, these pages can become nested, duplicating the left navigation. Koskimaa explores how this recursion can be interpreted as becoming lost or trapped within one's own memories. Certainly, it does seem to blur the sense of being located within a single node. Also, a lexia does not always correspond to a page in These Waves. Often, a link will lead to a part or section of a pages, such as the many links that lead to Shh.
These Waves uses a great variety of media as its page contents. However, the use of this content as potential landmarks is ambiguous. First of all, images such as the school bus appear on multiple lexia, often in different contexts--either as illustration or as background. This reduces their potential use as distinguishing features. Secondly, apparent use of content as an orienting landmark is often misleading. For instance, the opening menu4 appears to be providing textual and image landmarks with the link rollovers. For instance, the "she was warned" link is associated with a detail image of a little girl's interlaced hands and a text exerpt about how Tammy Stevens was a slut. However, following this link reveals neither the image nor details about Tammy Stevens. (In fact, it is the "school takes" link that leads directly to the story of Tammy Stevens, though its rollover text concerns the teacher Mrs. Mackenzie.)
Edges are hard to find in any hypertext, and are especially rare in this densely linked work.
At first, it seems that each frame-based collection of links found from menu4 is a separate subsite concerning a particular set of memories, which are further organized into threads. For instance, the "school tales" district includes the one-lexia thread concerning Tammy Steven's progression as a slut, as well as Neil's eight-lexia trip through the security window. However, the distinctive flavor of these "districts" is undermined by having story threads duplicated between them, and by using the same background in multiple districts (as for "city" and "she was warned").
Cover → Introduction → Structure → Connections → Imageability → Navigation → Conclusion → Works Cited