The Electronic Labyrinth
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Global Map

A global map provides a picture of the entire network of links and nodes. To be useful, this must be depicted graphically, and allow the reader to move and size the view. In most systems, readers may select a new node to make it current.

Global maps are of limited utility. Experiments with InterMedia have found that:

[A]s the number of connections and quantity of information increases, so does the difficulty of generating maps of the entire information web. Since most readers cannot readily understand a diagram with hundreds of crisscrossing interconnections, the problem of distilling or summarizing the information must be addressed. (Yankelovich, Meyrowitz, and van Dam 17)

In his survey, Conklin provides an illustration of just such an entanglement (39). For this reason, the global map was not implemented in released versions of InterMedia.


© 1993-2000 Christopher Keep, Tim McLaughlin, Robin Parmar.
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