Electronic Presentation, Publishing, and Digital Libraries

Any complexity to be understood, let alone conveyed, must be structured. It may be that the human brain needs it actually modelled as a structure, visual or conceptual. Moreover, anything new, particularly anything abstract, can be most comfortably met by meeting it in terms of something familiar. Computing, accepting all this, has had fun with metaphors. The concept of “navigating” is itself a metaphor. For multimedia presentations “travel” is only one of several available metaphors discussed in Section 9.2.