Introduction: A Brief Note on Navigation: How Do We Get Around These Days?

[...]more recent, in The Laws of Cool, Alan Liu writes that the method of user-friendly computer navigation arrived at a 1968 Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco, where Doug Engelbart stunned the audience with his now famous demonstration of the “instrumental advantages of the GUI-and-mouse model of direct manipulation” (161). [...]Robert Tally’s “On Literary Cartography: Narrative as a Spatially Symbolic Act” encourages us to consider how narratives operate much as maps do: “organizing the multifarious data of life into recognizable and meaningful patterns.” [...]A. Kendra Greene’s “Five Directions” presents examples of real-world navigation in which getting from A to B involves fitting pieces together, synthesizing.