Cunningham on the Arte of Navigation
Richard Cunningham is at the Acadia University English department, and directs the hypermedia center there. The full title of his paper is “Developing digital navigation from The Arte of Navigation.”
Readers experience something different reading an electronic document as opposed to a paper one. [Glaringly obvious, RC admits.]
RC presents the Acadia Digital Culture Observatory. They have digitized a 1561 edition of The Arte of Navigation and want to observe how readers read and use it. The original text included a navigation instrument made of three concentric paper circles of different sizes (volvelles), which are to be overlaid one on top of another and rotated. Here, you can see it for yourself. (Hm, it doesn’t seem to work in Firefox on Mac in Blackletter mode; I suggest the use of Arial to be safe, or you can download Blackletter from their table of contents.) Check out particularly the navigation instrument Flash files in the “other moving images” section of the TOC, they’re fun to play with.