Graphics: Worth a thousand words

Text Menu

Images convey scenes, underscore text, and even work against the text. A single graphic usually indicates a single anchor destination, but sometimes multiple graphics will form one graphic, as in brandchannel [5]. Both efferent sites and aesthetic works used graphics as anchors.

Graphic anchor introductions

Graphic introductions to a work which primarily uses text links can bring the few graphics into greater importance:

• Visual: Six Sex Scenes [14] provide short anchor images as doorways to the text. Notes Toward Absolute Zero [42]uses postage stamps to introduce each section.
  
• Spatial: Ferris Wheels' [33]introductory graphic provides a map to the fabula, while Penetration's [30] provides a more thematic overlay to the content.
  
• Secondary: BBC's [4] pictures that accompany the headlines also serve as anchors to the headlined story.
  
• Mood: High Crimson [11], The Rainbow Factory [22], Afterimage [7], use graphic introductions to draw the reader in and set the tone. High Crimson uses graphic menus throughout to change the tone, while Reagan Library's [47] graphic provides both setting and location.

Graphic navigation

Graphic anchors, like icons, can provide the main mode of navigation through a piece, as 25 Ways to Close a Photograph [41]introduces character speculations by face. Graphic navigation can provide:

• Setting: ~water ~water ~water~ [59]use a series of graphics to evoke a sensation of floating on water or of being immersed in water.
  
• Elucidation/obfuscation: Lexia to Perplexia [43]and _][ad][Dressed in a Skin C.ode [44]use background images which sometimes are-- and sometimes are not--anchors to bring portions of the background to the foreground in significance, but also to provide an underlying commentary on the functions of visual language.
  
• Subtle connections: Marble Springs [36] and The Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot [61]use graphics as nearly silent entrances to nodes that are connected below the surface. As Odin remarks of The Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot: "there is a continuous interpenetration of the foreground and the background and the text and the image. Strickland's use of graphic anchors plays a major role in that interpenetration. [104] " Marble Springs uses graphics to explore subconscious connections that the characters will not admit to.