1) Making your way through this hypertext requires your concentration on the instructions in the booklet that accompanies the disc. If you keep the booklet with you when you are working, you should be able to navigate the site well. The plethora of buttons on the windows initially looks confusing (well, it was to me!). Use the guide to identify each. The most useful to me in navigating are the history, storyspace map and outline buttons.

2) This is a new experience: expect it to be confusing. Don't be discouraged if you find your self lost or overwhelmed by windows or buttons. Just open up the storyspace map again to re-orient yourself. Remember, too, that reading hypertext is not a linear experience: you, as reader, are expected to create, in a sense, the story from your reading.

3) The Story
If you read the articles before you start exploring you should be clear on the concept of the book, and the story of which it is reworking, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. A number of 'I's inhabit this book at different times: the I of the writer of the hypertext, the I of the maker of the female Frankenstein, the I of the monster itself writing and speaking. In addition, each of the body parts from which the monster is made narrates its own story. You need to work out all the time you are reading exactly who is speaking. The vagueness about speaker that characterized the Don DeLillo essays will leave you in serious trouble.

4) Navigation
There are two primary ways to navigate the text: by picture maps and by text spaces. You can move between the two at will, but for those who like to know where they are going and what will happen when they are en route her are some basic directions.

Bring the storyspace map version of the text to the front. You will see a number of titled boxes. hercut through hercut4 and phrenology are picture maps: you click on different parts of the picture to bring up separate sections of the story. Use the history button (which produces a list of all the text spaces you have visited) to go back to the picture to explore additional links. Or follow the links from the text spaces you open. Use the history button, too, if you want to revisit a text box.

journal, body of text, story, crazy quilt, and graveyard are primarily sequences of text boxes. Impatient, linear readers like me should open the main text space and click on the outline button. Check both the show text box and the automatically show text window boxes at the top of the window and a miniscule text sequence appears on the screen. The print is just legible, but if you double-click on each section, the full-sized text box will open in front of the outline, easing eye strain a lot.

5) Why am I asking you to read this book? First, you will find more and more of your research materials both for school and for work on the web. Most major companies operate their own webs, also. Teachers work more and more from the web.

Everyone (that includes me) needs practice in navigating webs and, at the same time, reading, comprehending, analyzing and drawing hypotheses and conclusions from the scattered materials we encounter. We are all good, I think, at collecting information from web sites. Indeed, the amount of information is sometimes overwhelming and we find it difficult to do more than stitch it together into some kind of hybrid patchwork quilt of our own.

The challenge facing all of us today is the challenge of learning to create useable knowledge from that information glut. Reading this 'book' is a valuable way of practicing all those intellectual skills outlined above in the screen-based environment where more and more of us will earn our living (and maybe spend our leisure, write our books and poetry, gain our education, communicate with friends and family, etc. etc.).

Explore…….Learn…….Ask Me Questions as Soon as You are Lost!