The Perspective Research Centre uses interactive navigation maps throughout the website to show how individual topics fit within the wider structure of perspective. Rather than presenting knowledge only as a linear sequence of pages, the maps allow you to move upward, downward and sideways through the subject, following relationships between broader concepts, specialised topics and neighbouring ideas.
How to Read a Navigation Map
Each map places the current topic within a wider conceptual neighbourhood. Depending on the subject, it may show broader parent topics above, more specialised child topics below, and related or sibling topics alongside it.
- Current topic — the page you are presently viewing, normally highlighted so that its position can be recognised immediately.
- Parent topics — broader subjects of which the current topic forms a part.
- Child topics — narrower subjects, forms, types or concepts that develop from the current topic.
- Sibling topics — related subjects occupying a comparable level within the same part of the classification.
- Neighbouring concepts — closely connected ideas that may belong to another branch of the subject but are useful for further exploration.
The maps therefore answer two questions at once: “Where am I?” and “Where can I go next?”
The Maps Are Clickable
Most boxes or labels within a PRC navigation map act as links to the corresponding page. Clicking a neighbouring concept takes you directly to that subject, where another navigation map may continue the route.
This makes it possible to explore perspective without repeatedly returning to the main menu. You can instead move through the structure of the subject itself, following whichever branch becomes relevant to your question or interest.
Three Directions of Exploration
Move Up
Move upward when you want to understand the larger category or theoretical context surrounding a topic. A specialised concept may lead upward to a type of perspective, then to a broader class, category or field of study.
Move Down
Move downward when you want to investigate a subject in greater detail. A broad topic may divide into types, forms, phenomena, processes, applications or specialised concepts.
Move Sideways
Move sideways to compare the current topic with related subjects at approximately the same conceptual level. This is often the quickest way to discover distinctions that are difficult to see when pages are encountered separately.
Highlighting and Colour
On many PRC maps, the current page is highlighted in yellow so that its position can be recognised immediately. Other colours may be used to distinguish branches, levels or groups of related subjects.
Colour is therefore used primarily as a navigation aid. The wording and position of each item remain more important than colour alone, and individual maps may vary slightly according to the structure being represented.
The Maps Are Not Ordinary Site Maps
A conventional website map normally shows where pages sit within a menu or folder structure. PRC navigation maps do something different: they attempt to show relationships within the knowledge itself.
A page may therefore be conceptually close to another topic even when the two pages appear in different parts of the main menu. The maps help reveal these connections and allow the website to be explored as an interconnected knowledge system rather than a simple hierarchy of webpages.
A Simple Example
Suppose you arrive at a page concerned with a particular kind of perspective. Its navigation map may allow you to:
- move up to the broader class or category to which it belongs;
- move down to particular forms, phenomena or applications;
- move sideways to closely related types of perspective;
- follow another branch into geometry, optics, vision, images, history or professional practice.
A single page can therefore become the starting point for several different routes through the subject.
Use the Maps Together with the Other PRC Indexes
The navigation maps are only one of several ways to explore the Perspective Research Centre. They work alongside the Dictionary, theory and concept indexes, applications index, historical material, bibliography, image collections and other reference tools.
- Use the maps when you want to understand relationships between topics.
- Use the Dictionary when you are looking for a particular term, type or definition.
- Use the theory indexes when exploring concepts and classifications systematically.
- Use the Applications Index when approaching perspective through a field, profession or practical use.
- Use the Timeline and historical pages when following the development of ideas through time.
- Use the bibliography and library resources when following the literature of a subject in greater depth.
You can move freely between these different routes. No single sequence is required.
Why PRC Uses Visual Navigation
Perspective is an unusually interconnected subject. Geometry overlaps with optics; optics with vision; vision with images; images with art, photography, cinema and technology; and all of these connect with terminology, classification, history and theory.
A conventional menu can tell you where a page is stored. A navigation map can help show what that page means in relation to everything around it.
The maps are therefore intended not simply to help visitors move around the website, but to make the structure of perspective itself progressively visible.