Storyspace, a program used to create standalone hypertext documents, including much of today's non-Web hyperfiction, incorporates spatial representations. It allows you to see various views, including maps, charts, treemaps and outlines. The author can use this tool to help visualize the relationships between various nodes, bringing related nodes closer together, or seeing lines representing the links between these nodes of the network.
Storyspace provides, in addition to the various views of the text, ways of orienting a viewer through information about the specific reading. These features, sadly, are not fully available with just the standalone viewer, but with the complete program, the reader can view the history of where they've been in the site, annotate sites with "margin notes" and create new links. The reader can alsobookmark certain pages so they can be easily returned to later. The reader can then save the specific information about his/her reading, and return to it later. This helps to give a sense of order and organization to each reader's experience of the hypertext. This is more of what is referred to as a constructive (rather than exploratory) reading.
Michael Shumate used Storyspace to create a map of a short story. He relates that Storyspace's "usefulness is that it lets you easily see the spatial nature of a hypertext.... It is first of all a visual reminder that, unlike print, thinking in a single sequence of pages (or files or nodes) is misleading."
Shumate also points out that Storyspace map allows the reader to see the number of links arriving at a certain node, as well as the number departing. "Which is more important, the section of narration that refers to many others, or to which many others keep leading the readers back? Allowing the reader to see the density of links gives them the knowledge to consider such questions."
While Storyspace documents can be exported to the World Wide Web, Storyspace's mapping features are lost. Storyspace also allows a variety of link types (including "guarded" links, which only allow you to access a certain site if other sites have previously been accessed). These link features are also lost in the move to the Web.
Storyspace is available through Eastgate.