In his early-90s article about reading hypertext literature, Moulthrop discusses how student readers, when unable to find a conclusive metaphor through discursive reading of the text, used a 'cartographic' reading to try and 'map' the text.

...they had given up hope that the metonymic flow of language in any given node would take them coherently to a conclusion. Instead, they were plotting their own readings through a cartographic space, hoping to discover a design which ... might prove to be buried or scattered in the text. The map, which represents the text as totality or metaphor, was not something to be reached through the devious paths of discursive metonymy, rather it was a primary conceptual framework, providing the essential categories ... by which readers oriented themselves. (Moulthrop 128)

Could notions of 'maps' as orienting figures in hypertext, as Moulthrop seems to allude, be a betrayal of the possibility inherent in hypertext? Does the inclusion of a map add to or confine the space? Of course, the finite nature of hypertext prevents the realization of the infinite possibility of hypertext.