Adventures in Hypertext

Siddhartha: An Interactive Story

Hypertext is essentially text that links to other text or information. Thus, a lot of digital text is hypertext. Wikipedia is a prime example of text that is like printed material in some ways but includes links to relevant information. Hypertext enables a different kind of reading than the close reading typically associated with books as a method of linearly parsing the words that comprise a text. Since hypertext may contain links to external sources, it decentralizes the text in some sense, turning it into a web of connected nodes rather than a ordered sequence of text without shifting relationships. Also, since hypertext may contain internal links to other parts of itself, it allows for different reading sequences. Choose Your Own Adventure books serve as a great example of hypertext in this way, since the reader does not read the whole book in one linear narrative, but can rather create different stories with each reading. Below is an interactive, non-linear story created through Twine that places the reader in the life of Siddhartha, the man who would later become the Buddha.

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