It’s no wonder that Robert Coover’s “Babysitter” is often invoked as a hypertext precursor. The story is filled with recursive text chunks, overlapping timelines, and shifting centers of perspective, all of which destabilize a clear linear progression and make the story a convincing precursor to hypertext fiction. But what if you turned the text of Coover’s story itself into hypertext? What if you linked to different characters within the story and followed these links? I conjectured that, if you did so, you might find that hypertext, in this case, would make a more linear story out of what is a nonlinear print-based text. To test this conjecture, I took a section of Coover’s text and linked all the instances of the word/character “baby.” You can check it out here to see how it reads.
