The humanities have long depended upon the page as a temporal instrument through which meaning unfolds in ordered adjacency. Sequential arrangement stabilizes causality: an event follows another and therefore explains it. Even in digitized environments this logic persists, as interfaces reproduce pagination through PDFs, encoded page breaks, and bounded reading units. Alongside these transitional forms emerge machine readable textual structures such as datasets, metadata tables, filtered archives, and search based retrievals that do not provide a privileged entry point. Here the reader does not encounter a past arranged in advance but assembles one through navigation. This paper argues that such environments generate navigational time, a temporality organized through selection and proximity rather than sequence, transforming historical interpretation from reconstruction into configuration.

The paper will develop this claim through a computational experiment based on archival materials concerning Anagarika Dharmapala and the Mahabodhi Society. The same corpus of documents will be structured into a choice based interactive interface in which readers traverse the archive through selectable nodes instead of chronological order. Different pathways produce incompatible historical explanations: contextual events appearing before or after a document alter the perceived intention of the actor without altering the document itself. The experiment will demonstrate that once pagination disappears, causal authority shifts from authorial arrangement to readerly traversal.

By theorizing navigational time, the paper will contribute to digital humanities debates on data modelling, interface design, and interpretive ethics. It will show that computational infrastructures do not merely store knowledge but condition its intelligibility, producing multiple potential histories within a single dataset and revealing history as assembled rather than sequential.