:: meanders ::

:: The Library of Babel
The Library of Babel - the dream of cyberspace as a Universal Library

"The first part of digital library development consists of doing better with electrons what we used to do with paper so we get better accessing and searching," says Wilensky. "The second part asks what can we do that ordinary libraries can't do at all?" One thing he identifies is that when you take a book out of the library you can't work on it, write in the margins, highlight and annotate it, or share your work with collaborators. His team is developing technology to do all of these things and more with digitized documents. "Presently with a scanned image, what can you do?" asks Wilensky, "You get to stare at it. It's literally a photo; you can't interact with it." Wilensky predicts that the technology will make it possible for users to do with a Web page pretty well anything they can now do in a Word file on a home computer. The electronic library then becomes more than a museum for documents. "With our system," says Wilensky, "the document becomes enlivened."

Remarkably, the genesis of The Library of Babel is not a dot.com brainstorm, rather the idea described in the blurb above, funded in part by a $25M government grant, was inpsired by a short story of the same name by Jorge Luis Borges, whose vision of such a compendium of all that has been writ is as different from this project's ambition as Orwell's apocalyptic vision 1984 was from the actuality that was that swinging go-go year. I strongly disagree with the view in the preface to the project that Borges held a grim view of the chaotic catalog that is our collective words. Quite the contrary. The story is powerful paen to the human soul and it's unceasing quest for transcendence, through what, apart from our works, largely differentiates we humans from the other species, our language, our words. Poets mirror the depths and heights of our meagre human ambitions, amplifying them to the point of transcendence of heaven and hell. Borges, like his compatriot Neruda on the other side of the Cordillera, molds language boldly, like a sculpter working in stone, chiseling thoughts into words with a tempered force. The story is curiously replete with geometry and numbers, which not only subtlely appeals to my gematriac tendencies, but more importantly, touches on the inescapable thruth of the inner math that is language. Surreal, without a plot, this short "story" nevertheless makes a statement that sears through our reading eyes and into our wordless souls.

"To perceive the distance between the divine and the human, it is enough to compare these crude wavering symbols which my fallible hand scrawls on the cover of a book, with the organic letters inside: punctual, delicate, perfectly black, inimitably symmetrical."
From a translation of the Jorge Luis Borges story