 Screenshot of a page of a book at libraryofbabel.info, with English words highlighted | |
| Available in | English |
|---|---|
| Founded | 2015 |
| Founder(s) | Jonathan Basile [1] |
| URL | libraryofbabel |
The Library of Babel is a website created by Brooklyn author and coder Jonathan Basile, based on Jorge Luis Borges' short story "The Library of Babel" (1941). [1] [2] The site was launched in 2015. [3]
According to Basile, he "was lying in bed one night and the idea of an online Library of Babel popped into my head." [4] Basile quickly realized that an actual digitalized Babel Library would require more digital storage space than one can imagine. [5] To get around this limitation, he designed an algorithm to simulate the library instead.
The Library's main page contains background information, forums and three ways to navigate the library. These ways are to have the website randomly pick one of the thousands of "volumes", to manually browse through the library, or to search for specific text. [3] Due to the library's Infinite monkey theorem-gibberish-like contents, [6] there is an "Anglishize" feature, that points out words and clumps of words. [7]
The library's content is divided into numbered digital hexagons, each with 4 walls, 20 shelves and 640 volumes. [3] The names of hexagons are limited to 3360 alphanumeric characters, for a total of more than 105229 available hexes.
The algorithm Basile created generates a 'book' by iterating every permutation of 29 characters: the 26 English letters, space, comma, and period. [8] Each book is marked by a coordinate, corresponding to its place on the hexagonal library (hexagon name, wall number, shelf number, and book name) so that every book can be found at the same place every time. The website can generate all possible pages of 3200 characters and allows users to choose among about 104677 potential pages of books. [9] [6]
The Library of Babel website attracted the attention of scholars, particularly those working at the juncture of humanities and digital media. [10] [11] [12] Zac Zimmer wrote in Do Borges's librarians have bodies: "Basile's is perhaps the most absolutely dehumanizing of all Library visualizations, in that beyond being driven to suicidal madness or philosophical resignation, his Librarians have become as devoid of meaning as the gibberish-filled books themselves." [11] Journalist Jerry Adler said "It just may be the most fascinatingly useless invention in history." [5]
Jonathan Basile is a Brooklyn [13] author and programmer. Basile has authored two books, one of which has been published by Punctum Books. [14] When asked how he got the idea for the website, Basile responded, "My first thought was — it must exist already. It seems like such a natural extension of the capabilities of a computer that I was sure someone would have made it. The next day I looked for it, a bit excitedly, and was disappointed. From then on, it’s kind of been a reluctant destiny for me." [4]
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator regarded as a key figure in Spanish-language and international literature. His best-known works, Ficciones (transl. Fictions) and El Aleph, published in the 1940s, are collections of short stories exploring motifs such as dreams, labyrinths, chance, infinity, archives, mirrors, fictional writers and mythology. Borges's works have contributed to philosophical literature and the fantasy genre, and have had a major influence on the magic realist movement in 20th century Latin American literature.
The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type any given text, including the complete works of William Shakespeare. In fact, the monkey would almost surely type every possible finite text an infinite number of times. The theorem can be generalized to state that any sequence of events that has a non-zero probability of happening will almost certainly occur an infinite number of times, given an infinite amount of time or a Universe that is infinite in size.
The Name of the Rose is the 1980 debut novel by Italian author Umberto Eco. It is an historical murder mystery set in an Italian monastery in the year 1327, and an intellectual mystery combining semiotics in fiction, biblical analysis, medieval studies, and literary theory. It was translated into English by William Weaver in 1983.
"The Library of Babel" is a short story by Argentine author and librarian Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986), conceiving of a universe in the form of a vast library containing all possible 410-page books of a certain format and character set.
The National Library of New Zealand is charged with the obligation to "enrich the cultural and economic life of New Zealand and its interchanges with other nations". Under the Act, the library's duties include collecting, preserving and protecting New Zealand's documentary heritage, supporting other libraries in New Zealand, and collaborating with peer institutions abroad. The library headquarters is on the corner of Aitken and Molesworth Streets in Wellington, close to the New Zealand Parliament Buildings and the Court of Appeal.
"The Book of Sand" is a 1975 short story by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges about the discovery of a book with infinite pages. It has parallels to the same author's 1949 story "The Zahir", continuing the theme of self-reference and attempting to abandon the terribly infinite, and to his 1941 story "The Library of Babel" about an infinite library.
Ficciones is a collection of short stories by Argentine writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges, originally written and published in Spanish between 1941 and 1956. Thirteen stories from Ficciones were first published by New Directions in the English-language anthology Labyrinths (1962). In the same year, Grove Press published the entirety of the book in English using the same title as in the original language. "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim" originally appeared published in A History of Eternity (1936). Ficciones became Borges's most famous book and made him known worldwide.
Labyrinths is a collection of short stories and essays by Argentine writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges. It was translated into English, published soon after Borges won the International Publishers' Prize with Samuel Beckett.
The Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC) is a division of the American Library Association.
The Cleveland Public Library is a public library system in Cleveland, Ohio. Founded in 1869, it had a circulation of 3.5 million items in 2020. It operates the Main Library on Superior Avenue in downtown Cleveland, 27 branches throughout the city, a mobile library, a Public Administration Library in City Hall, and the Ohio Library for the Blind and Physically Disabled. The library replaced the State Library of Ohio as the location for the Ohio Center for the Book in 2003.
"The Garden of Forking Paths" is a 1941 short story by Argentine writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges. It is the title story in the collection El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (1941), which was republished in its entirety in Ficciones (Fictions) in 1944. It was the first of Borges's works to be translated into English by Anthony Boucher when it appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine in August 1948.
"The Secret Miracle" is a short story by Argentine writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges. The story focuses on an author condemned to death. At the moment of his execution, time freezes, allowing him to finish his masterpiece, though only within his own mind.
Open Library is an online project intended to create "one web page for every book ever published". Created by Aaron Swartz, Brewster Kahle, Alexis Rossi, Anand Chitipothu, and Rebecca Malamud, Open Library is a project of the Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization. It has been funded in part by grants from the California State Library and the Kahle/Austin Foundation. Open Library provides online digital copies in multiple formats, created from images of many public domain, out-of-print, and in-print books.
Librarians in popular culture can be found across many different mediums, including film, television, music and literature. Their portrayal is varied and can represent or subvert various stereotypes. Libraries and librarians are recurring elements in fiction.
A universal library is a library with universal collections. This may be expressed in terms of it containing all existing information, useful information, all books, all works or even all possible works. This ideal, although unrealizable, has influenced and continues to influence librarians and others and be a goal which is aspired to. Universal libraries are often assumed to have a complete set of useful features.
Goodreads is an American social cataloging website and a subsidiary of Amazon that allows individuals to search its database of books, annotations, quotes, and reviews. Users can sign up and register books to generate library catalogs and reading lists. They can also create their own groups of book suggestions, surveys, polls, blogs, and discussions. The website's offices are located in San Francisco.
Jorge Luis Borges and mathematics concerns several modern mathematical concepts found in certain essays and short stories of Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), including concepts such as set theory, recursion, chaos theory, and infinite sequences, although Borges' strongest links to mathematics are through Georg Cantor's theory of infinite sets, outlined in "The Doctrine of Cycles". Some of Borges' most popular works such as "The Library of Babel", "The Garden of Forking Paths", "The Aleph", an allusion to Cantor's use of the Hebrew letter aleph to denote cardinality of transfinite sets, and "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim" illustrate his use of mathematics.
Pratt Institute Libraries is the academic library system of Pratt Institute. The main library is located on the main campus in Brooklyn, NY, with a branch library in Manhattan. The collection focus includes the arts, architecture, design, information science and allied fields. Holdings include 200,000 printed volumes, over 600 periodicals, rare books, digital images resources including Pratt Institute specific Digital Image Collection, and the Institute's archives. It has the distinction of being the “first free public library in Brooklyn” and its Brooklyn building is a New York City designated landmark.
The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges' Library of Babel is a popular mathematics book on Jorge Luis Borges and mathematics. It describes several mathematical concepts related to the short story "The Library of Babel", by Jorge Luis Borges. Written by mathematics professor William Goldbloom Bloch, and published in 2008 by the Oxford University Press, it received an honorable mention in the 2008 PROSE Awards.
Mass digitization is a term used to describe "large-scale digitization projects of varying scopes." Such projects include efforts to digitize physical books, on a mass scale, to make knowledge openly and publicly accessible and are made possible by selecting cultural objects, prepping them, scanning them, and constructing necessary digital infrastructures including digital libraries. These projects are often piloted by cultural institutions and private bodies, however, individuals may attempt to conduct a mass digitization effort as well. Mass digitization efforts occur quite often; millions of files are uploaded to large-scale public or private online archives every single day. This practice of taking the physical to the digital on a mass realm changes the way we interact with knowledge. The history of mass digitization can be traced as early as the mid-1800s with the advent of microfilm, and technical infrastructures such as the internet, data farms, and computer data storage make these efforts technologically possible. This seemingly simple process of digitization of physical knowledge, or even products, has vast implications that can be explored.