Visualizing the Library of Babel
While I am greatly amazed by Borges' concept of infinity in his story "The Library of Babel", it still appears very abstract for me at first. Then I came across this cool website that is basically a digital version of the Library of Babel which Borges describes in his book. There are mainly two things that I found to be interesting about the website.
Firstly, the creator of the website provides a visualization of the library. If the user clicks "Browse" on the portal page, it will ask you to randomly choose a hexagonal chamber out of any combination up to 3260 letters or number. Then the page will lead to that specific chamber you selected and display a chamber that has exactly "4 walls of bookcases, five shelves per wall, and 32 volumes per shelf" just as Borges described. Then the user is free to designate a particular shelf and pick out the book you want to read from that shelf so that all 410 pages of arranged letters will be presented. The is idea is that there are infinite numbers of identical chambers which therefore contain any book ever be written in the world.
Another feature of this library is that you can search for any text that you make up by yourself or any pre-existing literature that you read from somewhere else and locate its location. So I tested the "search" page with my initials, letters of gibberish, and an except from The Great Gatsby. I initially doubted if the website simply generates the texts as requested, but later I found out that any combination of words that I input has a permanent location in this library and I can actually bookmark it.
The story along with the website makes me think whether meaning is just something that we arbitrarily assign and whether everything has a meaning. The things that we actively search for in the library are things that we consider meaningful, but what about all the other words that we ignored? Do they also contain valuable meanings? Maybe things we perceive as meaningless for the moment will make sense in the future since the Library of Babel contains everything: the past, the present, and the future.
Firstly, the creator of the website provides a visualization of the library. If the user clicks "Browse" on the portal page, it will ask you to randomly choose a hexagonal chamber out of any combination up to 3260 letters or number. Then the page will lead to that specific chamber you selected and display a chamber that has exactly "4 walls of bookcases, five shelves per wall, and 32 volumes per shelf" just as Borges described. Then the user is free to designate a particular shelf and pick out the book you want to read from that shelf so that all 410 pages of arranged letters will be presented. The is idea is that there are infinite numbers of identical chambers which therefore contain any book ever be written in the world.
Another feature of this library is that you can search for any text that you make up by yourself or any pre-existing literature that you read from somewhere else and locate its location. So I tested the "search" page with my initials, letters of gibberish, and an except from The Great Gatsby. I initially doubted if the website simply generates the texts as requested, but later I found out that any combination of words that I input has a permanent location in this library and I can actually bookmark it.
The story along with the website makes me think whether meaning is just something that we arbitrarily assign and whether everything has a meaning. The things that we actively search for in the library are things that we consider meaningful, but what about all the other words that we ignored? Do they also contain valuable meanings? Maybe things we perceive as meaningless for the moment will make sense in the future since the Library of Babel contains everything: the past, the present, and the future.
Wow, this is a cool website . Perhaps the books that we pass over are the books that hold meaning for others. The meanings that they create for themselves.
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