Jonathan Basile

A digital Library of Babel

A wall of a hexagonal chamber in the digital Library of Babel
A wall of a hexagonal chamber in the digital Library of Babel

In his 1941 short story "The Library of Babel," Jorges Luis Borges depicts a series of hexagonal rooms, their walls lined with bookshelves. These shelves contain books comprised of every possible combination of letters, spaces, commas, and periods. Some books are filled with nonsense but within the collection lies every literary text ever written, along with multiple permutations of each of these texts. The library's collection comprises all knowledge that is known or will be known.

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