The Cafe Richmond in Buenos Aires opened in 1917 and became a favored gathering place for author Jorge Luis Borges and other intellectuals. For many years, chess players also hung out there. But the elegant cafe lost much of its luster, and most of the
Comments Before there was the World Wide Web, the Internet, hypertext markup, or even a digital computer, there was Jorge Luis Borges' idea of “forking paths.” The Argentinean writer who envisioned “a massive branching
The Cafe Richmond in Buenos Aires opened in 1917 and became a favored gathering place for author Jorge Luis Borges and other intellectuals. For many years, chess players also hung out there. But the elegant cafe lost much of its luster, and most of the
Before there was the World Wide Web, the Internet, hypertext markup, or even a digital computer, there was Jorge Luis Borges’ idea of “forking paths.” The Argentinean writer who envisioned “a massive branching structure as a better way to organize data and to represent human experience,” was born 112 years ago today and is the subject of a special Doodle on today’s Google home page.
The Web & The Library
“The Garden of Forking Paths” is a 1941 short story penned by Borges that many view as the basis for what we know today as our digital world of hyperlinks and the World Wide Web – yes, even for the universe, but we won’t go that far here. Replace “book” with “web” in Borges’ story and you may as well be discussing a gigantic story (in the online world that mirrors ours) that can be read multiple ways in non-linear fashion, with an endless series of consequences (or destinations).
What is the web if not an always expanding invisible labyrinth that folds back on itself or an infinite maze or book, showing an “incomplete yet false” picture, as Borges wrote. Visiting a website may start you on one path, but you can easily click on one link to another website, which leads you to a link to another website, and an ever-increasing piece of the gigantic hyperlinked puzzle that is the Web library.
A doodle inspired by the writings of Jorge Luis Borges honours the Argentine author on his 112th birthday. Born on August 24, 1899 in Buenos Aires the poet, essayist and short-story writer had command over a number of languages, though Spanish was the language of his literature.
Born to a respected Argentine family, Borges interest in literature was triggered by the books in his father’s library. In 1914 Borges moved to Switzerland with his family, where he learned French and German and also received his bachelor’s degree. While in Europe, Borges also spent a year in Spain, where he joined the Ultraist movement of avant-garde poets.
Upon his return to Argentina in 1921 he established the Ultraist movement in South America. Borges’ first published work was a volume of poems titled Fervor de Buenos Aires, poemas
In Borges’ “The Library of Babel,” a library is filled with endless amounts of information (and the source of the famous quote, “I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library”) but lacks any kind of organization, making the vast knowledge essentially worthless. This isn’t unlike the World Wide Web in its infancy and prior to Google’s emergence in the late 1990s.
Google’s mission, don’t forget, is to organize the world‘s information and make it universally accessible and useful – to bring order to the chaos with its system of ranking and retrieving search results.
Adding to this nightmare scenario in “Babel”: this library contains every book, whether it contains inaccuracies, predictions, biographies, or translations. Compare this to today’s Web, where nearly anybody can creat
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