Reading this article, it struck me that the website Jonathan Basile has created would be a great premise for an MLIS student’s research paper on multimedia literacies. Or at least continue to inspire others to create online and/or virtual worlds based on ideas and settings as described in fiction.  

“When it was proclaimed that the Library contained all books, the first impression was one of extravagant happiness,” wrote Jorge Luis Borges in his classic of philosophical fiction, “The Library of Babel.” One of the most revered stories-as-thought-experiments ever committed to print, Borges’ fiction posits the Universe as a library (“composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries”) that contains every possible text. This intellectual vision, at once playful and poised, has stirred authors (like Umberto Eco and Terry Pratchett) and philosophers (W.V.O. Quine and Daniel Dennett) alike for more than 75 years.

And now it exists! Recently, Jonathan Basile, a Brooklyn author and Borgesian Man of the Book, taught himself programming so that he could recreate Borges’ Universal Library as a website. The results are confounding.

READ MORE: Brooklyn Author Recreates Borges’ Library of Babel as Infinite Website | Flavorwire.