I Want to Live in The Library of Babel

I'm going to start with The Library of Babel because I loved this so much! So, the library is the universe and it is perfect. The shape, the design, the galleries, the shelves, the content (books!) I love how the library is everything ab aeterno (from eternity) and nothing exists outside of the library since it is the universe. The readers and the narrator are then submerged and part of the library since it is the universe. The librarians want to catalog the works of the library but they must realize that they can't do this because some works must remain an mystery. The part where the work will eventually die and be thrown from the higher floor and be left to decay was an a-ha moment for me. Even though written texts is important, and I would never want written text to die out, there is so much more that can be done with written text in terms of digitalization, that written text is no longer the only medium. I think this piece is trying to convey the fact that yes, every piece (book, written text etc) has a purpose, there can always be more purpose or more meaning hidden within, and perhaps that is what the digital humanities will help us figure out. I really enjoyed this short story and found I could relate it to the reason why things move into a digital age. "What is the Matter?" by Laura Mandell was also a great read, and I found it helpful in a few aspects. She says, "Contemporary conditions call increasingly for understandings that go beyond binary view to more nuanced analysis." She goes onto explain that this development requires a repositioning in material as distince from being physical and re-envisioning the material basis for hybrid texts and subjectives. One thing I think I have been struggling with was how to gain a better understanding of something that is in digital form, and how to allow others to gain this understanding as well in terms of my project. Digital needs to be looked at as just another medium. The first medium was material texts, as printed codex, paper and binding. The new media is digital and everything that encompasses. When she started analyzing the poems, I found this useful because it is along the lines of what I want to do for my project. She wanted to offer a view as to how the poems operate, given that they were printed in the year 1800. I enjoyed how she wanted to look at what she called visual code, and to examine how that operates to produce conditions for modern forms of meaning. Her example of running the words in the text together was interesting because it give a good visual example of how something is read,and how you see the text you will read and read it differently based on how you see it. I wanted to give an example of this in my project of how to break apart aspects of a poem based on how it is written to get the deeper meaning that some readers may not see upon a first initial reading. This article is definitely an article I will keep for reference while doing my project.