-
Thinking more about searching the Library of Babel. It transforms the problem, while leaving it the same.Permalink Look on archive.org
❤️ 5 Favorites Mood -2 🙁
-
Previously, you had to go on a weary trudge through the shelves, hunting out a gleam of intelligibility within the volumes.Look on archive.org
-
Now intelligible words are easily found. But all you find is what you look for - English text stops meaning and just becomes more entropy.Permalink Look on archive.org
-
Now there enters a mapping between shelfmark& page number and text. Each holds as much information as the other.Permalink Look on archive.org
-
Who is to say which one has more meaning? Maybe the text is merely a way of compressing the address, representing it more compactly.Permalink Look on archive.org
-
It makes explicit that the true form of the library is a mapping.Permalink Look on archive.org
-
The search function allows you to see the map. But a map as big as the territory is not a useful map.Permalink Look on archive.org
-
(The process of making a useful map is the process of making sense of the landscape, semantically chunking it. The Library has no semantics)Permalink Look on archive.org