Marginalia in the Library of Babel

"To approach a hypertext, the reader must allow her- or himself to be immediately transported into the world of the piece, to accept that it most likely will not appear as simply text, but compilations of visual, audio, and textual elements. Most digital writing relies on one or more of these elements to function as hyperlinks — a method of movement from page to page. Mark Marino’s piece, 'Marginalia in the Library of Babel,' integrates annotations to the traditional Borges work while allowing the reader to traverse what is akin to a self-contained internet. The reader moves through the links into pages where they are welcomed to create their own annotations to the texts at hand. This type of interaction allows for new associations to be made with each venture into the piece.

Author's Note: This page offers a reproduction of an excerpt from the longer and ongoing work 'Marginalia in the Library of Babel'. That longer narrative presents annotations via the social bookmarking and annotation plugin Diigo, using live web pages. For the sake of maintaining stability for publication, this version uses saved versions of those pages and a custom system for annotations developed by Keith Gustafson. All copyrights and permissions remain with the authors of the original pages, though these older saved pages may not match the current live versions. Changes were made to the original pages only when necessary to facilitate the annotation tools." -- From The New River Journal, Fall 2007