Earlier this week the Guardian, Forbes and others covered the discovery of 500 fairy tales collected by 19th century folklorist Franz Xaver von Schönwerth. I sent a note about this to Professor Jack Zipes, who promptly replied urging caution about the discovery and pointing to many other (in his view more interesting) 19th century collections [...]
Category Archives: literature
The Sea of Stories
Also posted in bibliography, culture, fairytales, hamann, herder, history, humanities, intellectualhistory 2 Comments
TEXTUS: an open source platform for working with collections of texts and metadata
Since finally blogging about OpenPhilosophy.org last month I’ve been thinking about how one could make a generic open source platform that could be used to power it, and other things like it. Enter ‘TEXTUS’: TEXTUS is an open source platform for working with collections of texts and metadata. It enables users to transcribe, translate, and [...]
Also posted in bibliography, digital, digitalhumanities, history, humanities, ideas, notes, open data, openknowledge, projects, technology 9 Comments
On Archiving Everything: Borges, Calvino, Google
Today Google marks the 112th birthday of Jorge Luis Borges with this colourful sketch. The sketch alludes to his role as Director of the Argentinian National Public Library, his architectural literature, and – not least – his recurring fantasies of the all-encompassing archive, the total library: Everything would be in its blind volumes. Everything: the [...]
Also posted in borges, culture, technology, wittgenstein 6 Comments
Architectural Literature, Literary Architecture
A few years ago an architect friend and I used to fantasise about building and animating a model of a small but representative section of Borges’s “Library of Babel”. We wanted to incorporate the animation into a short film with a reading of Borges’s story, complete with lots of digitally-assisted indefinite zooming through the model. [...]
Also posted in architecture, art, culture, events, exhibitions, history Tagged architecture, borges, calvino, library, literature, unbuilt extremities 4 Comments
Jonathan Gray