Old Literature Archives Minus All of the Dust

In the short story “The Library of Babel”, Jorge Luis Borges contemplates epistemology and concludes that knowledge comes from an “infinite amount of hexagonal galleries” that make up the universe: aka libraries (51). The most telling part of this story is the title because it is a reference to the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1-9), a myth about how people came to speak different languages. In Borges’ narrative, the library is a version of the tower as it is constantly being built upon with a variety of texts throughout history with an ever-evolving collection of humanity’s documentation. Libraries store information as it is revealed over time and essentially act as inanimate historians with archives that grow like the blob. As time passes, people get more and more distant from the past, but the textual archives are always there to remind us of what took place before our time which is important in understanding our purpose. As the timeline of human existence continues to expand, archives help to prevent us from becoming too far removed from the past; gladiators may not have fought yesterday, but our library archives ensure that the rise and fall of ancient Rome is something that is not forgotten as we are so easily distracted by the present and future to think about the past. Borges suggests that the library is “unlimited and cyclical” which is our solution to the “ancient problem”, that problem being memory (58). In order to grow as a species, we must remember the past, and in order to remember the past, we need to archive all that we can.

At this point, our archive of human history is rather large and is probably made up of enough dusty paper to cover an entire continent. Marija Dalbello contemporizes the idea of the archive by explaining that our new means of saving bits of history is digital and the term for this has been coined as “web archiving”. Just as Borges points out the infiniteness of knowledge that may or may not have been discovered yet, Dalbello brings to our attention that the internet is the perfect home for all of our documentation needs because it allows for more diversity in our history. Before the internet, historians based their interpretations of the past off of the literature written during a given time period which is problematic because history is typically written by those are in the positions of power and the analysis of these types of documents gives us a jilted view of the past. The democratic nature of the internet allows for anyone to write, record, capture anything that they want which would give future generations a broader sense of what went on during a given time on earth. While this may sound like a fairer way of tracking history, there are some potential setbacks such as lack of credibility because with so many different perspectives being brought into light, it may be difficult to filter the most the reliable accounts. However, that is part of the human condition: our differentness. Everyone has a unique story to tell and a diversified narrative is something that previous records of history tend to lack. If the “ancient problem” is memory of our past, then Dalbello’s recommendation of web archiving can help preserve our history in a possibly more detailed and realistic manner.