![]() ![]() Would Borges have used Ngram Viewer to track trends and the emergence of words in the many languages he knew? Could he have used it to write about the death of one word or language, to be supplanted by another, similar to how he describes the birth of English from Anglo-Saxon in his poem " On Beginning the Study of Anglo-Saxon Grammar"? Or would he have have used the tool in ways we have not yet imagined? How would Borges, a lover of language known for his exquisite word choice, have used Ngram Viewer? This tool is a step beyond the card catalogue and library indexes he used as a librarian, but is a data visualization tool that allows one to simultaneously peer at and dissect individual words and phrases used in millions of books. It will be interesting to see in the future, if references to Borges keep rising. Interestingly, for Spanish books, the frequency of his name dropped soon after his passing in 1986, only to surge from 1990 to 2000. The number of times Borges's name appears in English books rises sharply in the decade from 1961 to 1971 and continues its upward trend through 2000. English translations of his works became more widely available thanks to the efforts of Norman Thomas di Giovanni and other translators, and Borges traveled the world in the later years of his life with Maria Kodama, giving lectures on literature. ![]() However, for English books, Borges's popularity didn't take off until he shared the Formentor Prize, an international literary award, with Samuel Beckett in 1961.Īt that point, Borges's popularity in the English-speaking world took off. What's interesting about these graphs is how there are Spanish-language books referencing Borges as early as the mid-1920s. This story has left scholars pondering the consequences of this infinite library, and recent titles, like William Bloch’s The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges' Library of Babel, have set about analyzing the mathematics in Borges’s story. In The Library of Babel, Borges describes an infinite library that holds every conceivable book, composed of every conceivable combination of letters. The Google search box hasn’t quite reached this breadth, but we are adding to the index everyday. In " El Aleph", Borges wrote about a single point in space through which all other points in space and time could be seen. In a similar light, Borges's story " On Exactitude in Science," which is about a map as large as the area it depicts, has a virtual corollary with Google Earth and Google Maps. Focusing on Borges's story " Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," the article shows how Borges's idea of an infinite encyclopedia can be interpreted as a prototype for Wikipedia. The New York Times piece " Borges and the Foreseeable Future" highlights Borges's surprising influence on the Internet era.
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