Individual Work
Marginalia in the Libary of Babel

A metafiction written in annotated web pages, this tale follows one narrator's browsing history and reflections about the content he encounters. The tale begins with a meditation on Borges' short story "The Library of Babel" but soon moves into despair at our inability to leave, as Marino puts it, "a meaningful mark on the Internet." But this work makes the Web notable by making use of Web 2.0 features: Social Bookmarking, which allows Internet users to store, share and retrieve visited Webpages. The work uses pages from the Internet for its palette and invites readers to add their own annotations and bookmarks. Adding their own layers of meta-narratives, readers create collaborative Web-Travelogues by leaving a bookmark as a footnote. Making use of marginalia has an enormous history that long predates contemporary footnoting practice. Thus, Marino's work is digitally following the genre of annotation fiction. He asserts: "Why not turn the web into a means of characterization, to turn web reading practices themselves into ways of examining the ergodic, interiority of our characters, or to stitch together tales of paranoia in the way that various Alternate Reality Games have?"

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