Babel Nexus Index — A Discovery System for the Public Domain
A knowledge-graph explorer of the public domain. A two-level Index: 18 science chambers on Level I, 11 literature chambers on Level II (reached via the spiral staircase at the center of every room), holding 318 primary works (books, papers, and reports drawn entirely from the public domain), and an AI Oracle (powered by Google Gemini) that answers free-form questions about the Archive. Built in the lineage of Jorge Luis Borges' Library of Babel, Vannevar Bush's Memex, and H. G. Wells' World Brain.
The Index is a discovery system: a navigable knowledge graph of the public domain, built on two floors. Each chamber is a thematic shelf holding canonical primary works whose copyright has expired or that were released into the public domain. Chambers are connected by typed edges that descend directly from Vannevar Bush's "associative trails" idea in As We May Think (1945). At the exact center of every chamber is a spiral staircase to the next floor — Borges' hexagonal-gallery architecture, made navigable. Visitors can walk the graph chamber by chamber, ask the Oracle natural-language questions about the Archive, build and share their own associative trails (Bush's idea, made concrete), and view every primary source's full text via Project Gutenberg, Internet Archive, or Wikipedia.
The Oracle is powered by Google Gemini through a small first-party API. The browser bundle never sees the API key.
Knowledge Itself — Bacon's Novum Organum, Locke, d'Alembert's Encyclopédie preface, Dewey, Peirce, Wells's World Brain (the meta-epistemology shelf, and the bridge to Level II)
The Crimson Hexagon — a hidden chamber, unlocked after visiting seven above; a Borges easter egg
Level II — Literature
Beneath the sciences sits the literary substrate from which formal knowledge later crystallized. Reach Level II via the spiral staircase at the center of any Level I chamber, or via the dashboard tile.
First Novels — Tale of Genji, Callirhoe, Satyricon, Golden Ass, Kadambari, Don Quixote, Le Morte d'Arthur, Beware the Cat, Oroonoko, Robinson Crusoe, Hayy ibn Yaqdhan
Wisdom Literature — Maxims of Ptahhotep, Instructions of Shuruppak, Instructions of Amenemhat, The Debate Between Winter and Summer, Poem of the Righteous Sufferer, Story of Aḥikar, Counsels of Wisdom, Instructions of Šūpê-amēli, Instructions of Kagemni, Nig-Nam Nu-Kal
First Plays — Aeschylus (Persians, Suppliants, Seven Against Thebes), Sophocles (Antigone, Ajax), Euripides (Alcestis, Cyclops), Aristophanes (Acharnians)
First Mystery Novels and Stories — Poe (Rue Morgue, Marie Rogêt, Purloined Letter), Wilkie Collins (Woman in White, Moonstone), Charles Felix (Notting Hill Mystery), Gaboriau (Lerouge Case), Seeley Regester (Dead Letter), Anna Katharine Green (Leavenworth Case), Stevenson (Jekyll and Hyde), Fergus Hume (Mystery of a Hansom Cab), Conan Doyle (A Study in Scarlet)
First Science Fiction and Proto Science Fiction Stories — Lucian (A True Story), Bacon (New Atlantis), Kepler (Somnium), Godwin (Man in the Moone), Cyrano de Bergerac (Moon, Sun), Cavendish (Blazing World), Swift (Gulliver's Travels), Holberg (Niels Klim), Shelley (Frankenstein, The Last Man)
Fiction Set in Libraries — Irving (Mutability of Literature), Flaubert (Bibliomania), Nodier (Le Bibliomane), Hawthorne (A Virtuoso's Collection), Anatole France (Sylvestre Bonnard, Penguin Island), Henry James (The Aspern Papers), Eugene Field (Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac), Pearson (Old Librarian's Almanack), M. R. James (Tractate Middoth)
First Romance Novels — Achilles Tatius (Leucippe and Clitophon), Heliodorus (Aethiopica), Longus (Daphnis and Chloe), Xenophon of Ephesus (Ephesian History), Richardson (Pamela), Cao Xueqin (Dream of the Red Chamber), Austen (Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice), Maria Edgeworth, Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre), Georgette Heyer (The Black Moth)
First Horror Stories and Novels — Pliny the Younger (Athenodorus and the Haunted House), Walpole (Castle of Otranto), Beckford (Vathek), Radcliffe (Mysteries of Udolpho), Lewis (The Monk), Shelley (Frankenstein), Polidori (The Vampyre), Maturin (Melmoth the Wanderer), Hugo (Notre-Dame de Paris), Poe (Usher, Tell-Tale Heart, Black Cat, Raven), Le Fanu (Carmilla, Uncle Silas), Stevenson (Jekyll and Hyde), Wilde (Dorian Gray), Stoker (Dracula), Leroux (Phantom of the Opera)
First Fantasy Literature — Apuleius (Golden Ass), Arabian Nights, Boccaccio (Decameron), Malory (Le Morte d'Arthur), Spenser (Faerie Queene), Bunyan (Pilgrim's Progress), Swift (Gulliver's Travels), MacDonald (Phantastes, Princess and the Goblin, Lilith), Carroll (Alice's Adventures, Looking-Glass), Haggard (King Solomon's Mines, She), Morris (Well at the World's End), Baum (Wizard of Oz), Barrie (Peter Pan), Dunsany (Gods of Pegāna, King of Elfland's Daughter), Eddison (Worm Ouroboros), Mirrlees (Lud-in-the-Mist)
Wordless Novels — Frans Masereel (Mon Livre d'Heures, Die Stadt), Hermann-Paul (Danse Macabre), Otto Nückel (Destiny), Lynd Ward (God's Man), Milt Gross (He Done Her Wrong), Freyhold (Tiere) — the seven public-domain woodcut and engraving novels in the chamber
Lineage
The Index is named for Borges' Library of Babel (1941), built on the architecture Bush sketched in As We May Think (1945), and aimed at the goal Wells named in World Brain (1936–38): a permanent, universally accessible synthesis of human knowledge. It is the latest answer to a question that recurs every few generations — Bacon's Novum Organum, d'Alembert's preface to the Encyclopédie, Dewey's classification, Peirce's semiotics, Ted Nelson's Xanadu, Tim Berners-Lee's Web — what would it look like to make knowledge itself navigable?