The Book as a Living Catalogue
This platform transforms The Book of Imaginary Beings into a relational publishing system. Each creature becomes a cultural record, described through morphology, habitat, categories, themes, and capabilities.
Digital cultural heritage perspective
The project approaches digitisation not only as reproduction, but as interpretation. By modelling the creatures as structured data, the platform creates new forms of access: users can search across the collection, follow conceptual paths, and discover relationships that are difficult to see in linear reading.
Access, interpretation, wonder
The archive supports access through search and filtering, interpretation through relational categories, and participation through a generative explorer. The generative layer does not replace the original text; it invites users to see how the vocabulary of the archive can produce new imaginative combinations.
Database structure
Source and Copyright
This website was developed as part of a Master's thesis in the Advanced Master of Digital Humanities at KU Leuven. It provides an interactive interface for exploring the relational database created from The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges.
Original creature descriptions are reproduced from The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges and Margarita Guerrero, translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni (Penguin Books, 1974). These texts are included solely for academic research and educational demonstration. Copyright in the original text remains with the respective rights holders.