Welcome to the Storyverse: A Catalog of the Implicit Links Inside Books

Welcome to the Storyverse: A Catalog of the Implicit Links Inside Books

the start-up company Small Demons creates a "..."discovery platform" for readers to connect with the people, places, and things that are written into stories."

Small Demons doesn't actually embed links within a story, but offers reference material for whenever curiosity impels a reader to stray beyond the book itself. "The closest model for us would be the way people use IMDB or Wikipedia," Vakili explains. Small Demons may be, like Borges's "Library of Babel," a universe in the form of an endless library--a welcome message for the site announces, "Welcome to the StoryVerse." It has the potential to build shelf after digital shelf to catalogue allusions, and then, to organize those catalogues into countless patterns. This type of engagement with text--as a reader hunts for points of intersection with other novels and in the real world--feeds an approach to literature that longs to fill-in an ever-more complicated network of meaning.