Kastalia

grew

''

over

several

years

''

out

of

earlier

and

smaller

tools

built

for

recording

''

annotating

and

replaying

spoken

language

data

--

the

is

uttered

as

''

illustrates

and

translates

predicates

still

carry

traces

of

that

origin

.

Over

time

the

same

knots

/

bounds

substrate

proved

general

enough

to

also

carry

course

material

''

presentations

''

glossaries

and

personal

archives

''

and

the

system

was

generalized

accordingly

.<

br

><

br

>

Today

Kastalia

KMS

powers

several

independently

themed

sites

(

baumhaus

.

digital

''

udk

.

ai

''

wizzion

.

com

and

others

)

from

the

very

same

underlying

graph

--

each

domain

simply

renders

a

different

canonical

slice

of

it

''

through

its

own

domain

template

.

Beyond

Hesse

'

s

Glass

Bead

Game

''

Kastalia

'

s

design

draws

loosely

on

a

handful

of

other

fictional

and

speculative

treatments

of

knowledge

-

as

-

structure

:

Borges

'

Library

of

Babel

and

his

Garden

of

Forking

Paths

(

both

meditations

on

combinatorial

''

non

-

linear

texts

)''

and

Vannevar

Bush

'

s

non

-

fictional

but

visionary

'

memex

'

--

an

imagined

machine

for

associative

''

trail

-

following

reading

that

anticipated

hypertext

by

decades

.<

br

><

br

>

None

of

these

are

literal

blueprints

.

What

they

share

''

and

what

Kastalia

tries

to

inherit

from

them

''

is

the

idea

that

a

body

of

knowledge

is

better

modelled

as

an

explorable

''

richly

cross

-

linked

space

than

as

a

shelf

of

separately

bound

books

.

Kastalia

is

named

after

Hermann

Hesse

'

s

Castalia

''

the

walled

province

of

pure

intellectual

play

in

<

em

>

The

Glass

Bead

Game